This Land Is Not Your Land
The Ethnic Cleansing of Native Americans
In his first annual message to the U.S. Congress, in 1829, U.S. President Andrew Jackson—a slave-owning real estate speculator already famous for burning down Creek settlements and hounding the survivors of the Creek War of 1813–14—called for the “voluntary” migration of Native Americans to lands west of the Mississippi River. Six months later, in the spring of 1830, he signed the Indian Removal Act into law. This measure gave the president the authority to negotiate with Native American tribes for their fertile lands. The statute set off waves of litigation, mineral prospecting, and land speculation—not to mention waves of violence committed by nonnative settlers against Native Americans.
As the historian Claudio Saunt shows in his new book, Unworthy Republic, U.S. administrators and politicians gradually turned the voluntary removal into compulsory expulsion using a mix of legal and extralegal measures. State and federal militias hunted, killed, and often scalped Native Americans. Squatters and opportunists moved onto Native American lands both before and after tribes officially relocated. And the government gave banks and other lenders the power to force Native Americans into punitive sales and forfeitures, rendering tens of thousands of Native Americans homeless in their own lands. Thousands of Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, Delawares, Hurons, Potawatomis, Sauks, Seminoles, and Senecas died in the process o‚ removal. The myriad relocations and displacements are now commonly referred to by a single name: the Trail of Tears.
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