Talk:Indian Removal

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is part of WikiProject Indigenous peoples of North America, which collaborates on Native American, First Nations, and related subjects on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
??? This article has not yet been rated on the assessment scale.
Suggested article edit guidelines:

Please rate this article and leave comments here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.

This article is part of WikiProject Oklahoma, a WikiProject related to the U.S. state of Oklahoma.
??? This article has not yet received a rating on the assessment scale.


Page to do further research:

This page should be renamed, I think. "Indian Removal" is not a proper name. I'm not sure what the title of the article should be, though. --LMS

Hmmmm. The Removal is the term my Cherokee friends use of the general phenomenon, while their own experience is more specifically called The Trail of Tears. --MichaelTinkler

"Indian Removal" is what historians call the process of moving various tribes from areas which had been taken over either by force or treaty by the U. S. and placed in an area usually less populated by U. S. citizens. It was predominant during the 1800s up to about the 1880s. Examples are the Cherokee tribe being moved from the southern Appalacians of Georgia, Alabama and North Carolina to what is now northeastern Oklahoma, the Apache being moved from Arizona to Oklahoma and New Mexico and the Osage from Kansas to Oklahoma. There is a good older book by Grant Foreman called Indian Removal in which he talks about the various tribes and their removals to the west. Unlike the article implies, it was more than just the Five Civilized Tribes which were involved.

There was a federal Indian Removal Act of 1830 which called for the removal of all eastern Indians. This policy was carried out both in the south and the north. The events in the south attracted more attention. However after the tribes were moved west of the Mississippi, with some exceptions (such as the movement of tribes from Kansas to the Indian Territory it is a stretch to say Indian Removal was the policy as it changed to one of establishing reservations. So the topic name is viable but applies to a limited period. Probably we should have done a Native American history topic rather than the diffuse set of topics we have come up with. User:Fredbauder

"The horrible mistreatment of the indigenous population and the practice of slavery are considered two of the largest stains on the history of the United States. "

Considered by who ? There are many worse things they did, like in Hiroshima, Drezden and Vietnam. Taw 17:31 23 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Germans still speak German, Japanese still speak Japanese... I speak English. Yet, I am Ojibwe.

[edit] Removed "see also"

While reorganizing this article, I removed these "see also" links:

These have ambiguous or tenuous relationships to Indian Removal. Consider apartheid: most Native Americans are essentially pro-apartheid. That is, they prefer to keep a distinct identity and a separate living area where a different set of race-based laws apply. Is that what is meant by this "see also" link, which links to an article almost exclusively about South Africa? It's hard to say. Cultural imperialism seems to have even less connection, since removal is essentially an opposite phenomenon. Genocide is a serious word that gets thrown around rather too freely; its use here is more understandable than the other links, but is still problematic: removal and destruction are not synonymous. After the many deaths from disease on the "Trail of Tears," for example, Cherokee population steadily increased. (Today the population is at least 20 times the pre-removal population.) Andrew Jackson believed that removal saved the "Five Civilized Tribes" from extinction; historian Robert Remini thinks he was right. Some experts might have argued that Indian Removal was genocidal; if so, that should be cited in the article, rather than in an ambiguous link. --Kevin Myers 00:05, Dec 26, 2004 (UTC)

OK, I'll buy those, but I think it would be harder to argue against a parallel to Ethnic cleansing. -- Mwanner June 29, 2005 19:15 (UTC)

[edit] Table in progress

My crack research team is still working on this table. You can too. --Kevin Myers 05:31, August 3, 2005 (UTC)

Southern Removals

Nation Population east of the Mississippi before removal treaty Removal treaty
(year signed)		 Years of major emigration Total number emigrated or forcibly removed Number stayed in Southeast Deaths during removal Deaths from warfare
Choctaw 19,554 [1] Dancing Rabbit Creek (1830) 1831-1836 12,500 7,000 [2] 2,000-4,000+ (Cholera) n/a
Creek 22,700 + 900 black slaves [3] Cusseta (1832) 1834-1837 19,600 [4] ? 3,500 (disease after removal)[5] ? (Second Creek War)
Chickasaw 4,914 + 1,156 black slaves Pontotoc Creek (1832) 1837-1847 over 4,000 hundreds a few from disease n/a
Cherokee 21,500
+ 2,000 black slaves		 New Echota(1835) 1836-1838 20,000 + 2,000 slaves 1,000 2,000-8,000 n/a
Seminole 5,000 + fugitive slaves Payne's Landing (1832) 1832-1842 2,833 [6] 250-500 [7] 700 (Second Seminole War)

Many figures have been rounded.
↑  Foreman, p. 47 n.10 (1830 census).
↑  Several thousand more emigrated West from 1844-49; Foreman, pp. 103-4.
↑  Foreman, p. 111 (1832 census).
↑  Remini, p. 272.
↑  Russell Thornton, "Demography of the Trail of Tears", p.85.
↑  Prucha, p. 233.
↑  Low figure from Prucha, p. 233; high from Wallace, p. 101.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../i/n/d/Talk%7EIndian_Removal_8d1f.html"