Mary Kathryn Nagle

Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Supreme Court briefs defend tribal authority to protect Native children, address violence, and govern conduct on tribal lands. Her advocacy draws on treaties, the Constitution, and federal Indian-law decisions to enforce the United States’ commitments to tribal nations. She also writes plays about Native families and the legal disputes that affect their lives.

Born in Oklahoma City and an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Nagle descends from John Ridge and Major Ridge, Cherokee leaders who carried their nation’s cause to Washington during the removal era and lost their lives in its aftermath. Her great-great-great-grandfather brought the Cherokee Nation’s legal arguments to the federal government before the forced removal known as the Trail of Tears. Nagle studied at Georgetown University, then earned her law degree summa cum laude from Tulane, where she received the Judge John Minor Wisdom Award. She went on to clerk for federal judges.

Briefs at the Threshold of the Court

Nagle has drafted and filed numerous Supreme Court amicus briefs for the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center defending tribal sovereignty and Native women’s safety. In Dollar General Corp. v. Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, she co-authored a tribal-side amicus brief defending a tribal court’s authority to hear a civil claim arising from the alleged abuse of a Native child in a business operating on tribal land. An equally divided Supreme Court left standing the Fifth Circuit’s ruling recognizing the tribal court’s jurisdiction.

In Haaland v. Brackeen, she served as counsel of record for the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center as amicus in defense of the Indian Child Welfare Act. In 2023, by a seven-to-two vote, the Supreme Court sustained Congress’s authority to enact ICWA and rejected the challenges under the Tenth Amendment. It dismissed the equal-protection and nondelegation challenges for lack of standing. A decade earlier, Nagle had authored an amicus brief for members of Congress defending the statute in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl. In the intervening years, she publicly warned that challenges to tribal classifications could unsettle laws governing Native children, land, health care, and the relationship between the United States and tribal governments.

Alongside survivors and tribal leaders, Nagle has advocated for the Violence Against Women Act provisions recognizing and expanding tribal criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians who commit violence against Native women. The provisions restored tribal authority to prosecute offenses that had fallen outside tribal courts’ jurisdiction.

The Law Behind the Curtain

Nagle’s play Sovereignty made her the first Native playwright featured at Washington’s Arena Stage. It interlaces the Ridge family’s removal-era story with a present-day Cherokee lawyer’s fight over jurisdiction and violence against Native women; its premiere run took place blocks from the Supreme Court. Sliver of a Full Moon, her documentary play about survivors whose testimony drove VAWA’s tribal-jurisdiction provisions, has been performed at law schools and the United Nations. Manahatta follows a Lenape woman between Wall Street and her nation’s dispossessed homeland. It has been staged across the country and published alongside her other work.

From 2015 to 2019, Nagle ran the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program. In 2025, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected her a member.

Families, Sovereignty, and the Stage

After years with a firm devoted to tribal representation, Nagle works as an independent attorney with a national federal Indian law practice focused on tribal sovereignty and Native women’s safety. “Protecting sovereignty is not a hobby,” Nagle has said; her current work includes counsel for the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center and representation of families of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls. Among them is the family of Kaysera Stops Pretty Places, which has pursued a public campaign seeking an investigation into her death.

Her playwriting remained active in 2026. In January, The Old Globe presented a reading of On the Far End, Nagle’s one-woman play about Muscogee leader Jean Hill Chaudhuri and the history of promises made to tribal nations. Three Bone Theatre later staged Sovereignty in Charlotte from August 21 through September 6 and in Cherokee, North Carolina, on September 11 and 12.