Data Scavenger Hunt

Find answers to the following questions using the visual above:

1. Identify the current U.S. states where Indian nations were forced from their land in the 1830s.

2. Identify the current U.S. states where Indian nations were forced onto reservations in the 1830s.

3. Identify the Indian nations who were removed from their homelands in the 1830s.

4. Which was the last Indian Tribe removed from their land in the 1830s?

5. Which of the Indian nations removed from their land in the 1830s lost the most land?

   Big Brain Questions

   Answer these questions by yourself using your brain and the links below:

6. At the beginning of the 1830s, nearly 125,000 Native Americans lived on millions of acres of land in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Florida–land their ancestors had occupied and cultivated for generations. But by the end of the decade, very few natives remained anywhere in the southeastern United States. Working on behalf of white settlers who wanted to grow cotton on the Indians’ land, the federal government forced them to leave their homelands and walk hundreds of miles to a specially designated “Indian Territory” across the Mississippi River. This difficult and oftentimes deadly journey known as the Trail of Tears was an ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of approximately 60,000 people of the "Five Civilized Tribes" between 1830 and 1850 by the United States government. Of the 17,000 Cherokees forced to march the 1200 miles of the Trail of Tears, American government archives estimate that approximately 4,000 died along the way. The Trail of Tears. Imagine you were writing a chapter of a history textbook and you rename this voyage to more accurately the Trail of Tears. What would you call it?

7. In his 1829 inaugural address, President Andrew Jackson set a policy to relocate eastern Indians. In 1830 it was endorsed, when Congress passed the Indian Removal Act to force those remaining to move west of the Mississippi. An estimated 3,500 Creeks died in Alabama and on their westward journey. Some were transported in chains. Andrew Jackson was the seventh President of the United States from 1829 to 1837. How does the removal of Indian nations impact your evaluation of the presidency of Andrew Jackson.

8. A study by Linford D. Fisher, associate professor of history at Brown University, finds that Native American slavery “is a piece of the history of slavery that has been glossed over,” Fisher said. “Between 1492 and 1880, between 2 and 5.5 million Native Americans were enslaved in the Americas in addition to 12.5 million African slaves.” How does this research alter your definition of American slavery.

9. Before the Trail of Tears, the Cherokee nation did everything they could to show the United States they could assimilate (integrate) into American culture and that the two nations could live together, side by side. In 1825, the Cherokee nation adopted a written alphabet of their language, which was created and taught widely within a generation. In 1827, they created a constitution based on the United States', which formed judicial, legislative and executive branches. Were the Cherokee able to convince the American government that as The American Declaration of independence declares, “All men are created equal”?

10. The term “genocide”, made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, nation or tribe) and the Latin caedere (“killing, annihilation”), was first coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish legal scholar, in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. It originally means “the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group”. In 1946, United Nations (UN) General Assembly affirmed genocide as a crime under international law in Resolution 96, which stated that “Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings; such denial of the right of existence shocks the conscience of mankind … and is contrary to moral law and the spirit and aims of the United Nations.” Genocide is also clearly defined in U.S. domestic law. The United States Code, in Section 1091 of Title 18, defines genocide as violent attackswith the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, a definition similar to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. According to historical records and media reports, since its founding, the United States has systematically deprived Indians of their rights to life and basic political, economic, and cultural rights through killings, displacements, and forced assimilation, in an attempt to physically and culturally eradicate this group. Even today, Indians still face a serious existential crisis. Explain whether the Trail of Tears, Indian removal, and overall American relations with Indian nations qualify as genocide.

Write and Discuss

Take ten minutes to write about the question at the top of the page and then discuss with your classmates.

Act on your Learning

Last Fall, the Cherokee Nation appointed a delegate to the U.S. Congress—a first for the Cherokee Nation or any tribal government in the United States. It was an appointment over 180 years in the making, legally drawn from the 1835 Treaty of New Echota. Follow Kim TeeHee @DelegateTeehee Delegate-Designee to U.S. House of Representatives for @CherokeeNation , the largest sovereign tribal nation in America.

Get Creative

Imagine you were designing a memorial the the Trail of Tears. Describe what that memorial would be like.

Learning Extension