Cherokee Removal

Imagine a small town in Wyoming, with a full functioning community thriving on small businesses. The town has been functioning perfectly for 200 years without any hitches. It is the kind of town where a neighbor can just walk into someone else’s home and borrow a tool box without even asking. The betterment of the town is based solely on the ability of the population to work together and support one another. Now imagine a multi-billion dollar company from China positioning their company in this town. This Chinese company is under the impression that their system will improve this town ten-fold, and bring much more prosperity. However, their company dwarfs the small businesses and puts them out of business. This forces those employees to work for the Chinese company. The competition for work in this company turns the people of the town against each other, until that they realize they need to fight the company instead of each other. Even though they have every right to evict this company from their town, the company from China uses backhanded legal tactics to keep themselves established. Eventually the Chinese company turns the town into a full metropolis with many big businesses, and the small town completely vanishes. An injustice like this would never stand in America today, right? Unfortunately, our nation is built on a story quite similar to this. History scholars, and Americans in general, need to understand that our country is built on an atrocity, but unfortunately, this atrocity is why we have such a prosperous nation today.

In order to fully fathom this volatile act of oppression, one cannot think of the Cherokees as a group of people, but as individuals who were each victimized. Families were uprooted from the homes they had built and lived in for years. These families did not take part in the political pissing contest going on between Georgia and the Cherokees. They merely were just attempting to live their lives and make an honest living. For example,...