The Trail of tears

We are currently talking about American culture and history in English class and each one of us was assigned to prepare a topic and present it in class. I got a dark part of American history, the so called Trail of Tears and thought I would share this part of history with you.

Trail of tears refers to the Native American's journey to the West of Mississippi river as well as the act of the Native tribe's removal from the South East to today's Oklahoma in general. First policies to remove Indians from their land were developed in 1803 after the purchase of Louisiana (now they had the space to just send the Indians west) under President Jefferson as the white settlers desired their prosperous land to raise cotton on it. They also believed that Indians should be civilized, which meant converting them to Christianity and turning them into farmers.The Natives tried to assimilate themselves into the white people's culture to show them they were no savages in hopes that they would let them keep their land but 

in 1830 the Congress passed the “Indian Removal Act”

The new law allowed President Jackson to negotiate treaties with Native tribes under which they had to give up their land east of Mississippi river in exchange for land in the West.

Jackson tried to sell this as an act of grace the the public saying that this would allow to live Indians safe from white harassment and to govern themselves in peace. However in 1830 17.000 Cherokee people where forcibly removed from their homeland and approximately 6000 died on their way to Oklahoma.

The following years many other tribes got their own “Trail of tears” which made the term also a general reference for forced removals of Natives and ethnic cleansing all over the country