gaylordnews.net<\/a><\/div>\r\n<\/p>\r\nWASHINGTON \u2013 The Trail of Tears, the forced removal of the Cherokee Nation to Oklahoma, was one of the most inhumane policies in American history \u2013 but it wasn’t an isolated incident.
<\/p>\r\nIn 1831, nearly 16,000 members of the Cherokee Nation were forced under armed guard to leave their native lands in the southeastern United States to trek more than 1,000 miles to what eventually would become the state of Oklahoma.
<\/p>\r\n\r\nAlmost 4,000 Cherokees died along the way, never making it to the land designated by the U.S. government as Indian Territory.\r\n
<\/p>\r\nRemoval of the Choctaw Nation began even earlier, in 1830. Like the Cherokees, they were forced to leave their homes in the South and a way of life developed over millennia to start over in an alien environment on the prairie.
<\/p>\r\nBut the Cherokee and Choctaw nations are only two of the tribes with a removal story. There are 39 tribes in Oklahoma, five native to the state, that have stories to be told \u2013 each with its own trail of tears.
<\/p>\r\n\r\nA mural by artist Elizabeth Janes depicts the arrival of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma in the 1830s. Painted from 1938-39, the 8-by-15-foot mural is on display at the Oklahoma Historical Society in Oklahoma City. Image courtesy Oklahoma Historical Society\r\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/P>\r\nLong before the 1830s, the federal government believed white people could use the Native lands better than the indigenous inhabitants. This \u201cIndian problem\u201d motivated settlers to strip Native people of their land and resources, relentlessly pushing tribal members farther west. That pressure often resulted in violent attacks on Native Americans by settlers. If the Indians fought back, whites considered it proof that they were savages.
<\/p>\r\nAlthough the Constitution established sovereign Indian nations with treaty rights, the idea of removing tribes from the Southeast was gaining momentum by the time Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1828. After proposing the Indian Removal Act as one of his first pieces of legislation, he became one of the idea’s most forceful advocates.
<\/p>\r\nJackson believed that forcing Indigenous people west of the Mississippi River was essential to national security, and he had no qualms about violating existing treaties, according to Jackson biographer Jon Meacham.
<\/p>\r\n\u201cThe Southern states were anxious for more land, especially to grow cotton, and the Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole tribes held rich acreage \u2013 great chunks of which would become modern-day Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee,\u201d Meacham wrote.
<\/p>\r\nAppeals from the tribes that the land was rightfully theirs by treaty fell on deaf ears in Washington. Jackson simply did not believe the Indians had title to the land, and he would not tolerate competing sovereignties in the United States, Meacham said.
<\/p>\r\nOpponents of the act said removal was immoral and illegal, but the Senate approved the law in 1830 by a wide margin.
<\/p>\r\nThe act passed by only four votes in the House and set 1838 as the date for final removal. To those who demanded rights for Indians, Jackson argued that removal would guarantee the survival of the tribes.
<\/p>\r\nInstead, the Indian Removal Act launched more than a century of genocide.
<\/p>\r\n\r\n\u201cWe Never Gave Up\u201d says a sign in the Smithsonian\u2019s National Museum of the American Indian\u2019s exhibit \u201cNation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations.\u201d Photo by Addison Kliewer \/ Gaylord News\r\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/p>\r\nIn 1835, the Jackson administration signed the Treaty of New Echota, supposedly with the Cherokee Nation in Georgia, setting terms for the final removal of the tribe west of the Mississippi River.
<\/p>\r\nThe treaty had been signed by a small group of Cherokees who historians say did not represent the majority of tribal members. But Jackson insisted they did.
<\/p>\r\n\u201cThe people who signed removal treaties were not actually representative of public sentiment in their nations,\u201d said Barbara Mann, who holds a doctorate in English language and literature and has written several books about the Indian Removal Act. “That is why such a large number of Indians refused the treaties, to the point of hiding out rather than be rounded up by the government for forced removal.”
<\/p>\r\nThe federal government dispatched thousands of troops to enforce the poorly negotiated treaties.
<\/p>\r\nIn his farewell address to the nation in 1837, Jackson extolled the removal act.
<\/p>\r\n\u201cThe philanthropist will rejoice that the remnant of that ill-fated race has been at length placed beyond the reach of injury or oppression, and that the paternal care of the General Government will hereafter watch over them and protect them,\u201d he said.
<\/p>\r\nRather than protecting the tribes, the military was brutal, and one-fourth of the Cherokees died along the Trail of Tears of disease, starvation, exhaustion and exposure.
<\/p>\r\n\u201cI fought through the Civil War and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by the thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew,\u201d Meacham quoted one Georgia volunteer as saying years later about the removal.
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