This powerful collection of documents illumines the experiences of the original people of the United States during American Indian removal, offering readers a unique standpoint from which to understand American identity and the historical processes that have shaped it. The Indian Removal Act transformed the Native North American continent and precipitated the development of a national identity based on a narrative of vanishing American Indians. This volume is a probing look into a chapter in American history that, while difficult, cannot be ignored. Sweeping in its coverage of history, it includes deeply personal accounts of American Indian removal from which readers may discern the degree to which the new national identity of the United States was influenced by bigotry and dependence on the corporate economy. The book is organized into six sections that collectively provide the full scope of American Indian removal policies that began with the founding of the United States. The sections trace the evolution of federal government policies; the rhetoric of Indian removal in public debates; removal experiences; ethnic cleansing through overtly racist laws; responses to removals; and the question that reigned in the aftermath: Who owned the land? The chronological organization allows readers both to approach Indian removal through the framework of ongoing injustice in the colonial system that existed for the first 150 years of the United States, from the 1770s through the 1920s, and to draw connections from this legacy to the seizures of Indian lands and resources that continue today.

This work is a comprehensive encyclopedia of Indian removal that accurately presents the removal process as a political, economic, and tribally complicit affair. In 1830, Andrew Jackson became the first U.S. president to implement removal of Native Americans with the passage of the Indian Removal Act. Less than a decade later, tens of thousands of Native Americans—Cherokee, Chickasaw, Muscogee-Creek, Seminole, and others—were forcibly moved from their tribal lands to enable settlement by Caucasians of European origin. Encyclopedia of American Indian Removal presents a realistic depiction of removal as a complicated process that was deeply affected by political, economic, and tribal factors, rather than the popular romanticized concept of American Indians being herded west by military troops through a trackless wilderness. This work is presented in two volumes. Volume One contains essays on subjects and people that are general in scope and arranged alphabetically by subject; Volume Two is dedicated to primary documents regarding Indian removal and examines specific information about political debates, Indian responses to removal policy, and removals of individual tribes.

Winner of the 2021 Bancroft Prize and the 2021 Ridenhour Book Prize Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction Named a Top Ten Best Book of 2020 by the Washington Post and Publishers Weekly and a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2020 A masterful and unsettling history of “Indian Removal,” the forced migration of Native Americans across the Mississippi River in the 1830s and the state-sponsored theft of their lands. In May 1830, the United States launched an unprecedented campaign to expel 80,000 Native Americans from their eastern homelands to territories west of the Mississippi River. In a firestorm of fraud and violence, thousands of Native Americans lost their lives, and thousands more lost their farms and possessions. The operation soon devolved into an unofficial policy of extermination, enabled by US officials, southern planters, and northern speculators. Hailed for its searing insight, Unworthy Republic transforms our understanding of this pivotal period in American history.

Combining documents that share viewpoints of the Cherokee and white citizens with those pertaining to government policy, Cherokee Removal present a multifaceted account of this complicated moment in American history.

Provides a detailed account of American Indian Removal policy and its culmination at the massacre at Wounded Knee, including its social and political legacy in modern America. Includes a narrative overview, biographies, primary source documents, and other helpful features.