The Trail Of Tears And Its Impact On Native Americans

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When the population thinks of the first people in America, they may think of Christopher Columbus or the European colonists, when actually the first people here were the Indians. The Trail of Tears was a relocation process forced by the whites onto the Indians. Native Americans then had to move from their homelands to the west and onto what is now called Oklahoma. This document forced them to agree to removal so that they could preserve their identity as tribes. The Indian’s land was held hostage by the states and the federal government. To understand the Trail of Tears, one must look at the unfairness and prejudice, the impact on the Native American lives during the journey, and the lasting effects. The Indians were treated with prejudice …show more content…

Also the state of Georgia and the citizens did not want Indians to stay on the land. “In 1820, pressure from the government and the people of Georgia made it exceedingly hard for the Cherokees to stay in the state of Georgia”, (Rozema 42). Therefore that is to say the Indians chose to do everything and anything to stay together as a tribe even if it meant they had to move across the country for that. This then led to the Indian Removal Act. This was the first major legislature that said the U.S. would no longer respect the legal and political rights of the Indians. The Act gave President Andrew Jackson a grant to acquire the Indian tribe’s unsettled western lands in exchange for their territories within the state borders in the Southeast, where they would be removed from. The Indians were forced to accept the land exchange and the removal …show more content…

Not only was there not enough food to go around but also it meant many died of starvation as some natives slowly began to recover this tragic removal. With recovery finally taking its place, the Cherokee repopulated, established homes for their people and a nation as a matter of fact once again. However the tragic experience they lived still takes a toll on them today. In effect it reproduced a massive distrust of outsiders such as the whites and the government to be specific and therefore the tension with the whites between the natives is still evident today (Trail

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