'This case started with a tragedy'

One of the fascinating elements to me about By The Fire We Carry is how it takes a singular crime story and turns it into something much bigger, with a much wider lens.

This isn't necessarily bold in and of itself—lots of narratives use one inciting incident as a way to open a window onto something much larger. So why did this feel different? I think it's because it never pretends. Even though the case of Patrick Murphy was central to the eventual Supreme Court ruling about tribal lands, there was never any real suggestion that this was a story about innocence.

In the post-Serial landscape, we're flooded with stories of unfair trials or frame-ups. And in the true crime genre more generally, storytelling often focuses on making your eyes boggle at the audacity or callousness of the criminals. It's hard to tell nuanced stories about guilty people that aren't focused solely on their crimes… or at least it's hard to get readers to care about criminal acts beyond the question of who is guilty and of what.

That was one of the topics I asked By The Fire We Carry author Rebecca Nagle about when we talked about the book recently. While it's possible to feel sympathetic for Murphy's situation on death row, there's no doubt that he was part of the brutal murder of George Jacobs in 1999. How do you handle that as a writer?

She said that complexity was at the center of what she wanted to do from the beginning.

"I think it's important to not lose sight of the fact that this case started with tragedy," she said. "I really wanted the book to hold the tension that the Murphy case led to this historic victory, but that it started with this real family and community tragedy, and there are still people who are impacted by the murder who are around today, and that's not abstract."

So the motivating question of the book is never whether Murphy killed Jacobs. It is whether Murphy killed Jacobs on land that was actually part of the Muskogee Nation, which the State of Oklahoma said had ceased to exist.

In fact, as Nagle points out in the book, there's an argument to be made that some of these jurisdictional cases get elevated to higher courts precisely because they are gruesome, guilty—and therefore maybe (in the eyes of some lawyers) less likely to succeed in undermining the US government's claim over tribal land.

"There's a quote from Chief Floyd in there: 'Can they find a more horrible crime?'" she said. "I talked to a lot of tribal citizens in Oklahoma who felt like that case was picked almost to make them look bad.”

That said, while the Murphy case is horrible, readers will discover that there was actually another even worse case that was crucial to the story, too.

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When the Murphy jurisdiction case found itself caught in a conflict involving Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, it ended up being leapfrogged at the last moment by the case of Jimcy McGirt, another man who had been convicted by the state of Oklahoma, but was arguing that his crimes were actually committed on tribal territory.

This time, though, it wasn’t about murder. McGirt had been sentenced to 1,000 years in jail for the sexual abuse of his wife's four-year-old granddaughter. Centering this book on that case would have been just as accurate for telling the wider story... arguably more so, since it was the McGirt ruling that finally resulted in a ruling. But I can imagine that while a murderer might be hard to sympathize with, an abuser is almost impossible. So did Nagle ever consider focusing on that other story instead?

In fact, she said it was a question. But she didn’t go that route—and not simply because of the difficulty of making it relatable.

"The book doesn't shy away from the brutality of [McGirt's] crimes, but doesn't go into a lot of detail about the sexual abuse of the young child," she said. "There was a version of the book where… it wasn't graphic detail, but it just told a little bit more of the story of what happened in the family, and how the child told the story, and honestly, I think it's just hard to give that story the kind of the weight and the space that it needs.”

“I think it's also one of those things where I felt differently: it's important to understand the gravity of the crime. I tried to use some of the testimony from the survivor about how it still affects her, and things like that. But I think that those things are more important than the details of the crime. I was a little bit more careful to also make sure that it wasn't getting sensationalized."

That sensitivity came through in the book, I think. It never avoids the fact that these are real, horrible crimes—but it doesn’t want to end up just exploring them in lurid detail. Nagle said that was all in there from the start.

"I knew from the beginning when I started wanting to tell the story of the McGirt case and the Murphy cases," she said. "I knew when I started writing about that case that I wanted to include the history, because the history is why it matters, the history is why that Supreme Court decision [was made] and why our land rights today matter."

And that is the broader ambition of the book, to help the reader understand what it actually meant when the ruling came down, when the Supreme Court ruled that the Muskogee Nation had never been disestablished.

"What I wanted the reader to feel was a taste of what tribal citizens felt—what I felt and what a lot of the other tribal citizens that I talked to that day also described. It was just this overwhelming sense of joy, but it was this joy that also had a lot of sadness in it, because we knew what have been sacrificed and lost to meet this one act of justice at the end of the road... how much sacrifice, how much our ancestors had lost."

This is crucial ambition for any good book, I think. So much of art—whether it's writing, or visual art, or music, or anything else—is ultimately about the creator trying to transmit an idea or a feeling between the maker and the audience... trying to give shape to something that you feel in an instant but is built on a lifetime of knowledge and experience and understanding and instinct. It's a kind of telepathy… the real magic of art, to make somebody feel what you feel.

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There are innocent people at the heart of By The Fire We Carry of course, not least Millie Naharkey. That case, which goes back a century, is one of the saddest illuminations of the way the US has backtracked and betrayed tribes and tribal people.

Naharkey was a young Muskogee woman who inherited valuable land in the 1920s and was soon after abducted, abused and swindled by unscrupulous oilmen who wanted that inheritance for themselves. And even when Naharkey was given "justice" by a court ruling several years after she was kidnapped, the state decided she was also incompetent—and so she spent the rest of her life under guardianship, unable to access her inheritance and dying almost penniless in 1996.

Nagle's discovery of Millie Naharkey's story spun from a legal brief filed in the Murphy case—but understanding it and digging up the detail involved an incredible amount of research. I loved the insights Nagle gave into the effort she had to put in.

"All I knew was that Muskogee woman had been abducted and assaulted for a valuable oil estate, which was something that happened to a lot of citizens of the tribes at the time," said Nagle. "There was a congressional document that the brief [filed in the Murphy case] cited. I went back to that congressional document, got her name, and then we pulled a bunch of newspaper clippings, because her story was actually really famous at the time. From those newspaper clippings, I could tell that there was a lot of litigation, so I actually went to the Tulsa County Courthouse—because to actually pull the case files, I needed the case number and the legal name of the case, and the reporting just didn't have that level of detail."

"So, in the Tulsa County Courthouse there's this big shelf of books by year of lawsuits, where you can just look it up, it's sort of like a ledger of the lawsuits. And so I went there, and I started going through, and I realized there was a lot more litigation than what I had known about. And I actually found the names of over 100 lawsuits that involved the Naharkey family's land."

Eventually, with the help of the record keepers and archivists, Nagle pulled paper files and microfilm records as well as Naharkey's Bureau of Indian Affairs file from the National Archives and more. It ended up being a lot.

"Between the press clippings, the BIA file, the probate file, and all of the lawsuits it was thousands and thousands of pages of documents," said Nagle. "At one point, I converted a closet in my house to just to like a shelf full of binders of all of my research documents... and that was just the stuff I had physical copies of."

This was different in scale to the work Nagle had done on the Murphy case for the podcast This Land, she explained—one of the differences between the different media.

"What I really liked with the book [vs the podcast] was sort of how deep I could go into the storytelling. I did a ton. It's hard to overstate, but I did so much more research for the book. I kind of started from scratch: I was like, all right, let me read every piece of paper that's been filed in this court case. Let me go back and go through all these historical primary sources. Like, let me just, you know, read my little tail off. And so I think the book also has that richness and that depth of research, but it's still really readable."

I think that all comes through in this tremendous work.

Thanks to Rebecca for taking time to discuss it, subscribers will be able to see the video soon on our interview archive.

Next up… I’ll be taking a close look at December’s book of the month: Filterworld. If you have any thoughts or questions, please email them in!