Trails of Tears
A.S. Dillingham
In 1832, my family was forced from our homeland. For decades, a foreign government and settlers had coveted the ground beneath our feet, but we fought to remain. At times we took up arms; at other moments we sought peaceful coexistence. We made allies among some of the settlers and sent our children to learn their language and ways. As the settlers encroached, we made strategic concessions for the sake of peace. By 1830, we held only a small portion of our lands. Yet none of this satisfied the settlers’ demands. We were forced to accept our dispossession. The foreign government promised us land elsewhere. With military escorts, my ancestors travelled more than five hundred miles, mostly on foot, carrying what little they could. Many died on the journey that came to be known as the Trail of Tears.
As a historian, I understand the perils of comparison. But the similarities between Indigenous peoples’ history of loss and the plight of the Palestinians are too striking to ignore. Native peoples in what is now the United States suffered wars of extermination, policies of isolation and forced assimilation. During the 1830s, the US government under President Andrew Jackson, often cited as an inspiration by Donald Trump, expelled more than eighty thousand Native people from east of the Mississippi River to the west, towards what the US termed ‘Indian Territory’. On this forced march, they suffered from exposure, cholera and the corruption of the federal officials charged with their removal. Over the past year, Palestinians have faced exposure, outbreaks of polio and other diseases, and the destruction of aid convoys meant to assist them.
At the beginning of this month, Trump, with Benjamin Netanyahu smiling at his side, proposed that the two million Palestinians in Gaza be removed and the United States ‘take over’ the territory. The idea of a ‘population transfer’, another term for ethnic cleansing, has gone from a fringe position in Israel to the political mainstream, articulated by cabinet members and opposition MPs. Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have reiterated their support for it, as have Trump appointees. Jackson’s policies of ‘Indian Removal’ in the 1830s should be a reminder that ‘population transfers’ never solve social problems but only perpetuate existing inequalities and violence, while dehumanising the target population. They also demonstrate how programmes of extermination can become quotidian government policy.
The proposal to remove Native Americans from lands east of the Mississippi came after decades of war and illegal settlement. Settlers pushed farther west, often violating existing treaties with Native nations. In our traditional lands in what is now the US south-east, the Cotton Revolution drove demand for Native territory. As with Trump’s fantasies of turning Gaza into ‘the Riviera of the Middle East’, crass economic greed drove Native dispossession. As in the West Bank, settlers sometimes acted in co-ordination with state officials, while at other times they operated outside US law, putting pressure on the state to follow them and provide security. Talk of ‘empty land’ and ‘handfuls of wandering Indians’ was used to justify the expulsion of my people.
As Claudio Saunt observes in Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, ‘Indian Removal’ was an ‘artfully vague’ phrase that ‘left unstated who was removing whom’. The logistics of the policy – the largest federal initiative to date – were daunting. Government officials sought to co-ordinate the forced removal of tens of thousands of people who belonged to different tribal nations, spoke different languages and had distinct internal politics. Some, like the Choctaws, reluctantly accepted the policy, hoping to preserve ourselves in new lands to the west. Others, like some Seminoles, fiercely resisted their removal, arriving in Indian Territory in shackles. All suffered the violence of being separated from their lands and their ancestors who were buried there.
The officials were often inept and corrupt. They pilfered funds meant to feed and clothe the deportees, failed to secure safe resting spots along the route, and exposed the removal groups to deadly diseases and freezing winters. Thousands died during the forced march west; yet more would perish shortly after arrival. We commemorate the journey each year with walks and sombre gatherings.
Our forced dispossession was not a foregone conclusion. There was widespread opposition to ‘Indian Removal’, among ordinary people as well as politicians. Congress was divided on the issue and voted for it only by 102 to 97. Such policies can and should be opposed; our fates are not predetermined.
In the later 19th century, European powers drew on US policies to frame their colonial projects in Africa. During the Second World War, Nazi officials made explicit references to ‘Indian Removal’ when they justified German expansionism. Twenty-five years ago, Edward Said wrote that Palestinians had been ‘dispossessed by the very people who taught everyone the importance of not forgetting the past. Thus we are the victims of the victims, the refugees of the refugees.’
Perhaps most important, the experience of ‘Indian Removal’ demonstrates that you cannot extinguish a people through their dispossession. Native people survived and rebuilt their lives and nations in Indian Territory, in what eventually became the state of Oklahoma. Amir Karaja, a resident of central Gaza, recently said that he would ‘rather eat the rubble’ than be displaced from his land.