Thursday, November 8, 2007
Cherokee Struggle.
In the 1820s the majority of white people wanted the Native Americans moved west of the Mississippi River. Some wanted them removed so they could have their lands, but others where sympathetic to the Native Americans because they feared Natives would be subject to alcoholism, economic struggles, and would eventually lose all their cultural traits. After the war of 1812, Andrew Jackson took massive amounts of land from the Creeks. Although much of the land was being taken from them, the Natives used the political knowledge they possessed from whites and some of them even lived like whites. James Vann for example, was a Cherokee, who owned slaves and trading posts. Sequoya even invented a way to write the Cherokee language and eventually it led to the Cherokee constitution which was very similar to the United States Constitution. Even with all this effort on the mixed bloods' part, the pure blooded Cherokees were resistant to all the efforts of the mixed bloods, however, they seemed to agree that they didn't want to lose their lands. Sadly, in 1830, President Jackson pushed the Indian Removal Act through Congress and granted land and money in Oklahoma and Kansas. The government would grant them the right to ve in this new land without the threat of whites moving in on their new homes. Tis act would lead to much violence between natives and whites. Eventually removal treaties would force the Cherokee to move with the use of the US military. Perhaps one of the most infamous acts of the US government was the Trail of Tears, in which 14,000 Cherokees were force to march 1,200 miles. It seems that the Cherokee removal was permissible ultimately because the US government said so. At the time, with little to no tolerance on the part of the government, do you think there was any other way for this to be handled? Or considering the state of mind of people like Andrew Jackson, was Indian removal and eventual bloodshed inevitable?
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