Indian Removal Act

Indian Removal Act and other Travesties Against Human Rights

Winter 2000

A dead Indian is a good Indian

—Andrew Jackson

The history of the United States is fraught with irony. As tradition recounts, the Mayflower Pilgrims first disembarked on American soil a group of half-starved, disoriented individuals, and had it not been for the Native Americans, who feasted them with roasted wild turkey, they would’ve starved to death. To date, elementary school children still enact representations of this event in their school plays, dressed up as Indians, Pilgrims and turkeys. One of the most beloved, sacrosanct American traditions is Thanksgiving Dinner, an occasion for the family to gather around the table to sup on farm grown turkey in remembrance of that feast given to the Pilgrims, while altogether electing to forget about the injustices committed against the true Americans—better known then as Indians—in the sake of colonialism.

In his State of the Union Address of December 6, 1830, Andrew Jackson expressed “pleasure to announce to Congress that the benevolent policy of the Government, steadily pursued by nearly thirty years, in relation to the removal [extermination?] of the Indians beyond the white settlements is approaching to a happy consummation. . . .” (Perdue and Green 119).

This benevolent, yet systematic removal of Indians from their rightful land was the result of several traits deep ingrained within the European psyche. To begin with, Europeans viewed themselves as conquerors; they arrived to the Americas to colonize the land and submit its people, and not, as they’d originally claimed, to co-exist peacefully with the original inhabitants of the continent. In their ethnocentric, patriarchal ways, there was no room to understand the Cherokee’s matrilineal customs, that is, that they traced kinship solely through women (which familial structure was conveniently adopted several decades later when slave owners decreed that children followed the...