American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In 1830, the United States Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, effectively authorizing President Andrew Jackson to dispossess and forcibly remove thousands of Native people from their homelands in the American Southeast to lands west of the Mississippi River. The Removal Era has been explored by American historians over the years using classic historical methods and sources. They have recorded and analyzed the usual political and economic happenings and the prominent men with which these events are associated. White America’s philosophical and cultural beliefs have been examined in an effort to understand the underpinnings of Manifest Destiny and America’s insatiable drive for land and dominance. Various racial and political attitudes have been studied, along with economic factors such as the price of cotton on the world market. What has rarely been examined, however, is what Removal meant to Native people, from a Native point of view. The archives and other written sources that are usually mined by modern scholars are almost exclusively written by non-Native people. Government and military records and accounts, even personal journals and diaries, reflect white authorship. Some of these sources include transcriptions of the speeches and other oral communications made by Native people. But these are, almost without exception, orations that were crafted and intended for white audiences—usually government personnel or national legislatures—and therefore conform to the Native perception of what would be important or meaningful to the larger American culture. Sources that Native people trust to relate their experiences sometimes differ markedly from those considered valid or reliable by mainstream white historians. Most Native groups passed cultural and historical knowledge from generation to generation, not through written records but through oral accounts.