What is happening? “To remain ignorant of things that happened before you were born is to remain a child (CICERO).” I fear and imagine the whole cycle from the Trail of Tears of panic, violence, forced removal, and genocide may happen here again. I fear and imagine that because the current administration and current political party in power “remain(s) ignorant of things that happened before.” Ignorant of what, exactly? They stay willfully ignorant of the cause and effect relationship between dehumanizing legislation and genocide. For instance, the approximate 100,000 Native American Indians who were forced to relocate, and who were all who were left to relocate, had dehumanizing legislation written against them.
The Cherokee nation was not the only Native American culture to be removed westward in the 19th century. Perhaps as many as 100,000 First Peoples were pushed out of their traditional lands, and the death toll from these forced removals reached far into the thousands.
What else do they remain blissfully ignorant of?
(1)Kurt Kaltreider, PH.D. “American Indian Prophecies,” p.44:
…It is estimated that 100 million Indians from the Caribbean, Central, South, and North America perished at the hands of the European invaders. Sadly, unbelievably, really, much of that wholesale destruction was sanctioned and carried out by the Roman Catholic Church and various Protestant denominations.(1: p.37)
Extermination, although it didn’t kill all of the American Indians, was successful. After germ warfare was discovered, smallpox and diseases were used as germ warfare by “trading” or “gifting.” When more than ninety percent of the indigenous population were killed by diseases, white Europeans desired to eliminate those remaining indigenous members of the population before the forced relocations began. This only left, after disease had destroyed the vast majority of their tribes, approximately 5% of the indigenous population to forcibly remove to unwanted lands by white Europeans.(1)
After an estimated 100,000,000 Indigenous human beings “perished at the hands of European invaders,” an estimated 100,000 Indigenous human beings remained alive prior to Andrew Jackson’s Removal Act. Those100,000 Indigenous human beings were then forcibly removed from their homes by violence, shoved into Removal Forts (Concentration Camps), and then relocated to their new “home.”
By 1837, the Jackson administration had removed 46,000 Native American people from their land east of the Mississippi, and had secured treaties which led to the removal of a slightly larger number. Most members of the five southeastern nations had been relocated west, opening 25 million acres of land to white settlement and to slavery.
Since recognizing the past in the present is a key to not repeating it, the Trail of Tears should be a severe warning in these turbulent times. I can imagine the whole cycle of panic, violence, forced removal, and genocide happening here again with more “improvements”. The current administration and current political party in power “remain(s) ignorant of things that happened before;” specifically, “it shall and may be lawful for the President to cause such aid and assistance to be furnished to the emigrants as may be necessary and proper to enable them to remove to, and settle in, the country for which they may have exchanged;” and, “The worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed, roaring across two continents non-stop for four centuries and consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people, finally had leveled off. There was, at last, almost no one left to kill.” The Trail of Tears is a severe warning in these turbulent times, and the tornado is on the ground.
Section 5 – And be it further enacted, That upon the making of any such exchange as is contemplated by this act, it shall and may be lawful for the President to cause such aid and assistance to be furnished to the emigrants as may be necessary and proper to enable them to remove to, and settle in, the country for which they may have exchanged; and also, to give them such aid and assistance as may be necessary for their support and subsistence for the first year after their removal.
Sex, Race and Holy War
between 95 and 98 percent of California’s Indians had been exterminated in little more than a century. And even this ghastly numerical calculation is inadequate, not only because it reveals nothing of the hideous suffering endured by those hundreds of thousands of California native peoples, but because it is based on decline only from the estimated population for the year 1769-a population that already had been reduced savagely by earlier invasions of European plague and violence. Nationwide by this time only about one-third of one percent of America’s population-250,000 out of 76, 000,000 people-were natives. The worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed, roaring across two continents non-stop for four centuries and consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people, finally had leveled off. There was, at last, almost no one left to kill.
***
p147
During the course of four centuries – from the 1490s to the 1890s – Europeans and white Americans engaged in an unbroken string of genocide campaigns against the native peoples of the Americas.
Prison Camps & The Trail of Tears (Part 1)
Prison Camps & Cherokee Trail of Tears (part 2)
Hello,
I am completing a novel in which three women journey from Georgia to Oklahoma recounting history from the colonial period. It is a personal book. And I was looking for a map and came across this one. I would like to know if it would be possible to include it. I like it because it is simple. And I agree very much with your article, we must become conscious. This is the reason to write this book. I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you, Linda