...The Trail of Tears is a phrase known to define the forceful expulsion of the five civilized Native tribes, away from their traditional lands and forced migration to new Indian ground which was west of the Mississippi River. These tribes were the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and the Seminoles. When Andrew Jackson was elected president in the year 1828, the Natives soon became a part of the next racial targeting. President Andrew Jackson encouraged the expulsion; the Congress authorized this removal policy set by the president in 1830. The Indian Removal Act was passed on May 28, 1830; they were involuntarily removed from their homes and forced to move west. The Indian Removal Act was defined as swapping the U.S. western area for the...
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...Historically, the United States of America and Native American Nations was full of tumultuous occurrences of ecocide, ethnocide and genocide. One of the most prevalent situations of their interactions was the Trail of Tears, which resulted in lasting effects on the Cherokee and Choctaw Nations. It was an act of genocide against the Cherokee and Choctaw Nations by the United States of America. Today, these Nations still feel the impact of this atrocious event and continue to tell stories of the horrific experiences that their people endured. The event stemmed out of the white settler expansion into the South during the early 19th century. White settlers wanted to acquire high yield land from Native American Nations for growing cotton. Native American people were standing in the way of progress for white settlers and the United States did not uphold their agreement with these nations. Thus these communities were forcefully removed to a distant and foreign land that resulted in the death of many of their...
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...Tragedies of the Trail of Tears and the Holocaust The U.S government stole millions of dollars and millions of acres of land from the native americans. Likewise, the Nazi Regime stole the same from helpless Jewish people who were forced to live in ghettos. Unfortunately, this was just the beginning. When the white settlers first came to America they encountered the Native Americans they thought they were savages, and that they were dumb and could easily steal from them. The white settlers moved the Native Americans to oklahoma and in this process they stole from them and killed their livestock. They also killed them and stole their homes while they made the Native Americans walk all the from their homes to Oklahoma. This is very similar...
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...The international community has not legally admonished the United States for genocidal acts against Native Americans, yet it is clear that examples of genocidal acts and crimes against humanity are a well-cited page in U.S. history. Notorious incidents, such as the Trail of Tears, the Sand Creek Massacre, and the massacre of the Yuki of northern California are covered in depth in separate entries in this encyclopedia. More controversial, however, is whether the colonies and the United States participated in genocidal acts as an overall policy toward Native Americans. The Native-American population decrease since the arrival of Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus alone signals the toll colonization and U.S. settlement took on the native population. Scholars estimate that approximately 10 million pre-Columbian Native Americans resided in the present-day United States. That number has since fallen to approximately 2.4 million. While this population decrease cannot be attributed solely to the actions of the U.S. government, they certainly played a key role. In addition to population decrease, Native Americans have also experienced significant cultural and proprietary losses as a result of U.S. governmental actions. The total effect has posed a serious threat to the sustainability of the Native-American people and culture. Ideological Motivations Two conflicting yet equally harmful ideologies significantly influenced U.S. dealings with Native Americans. The first sprang from...
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...Warrior The tears of my youth have stopped flowing from absorbing the injustice, inflicted by Godly persons of cruel and wicked devils, who have extracted me from the womb of my community, cutting off my mother tongue, forcible compliance to their way of life and killing my spirit, my people, my community and my nation. Severely depressed, I painfully walk with permanent scars that are deeply saturated within my soul and I can no longer speak from my heart as I continue my life’s journey looking, hoping and searching for the end of the trail, beaten, broken, burdened and buried in despair. Helpless and unable to cope with the weight of atrocities gushing from the subtle but deadly waves of genocide that will not subside from all levels of governments along with the courts of the dominion that are manipulating, diminishing and imposing changes that disrupts the well being of our communities. My physical, mental, emotional and spiritual being is extremely out of balance where healing can only come from within and I must rise above the injuries of yesterday otherwise I will be the vessel of tomorrow’s generations that may lead to the fatality of a people. I am a warrior gravely wounded from the incarceration of an Indian Residential School and the genocides, but it is time that my resilience will abrogate the usurping of my people’s rights, liberties and freedoms upon the lands and resources we own, enjoy, use and occupy. I must heal myself by picking up the multiple years of baggage...
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...the east was being explored and the discovery of gold on the eastern states was valuable. The five civilized tribes, The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole were being forced to relocate West of the Mississippi river due to Americans believing Indians were savages and the discovery of gold in the area. MIgrating the Indians gave the United states an abundance of room to established plantations and continue slavery. The infamous “Trail of Tears” forced thousands of Indigenous people to walk through harsh weather and experience...
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...own history that they don’t even recognize the atrocities committed against the Natives. The federal governments owes the Natives their original land, the reservations they currently live in are a testament to the oppression that occurred since Columbus sailed the seas. If not for the federal government who can say what the Natives could be doing now, it was our hand that saw to their demise. To exterminate a society like theirs, we began with supplementing Abrahamic religions for Indian culture, this effectively made Indian culture disappear. Culture was not the only victim in our oppressive actions, the Trail of Tears slaughtered over 2,000 Choctaws and that was only the first removal (4). The federal government owes the Native people for the oppression that has transgressed.A society built off of the blood of Native bodies can do nothing but perpetuate oppression. The denial of the Native genocide has allowed the United States to construct a history of violence the enslavement of Africans, destruction in Korea and...
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...One of the most disenfranchised groups in the United States is the Native American people. This seems like it should be a contradictory statement considering that before Christopher Columbus’s arrival in 1492, Native Americans of various tribes lived and thrived in their homeland. However, that all changed when white conquistadors arrived. Columbus claimed an occupied land for Spain and then committed acts on the native people that equate to the modern day definition of genocide. Eventually, Columbus and other conquerors died off. However, that did not signal the end of the suffering for Native Americans because the U.S. government took over and became the new subjugators. The documentary “The Canary Effect” provides a timeline of how native...
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...Trail Of Tears “Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race.” ― Martin Luther King Jr The Trail of Tears was an unjust and On September 15, 1830, at Little Dancing Rabbit Creek, the Chiefs of the Choctaw Nation and representatives of the U.S. met to discuss the impact of a bill recently passed by the Congress of the U.S. This bill with all the same good intentions of those today who believe they know better than we how to conduct our lives, allowed for the removal of all Indian peoples to the West of the Mississippi River. It had been made clear to the Choctaw, that the Whites in Washington cared little for the Native americans situation, that either they willingly moved, or by military force they would be moved. were not ignorant savages, but industrious farmers, merchants, and businessmen of all types. We were educated people, many were Christians. The native americans had an organized system of government and a codified body of law. Some of these people were not even Indians, many strangers and orphans had been taken in over the years. The Chiefs and Warriors signed the treaty, realizing they had no option.(of what nation?) For doing this the government officials guaranteed, in the body of the treaty, (what treaty?)safe conveyance to our new homes. (where did you find this information?)(Do not forget for a moment that in this treaty, the Choctaw traded 10.3 million acres of land...
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...Americans traveling in large groups circling wagons ready to attack innocent people played a pivotal role in promoting the image of the savage untamed Native American. While at the same time, the white settlers were portrayed as moral humans only trying to protect their land and their family from the brutal and savage Native Americans bent on killing as many white settlers as possible. Of course, there were conflicts and deaths, but very few were the result of hostility between settlers and Native Americans. When Native Americans tried to defend themselves and their land, settlers or troops attacked them. We learned from “Major Problems in the History of the American West” that in total over eighteen thousand emigrants crossed the Overland Trails from 1840 to the pre-gold rush days in 1849, but there were only approximately thirty-four recorded deaths of Native Americans by settlers (128). During that same period, there were only twenty-five recorded deaths of settlers at the hands of Native Americans (129). Actually, there was a lot of trading going on between Native Americans and settlers and settlers hired many natives as guides By the early 1970s Hollywood attempted to portray Native Americans in a more accurate light and movies began casting actual Native Americans. In Geronimo (1993) Hollywood’s Wes Studi, a Cherokee Native American was cast in the role of the legendary Apache chief Geronimo. The movie tells, albeit mostly from the white man’s point of view, Geronimo’s...
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...Kindness is a very interesting word with a simple definition, however when put it into action the idea is much more complicated and complex. Diversity is a similar word that has a very simple definition but a deep complexity when put into action. How is it as people that we can take very simple positive words and make them very complicated and bleak, our nature makes us so. The idea that is brought forth in Anne Sexton’s “After Auschwitz” is very dark and angry, her meaning behind that poem I believe was to depict the human race as we are, as animals. People would prefer to think that good outweighs the bad however, when genocide is concerned that is simply not possible. The complexity of this issue will keep a person up at night, after reading...
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...Empowerment by Assimilation or by Self-Actualization? Beginning with the first settlers from Europe in the New World, Native Americans have persistently been exploited for their land and resources. The creation of the United States of America spawned an unprecedented explosion of immigrants flocking to America, which created tensions with Native Americans over territory. Under the Jackson presidency and approved by the U.S. Congress, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 detailed a plan for the relocation of Native Americans, later known as the Trail of Tears. Standing their ground, the Native Americans resisted the advancements of the U.S. government, creating a new wave of battles within the Indian Wars. U.S. Army captain Richard Henry...
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...Summary of Historical Trauma BSHS345 June 14, 2014 Chelie Safeels The Native Americans have faced extreme historical trauma for over five hundred years. This includes physical (death due to no immunity to European diseases), Emotional, Social and spiritual genocide. From 1492 when Christopher Columbus came to American, to the Spanish Conquistadors, The puritans and all those who came later to displace the Native Americans, including the trail of tears, and in the end to be locked into barren reservations. Another tragedy is the lose of most of the reservation through the court system, because oil, gas and other minerals are found on the Sovereign land. The Native American have been required through the years to adapt to the American way of life and to abandon their native culture to live in a “White Man’s World” The term trauma is Greek in origin, meaning to physically wound, disturb or pierce the corporeal boundaries (Garland, 1998;Leydesdorffet al., 1999). Sources generally define trauma according to an acute event or insult against a person’s body or culture’s psyche/traditions A lot of pain and suffering our family has going through. A lot of things that have happened to the Native American which were unjust, that were cruel, that were down right murderous, but as a culture they have survived, but most of the culture is lost to history. My Aunt Dorothy Yellowtail, whose husband Chief Robert Yellowtail was the last full Blooded of the Crow...
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...Many times during conflict those that are the powerless often become the most powerful. Throughout history there have been many of such examples. These examples prove that while despotism and dictatorship and a corrupt government may be the most powerful in the worlds eyes, the victims/powerless are the people who leave the biggest impact. When you think of and asylum seeker many people will often assume they are boat people looking for handouts. However, this is not always the case. Najaf Mazari is a perfect example of the powerless becoming powerful, through refugee/asylum status. At the age of about eleven or twelve, Najaf's world was literally blown to smithereens when a rocket launcher blew their house apart in the village of Mazar - e - Sharif. Najaf was injured to the point he was perilously close to becoming a cripple for life. A year after the bombing Najaf is cured. He returns to work as a Rugmaker only to face the demanding wrath of the Taliban and Communists governments. Najaf is perused so closely that he is forced into hiding from the Taliban, once caught is maliciously beaten as punishment. As a consequence Najaf is forced to risk his life in the hands of people smugglers and get on a rickety and instable boat bound for Australia. Najaf is one of the lucky ones, his boat makes it to Christmas Island. Although his journey does not end here, Najaf must now prove his identity and a genuine asylum claim. Eventually truth wins out and his visa comes through and...
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...with the greater Smoky Mountains. They did have access to many unique foods that would go onto to change the basis of their cooking which in turn changes their culture. Food is a main aspect of culture that you cannot unentwined from each other. Any pre-contact culture that the Cherokee would have had would have been solely based on their access to different types of foods, and how that access lead to the establishment of culture through the easy access to said foods. This culture was put to the test when the Indian Removal act was passed after gold was found on their land. The culture was strong because the people were strong in spirt and they were only strong gin spirit to their nutrition as a society due to the abundance of food. The Trail of Tears did kill thousands but did not kill their culture. The many types of food that they had access to were accented due to the geography that was just discussed. Pre-contact of Europeans the Cherokee people highlighted by the hunting of deer, bears, fish, squirrels, groundhogs and rabbits. They were masters of hunting, spreading their tactics throughout their homelands but also respected the killing of the animals, calling them to a whole nation onto themselves. One of the mainstays of how they would prepare the meat pre-contact would’ve been a large one-pot stew. The staples of their diet were Corn Beans and squash which are supplemented by wild greens, mushrooms, ramps, nuts, and berries. After European contact, they began to grow watermelons...
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