THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NONFICTION

A New Yorker Best Book of 2024 • An Esquire Best Book of Fall 2024 • Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard First Book Prize

'Reads like a legal thriller' ESQUIRE

'As propulsive and affecting as it is infuriating' VANITY FAIR

A powerful work of reportage and American history that braids together the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation’s earliest days, and a small-town murder in the 1990s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land more than a century later.

Before 2020, American Indian reservations made up roughly 55 million acres of land in the United States. By contrast, nearly 200 million acres are reserved for National Forests – in the emergence of the United States as a nation, the government set aside more land for trees than for Indigenous peoples.

In the 1830s, Muscogee people were rounded up by the US military at gunpoint and forced into exile halfway across the continent. At the time, they were promised this new land would be theirs for as long as the grass grew and the waters ran. But that promise was not kept. When Oklahoma was created on top of Muscogee land, the new state claimed their reservation no longer existed. Over a century later, a Muscogee citizen was sentenced to death for murdering another Muscogee citizen on triba