Cherokees on the Trail of Tears

Cherokees on “The Trail Where They Cried”

Until 1828, Cherokee Indians called Georgia and several other southeastern states, home. After the first “non-Indians” arrived, Cherokees, along with other Indian cultures experienced the worst over the next 300 years. They would be exposed to disease, famine, warfare, and over 90% of the Indian population would be wiped out.(1) All of the Indian population would be forced to leave their way of like behind and take on the white culture. An example of how poorly the Indians were treated would be the Trail of Tears.

In 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act and Jackson immediately signed it. This disastrous Act was a federal permission slip for states to coerce various tribal communities of the north and eastern areas to extract themselves from their own properties, some of which had been in their families for thousands of years and included sacred spiritual and burial sites, and move out west to land that the white people admittedly did not want to occupy, Western land that was already inhabited by other Indians tribes and could prove to be hostile to the newcomers.

Those who voluntarily relinquished their grounds were promised a monetary sum; those who remained and protested the move often received harsh treatment. First the Georgia Legislature passed laws allowing the states to police the Cherokees and policies were ratified that forbid the Cherokees to mine for gold, purchase alcohol, to conduct tribal business or to testify against a white man. There were lotteries held to give away land and gold rights to “non-Indians.” Cherokees were limited to their rights. (2)

The Cherokee's resisted the Removal Act and appealed to Washington for help, only to be turned away. Then that the Indians challenged the Removal policy in the Supreme Court. At first the Court refused to hear their case because they were not a sovereign nation -ruling that: "Their (the Cherokee's) relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian." Then, in 1832, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Cherokees, claiming that they were indeed a sovereign nation and therefore the removal laws were not applicable. The only way the Cherokee Nation would be extracted from their land was if they agreed to leave on their own.

The Cherokee people thought they had won the right to stay on what was left of their ancestral homeland, but the whites managed to lodge a campaign of cruelty and injustice to force the Native people to flee from their homes. Though gold was abundant on Cherokee turf, they were not allowed to mine it. Under no circumstance could an Indian testify against a white, even if the Indian's home was picked clean and all cattle or horses were taken. Whites could trespass and mine for gold - without permission - on