This Land: Oklahoma’s Past, America’s Future

In January 2025, just after the Inauguration of President Donald Trump, Switchyard organized a gathering of journalists from across the country to discuss how we would go about covering the new administration. We gathered together the biographers of Michelle Obama and Mitch McConnell, authors of books about the Koch Brothers and The Family, about Amazon and Google and Facebook, about the rise of white supremacy and the cash value of racism. We featured writers and editors for the New York Times, the LA Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Mother Jones, for StoryCorps, This American Life, and Reveal. We also had musicians, filmmakers, novelists, essayists, and poets. 

As we had hoped, the gathering was a source of solace, a call to action and a chance to recommit ourselves to our values and best practices and a rekindling of our belief in the power of storytelling, in all its forms. In these unprecedented and difficult times, we are once again reporting on a president who characterizes journalists as enemies of the state and jokes about killing us. And he empowers and emboldens state and local level officials to indulge their most authoritarian impulses. Here, in the heart of Tulsa, on the grounds of the Tulsa Race Massacre and the end of the Trail of Tears, we have state officials who have sought to block the teaching of that history while requiring schools to buy Bibles branded with the new president’s name.

The solemn question each of our panels addressed: What are we going to do now?

In this live episode, Rebecca Nagle and Caleb Gayle discuss how Oklahoma's peculiar history both stands apart from and seems to encapsulate the history of America.

Rebecca Nagle is an award-winning journalist and citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She is the author of By The Fire We Carry: The Generation-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land and 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, and Indian Country Today. She is the recipient of the American Mosaic Journalism Prize, Women’s Media Center’s Exceptional Journalism Award, a Peabody nomination, and numerous awards from the Indigenous Journalist Association. 

Caleb Gayle is the author of We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creek, American Identity, and Power and Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State. He is an award-winning journalist who writes about race and identity and is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. His writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Three Penny Review, Guernica, New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harvard Review, Pacific Standard, and The New Republic. He serves as a Senior Fellow and Professor of Practice at Northeastern University as well as a Visiting Scholar at the Arthur Carter Journalism Institute at NYU.