In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the “Indian Removal Act,” which authorized the government to negotiate treaties with the remnants of all Eastern Tribes to purchase their lands and move them west of the Mississippi River. In a lawsuit brought by the educated Cherokee, Chief justice John Marshall ruled in favor of the Cherokee, a Tribe that had adopted an alphabet, published its own newspaper, and displayed in every way acceptance of the American system of justice. Marshall said the Tribes were sovereign, and states—Georgia in the lawsuits—had no rights to take Indian lands. Tribes could deal only with the Federal Government, sovereign to sovereign. Jackson backed Georgia, envisioning a large “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi River, and forcibly removed Indian tribes from the East—including Georgia. He is supposed to have said that Marshall had made his decision, “now let him enforce it!”
Marshall could not of course, and some 100,000 Eastern Indians were coerced into abandoning ancient homelands and crossing into “Indian Territory.” Their ancient lands were taken up by cotton farmers in the south and homesteading agriculturalists across the center of the country. Eventually, Indian Territory became mostly Oklahoma, and as the country marched west, Native tribes were treatied and herded and warred onto smaller “reservations,” where they were supposed to be left to their own cultures and practices, safe from White encroachment.
Whites chipped away at Indian lands in the original Indian Territory and in smaller reservations across the West, sometimes chasing gold, oftentimes just land for homesteading and settlement. Indian Territory became the state of Oklahoma, and The General Allotment Act of 1887 then moved approximately 90 million acres—over two-thirds of remaining tribal lands, into settler hands. Dispossession continued into the 1950s, with the Termination Act—a final try at eliminating Tribal lands completely. President Nixon terminated the Termination Act, saying that Termination would be replaced by “self-determination.” In the last few years there have been “land-back” efforts—and successes! Current administration proclamations for return of Native lands and resources do not bode well. Is it a new assault on Native sovereignty, lands, and cultures?
TODAY, we hear from many sources about a plan to move all Gazans into restricted zones, overseen by, and possibly governed by, Israel. President Trump at one point advocated the complete removal of current citizens of Gaza—maybe towards some “Indian Territory” in some Arab state. Recently, the Israeli news source Haaretz, which is often critical of its government, wrote:
“Netanyahu supports the plan presented Monday by Defense Minister Israel Katz to concentrate Gaza’s entire population in a ‘humanitarian city’ that will be built on the ruins of Rafah, a source told Haaretz. ‘The plan is essentially to move all civilian Gazans south, to a large tent city in Rafah, where they will have hospitals and plenty of food,’ the source said.”
Can one see Gaza and the West Bank as Israel’s “Indian Territories,” and this new move to concentrate Arab citizens into enclaves as smaller “reservations”? The awful tole of death and human dismemberment caused by continued Israeli bombings even echoes the “Indian Wars” that followed Removal. Our Indian wars often amounted to slaughter, and always involved the deaths of women and children.
The parallels are striking. In a book originally published in 1991, “A Long and Terrible Shadow: White Values, Native Rights in the Americas since 1492,” Thomas Berger tells the story of European people and values overwhelming the New World. We have a good idea of the takeover of lands in all of the Americas; Berger’s gift is in explaining how values have been and still are intertwined with land dispossession. To this day, we cannot fathom Indians and Aleuts and Inuits of the far north holding onto a subsistence economy of hunting and fishing. We see anachronism where they see accommodation. “Yes, we’ll participate to some extent in your money economy, and use snowmobiles and guns in gathering our foods and furs. But we’ll keep communal lands and waters and practice our cultures.” Even some on the environmental left would like to see Natives totally adopt the “modern” economy—and leave the wildlife alone.
Making Gaza a European resort—with a few Gazans living in the enclaves working as waiters and hotel cleaners—might be the ultimate vision of a European Palestine. And it is no more outlandish than was Indian Removal in the US and Argentina, and the decimation of the Maya in Guatemala in the late 1900s as chronicled by Berger.
Every reprieve for indigenous populations—revivals of language and culture and regaining lands and control of resources—seems to be followed by setbacks in the name of modernity and (Euro-American) civilization.
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Photo, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. July 8, 2025
