The winner of the 2025 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize is “By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land” (Harper Collins Publishers, 2024) by Rebecca Nagle.
For two decades, the Center for Great Plains Studies’ book prize has celebrated the most outstanding work about the Great Plains during the past year, chosen by an independent group of scholars.
In “By the Fire We Carry,” Nagle recounts the long fight for tribal land and sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma by chronicling both the contemporary legal battle and historic acts of Indigenous resistance.
Nathan Tye, assistant professor of history at the University of Nebraska at Kearney and a book prize committee member, said the book is both personal and historical, excavating generations of trauma to examine the contests over land, jurisdiction, memory and the law on the southern Plains.
“At once the biography of a crime, a history of Cherokee and Muscogee peoples and a family memoir, it never loses sight of its wider argument, even across these varied points of view,” he said. “It invites readers to carry the weight of the Great Plains’ past and present.”
Nagle is an award-winning journalist and a citizen of Cherokee Nation, living in Oklahoma. She is the writer and host of the podcast “This Land.” Her writing on Native representation, federal Indian law and tribal sovereignty has been featured in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, the Guardian, USA Today, Indian Country Today and other publications. She is a Peabody Award nominee and the recipient of the American Mosaic Journalism Prize, Women’s Media Center’s Exceptional Journalism Award and numerous honors from the Native American Journalist Association.
“Thank you to the committee and the Stubbendieck family for this amazing honor,” Nagle said. “Books are often presented as a solo endeavor. This book was not. It would not have been possible without the help of a lot of people. Thank you especially to my editor, all the recordkeepers who helped me access the documents, all the historians who guided my research, to everyone who spoke with me, invited me into their homes and lives and trusted me with their stories. ‘By The Fire We Carry’ exists in a continuum of Indigenous intellectual thought, histories, resistance and survival. Thank you to all the ancestors who came before us who made our survival and struggle possible.”
Along with a $10,000 cash prize, book prize winners are invited to present a lecture on the book’s topic in Lincoln during the fall semester. First-edition, full-length, nonfiction books copyrighted in 2024 were eligible for the award, which Jim and Cheryl Stubbendieck have supported since 2005.
Other finalists were:
- “Bead Talk: Indigenous Knowledge and Aesthetics from the Flatlands,” edited by Carmen L. Robertson, Judy Anderson and Katherine Boyer;
- “The Spirit of 1889: Restoring the Lost Promise of the High Plains and Northern Rockies” by Samuel Western.
For more information about the award or the Center for Great Plains Studies, click here.
