Sunday, November 8, 2020 at 2:00 pm Eastern
Live online Zoom discussion and reading. Registration required. Free.
Hosted by: The Michael C. Carlos Museum.

An online discussion and play reading, in collaboration with the Decatur Book Festival, by Mary Kathryn Nagle (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma), author of the play Sovereignty, about the Cherokee Nation’s legal fight for sovereignty and also violence against women.

Written by Mary Kathryn Nagle, lawyer, playwright, and direct descendant of nineteenth-century Cherokee leaders John Ridge and Major Ridge, Sovereig unfolds over two parallel timelines. In present-day Oklahoma, a young Cherokee lawyer, Sarah Ridge Polson, and her colleague Jim Ross defend the inherent jurisdiction of Cherokee Nation in the U.S. Supreme Court when a non-Indian defendant challenges the Nation’s authority to prosecute non-Indian perpetrators of domestic violence. Their collaboration is juxtaposed with scenes from 1835, when Cherokee Nation was eight hundred miles to the east in the southern Appalachians. That year, Sarah’s and Jim’s ancestors, historic Cherokee rivals, were bitterly divided over a proposed treaty with the administration of Andrew Jackson, the Treaty of New Echota, which led to the nation’s removal to Oklahoma on the infamous Trail of Tears.