I highly recommend a free subscription to “Native News Online”—and a donation as well. Today’s juicy reminder, the anniversary of the Indian Removal Act. In 1830, the burgeoning United States sought to put all Native Americans east of the Mississippi River out of their traditional homes and into the Oklahoma Territory—on the other side of the famous river. (Remember too that the Oklahoma Territory was home to the Nez Perce of the Wallowa Valley for a few years, after a war that might have extinguished them. Remember that there were war survivors, and survivors too of Oklahoma, what the Indians called “the Hot Country.”)
The “dealing with Indians” that started with Columbus in the South and the European fishermen off the Atlantic Coast in the North, has been a rollercoaster of activities and events that have made Indians saints and sinners, saviors and destroyers, heroes and villains, from Rousseau’s “Noble Savage” to today’s salmon savers.
Alvin Josephy said that the Indians had three choices from the beginning: Be White (assimilate); Move (to reservations; to Indian Territory); or die (of disease and war and neglect). I think—and I wish I would have asked him while we had him with us—that Alvin missed one grand thing: Indians as Indians, as Pequot and Cree, Lakota and Nimiipuu (Nez Perce), and as such, survivors and possessors of ancient knowledge of other living things and the land and waters themselves.
I believe that as the waters flow freely again in the Klamath and the fish swim upstream, as the sockeye inevitably return to Wallowa Lake, as Condors fly in Yurok lands, that a fourth option, one that Alvin sometimes noted in his own writings but never named, Indians—Native Americans—are “Survivors.” Teachers too, as we struggle to understand just how they have survived and the ancient knowledge that sustained them across a continent, we are led by indigenous historians and culture bearers. Philip Deloria teaches at Harvard and Ned Blackhawk at Yale—firsts since the founding! Blackhawk writes of the “Rediscovery” of America; Deloria of “Indians in Unexpected Places.”
And 170 Indians—mostly Nez Perce, but Indians from many reservations and places, came this weekend to dig and cultivate root crops that have been dormant for over 100 years! Waiting for the people to come back.
But that is another story. Today we remember a darker chapter in American history, and praise those who survived “Indian Removal.”
Now this, from Native News Online:
“This Day in History. On this day in 1830, 195 years ago, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act.
“The Act established a process whereby the president could grant land west of the Mississippi River to Indian tribes that agreed to give up their homelands. As incentives, the law allowed the Indians financial and material assistance to travel to their new locations and start new lives and guaranteed that the Indians would live on their new property under the protection of the United States Government forever.
“With the Indian Removal Act in effect, President Andrew Jackson and his supporters were able to coerce, bribe, and pressure Native American tribes into signing removal treaties that forced them to leave their ancestral lands in the southeastern United States.
“By the end of his presidency, Jackson had signed nearly seventy such treaties, resulting in the forced relocation of approximately 50,000 Native Americans to what was then designated as Indian Territory. This area, located west of the Mississippi River, excluded the states of Missouri and Iowa as well as the Arkansas Territory. The government intended for the displaced tribes to settle in a more limited region—what would later become eastern Oklahoma—despite the vastness of the territory.
“The Indian Removal Act ultimately led to the Trail of Tears, a brutal and deadly journey that caused the deaths of thousands of Native Americans, including nearly one-quarter of the Cherokee Nation. Because of his role in these events, many Native Americans remember Jackson as the “Indian-killer” president and strongly oppose any form of recognition or honor, including his continued presence on the twenty-dollar bill.”
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Quote and image of Andrew Jackson from “Native News Online.” Get a free subscription by googling that title.
