Talk:Trail of Tears

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For those interested in this subject, several related articles need started:

  • Cherokee Phoenix/The Cherokee Phoenix -- the first American Indian newspaper
  • Samuel Worchester -- Missionary who helped start the newspaper, arrested by Georgia, case went to Supreme Court
  • Elizur Butler -- Doctor/missionary arrested by Georgia, went on the Trail and served in the camps as a doctor, provided the "4,000 deaths" estimates most often quoted.
  • Wilson Lumpkin -- Georgia politician, a driving force behind Cherokee removal [1]
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Contents

[edit] Image needed

This article would benefit from having the most famous image related to the "Trail of Tears", painted by Robert Lindneux in 1942 and found all over the Internet, such as: [2]. The artist died in 1970 ([3]); I don't know if we can use this image, but it would be nice.--Kevin Myers 04:28, Feb 16, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] "Death March"?

read the article, the people were forced to walk the entire length, many died along the way, death march seems rather appropriate, also considering that they were under military guard the entire time. " forced relocation" removes any reference to thier suffering, which is in itself a pov. Hence, Death March is appropriate. Gabrielsimon 02:14, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

You ask me to read the article. Not a problem, since I wrote most of the current version. BTW, your details are somewhat wrong: most of the emigrants were not under military guard, and many did not walk the entire way. The suffering was immense to be sure, though most deaths occurred from disease before the "march" itself. Just telling the story honestly is the proper way to demonstrate how awful and unjust it was. There's no need for loaded language and facile moral posturing when the facts speak for themselves. --Kevin Myers 02:22, July 29, 2005 (UTC)
Although deaths and suffering did occur, death march refers to the intentional infliction of death which, to my knowledge, was not the purpose. The purpose was to relocate them to the Indian territory. That's why I think forced removal is appropriate. Derktar 02:25, July 29, 2005 (UTC).
I think the purpose of most death marches is a mixture of removing people and of killing them (or at least don't care if they die). The goal for example of the Bataan Death March was not to kill prisoners, but to move them to a camp. A death march is more of a march where people get not enough water or food and people are shot if they get behind. The Baatan Death March suffered, according to the article, 14% casualties (from the article 10000 of 64000), which should be much higher if the purpose of the march was the death of the prisoners. The same goes for death marches at the end of WWII. They mostly had other camps for destinations, but people were denied food and water and where also shot if they got behind. This definiton is much easier to verify than things like purpose and missing destinations. - StephanSchmidt

As far as I can tell the problem with trying to understand the Cherokee's removal is that the whole thing was done half assed so there is not usual story for all of the Cherokees removals.

BTW you don't send people on a long trip with food that will go bad unless you want them to die. Someone(s) wanted the TOT to be a death march.

It went bad in restrospect but did they know it would? As stated before most of the deaths were caused by disease that was uncontrollable. In fact even with the Cherokee leading some of the trips, deaths still occured that were out of the hands of the U.S. gov't. Forced removal states only the fact that the Cherokee were forced to relocate and does not have an NPOV slant. Derktar 00:10, July 30, 2005 (UTC).


USA´s imperialism at the beginning. americans could have realocated themselves to the other indian territory instead of forcing the indians to do it. some gold nuggets arent worth a lot of lives i guess

[edit] Cherokee language, Unicode problems

I have removed the supposed Unicode version of the Cherokee language version of "Trail of Tears" in the opening paragraph. It looked like this:

{{Unicode|ᎨᏥᎧᎲᏓ ᎠᏁᎬᎢ}}

I tried to turn that text into actual entities in &#xXXXX; format, but as far as I can tell, it is corrupted and unusable. For example, that "Ž" turns into hex 17D, which is too large to fit into the lower two nibbles of the 2-byte Unicode representation. I'm not all that well versed in Unicode, though; maybe I'm just not understanding something.

I also removed "getsikahvda anegvi", which as far as I can tell has nothing to do with anything. :) If someone here knows otherwise, please let me know or correct the article; I am curious how that got in there! —HorsePunchKid→龜 00:15, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

By the way, if anyone is able to add the original Cherokee in whatever script it's actually supposed to be in, you can use this to convert it into HTML entities. That will avoid problems where the non-ASCII characters turn into garbage in some of the lamer browsers, as has clearly happend with this article. —HorsePunchKid→龜 00:18, 21 September 2005 (UTC)
That old converter I linked to is dead. Try this improved version. Also, if anyone is interested, you can view the Cherokee script, along with Unicode conversions, here. I would love to see the Cherokee back in the article, but I'm not going to be of much help with that aside from these encoding issues. —HorsePunchKid→龜 00:54, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Amazing Grace

User:Kevin Myers, not unreasonably, removed the following, requesting sources...

The Cherokee were not always able to give their dead a full burial. Instead, the singing of Amazing Grace had to replace any ceremony. Since then, Amazing Grace is often considered the Cherokee National Anthem.

I went looking, and found some online sources [4] [5] [6] [[7] [8] [9], though none validate the notion that it was used in lieu of a full burial ceremony. Since that claim is made both here and in the Cherokee article, it would seem worth getting it right. Anyone have a source? -- Mwanner | Talk 14:43, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

My father always tells that story, and I think its pretty interesting. The song is for sure a Cherokee anthem, and was definitely sung during the trail. The part about it being used instead of a full ceremony might be revisionism, I guess. I'll see if I can find anything.Smmurphy 15:16, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
This article [10] quotes another oral source with a different story about how it became an anthem. It may be that various people have various stories about how the song was used on the trail. I think that even if I find my father's source (if its not just a story he knows), it would be cast into doubt by other peoples stories, with no one story being diffinitive. Smmurphy 15:32, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
Definitely interesting. Since Christian missionaries led the fight among whites against Indian Removal, and many accompanied Cherokees during the journey, it certainly seems plausible that even those Cherokees who weren't Christians could have been familiar with the song at the time. However, none of the books listed in "references" of this article mentions "Amazing Grace" as far as I remember. Many web sites tend to freely mix myth, history, and urban legend, so hopefully someone can come up with a scholarly source which discusses the story. Of course, if it's a widely believed story but not historically verifiable, that's interesting as well, and we can still report it as such.
The following components of the story should be verified:
  1. The song was sung on the trail
  2. The song was sung in lieu of a burial ceremony
  3. The song is now a sort of Cherokee anthem
  4. The Trail of Tears had some role in making the song a Cherokee anthem
--Kevin Myers | (complaint dept.) 16:09, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
I talked to my father, and he does not have any sources (except oral, sorry) for the story that amazing grace was sung in lieu of a burial ceremony. However the websites Mwanner quotes, the article I quoted, as well as the books [11] and [12], found via google print, corroberate the connection between the song and the trail, and the song's status as an anthem. I will leave it up to someone else to decide if the material should go back in or if it isn't a major enough part of the story. Smmurphy 13:02, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
Good work. I had never heard of "Google Print" before -- that looks like it could be handy for working on Wikipedia. Thanks for that.
Notice that neither book you found goes so far as to claim that the story is "true": they both use qualifying phrases like "it is said" and "it is believed". That may mean that the story is based on folklore or oral tradition rather than traditionally verifiable history. Which is okay, we can and should include information about notable folklore in articles, we just need to make sure to let readers know when we do so. --Kevin Myers | (complaint dept.) 15:38, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Chuck Norris fact

The Trail of Tears is the subject of a Chuck Norris fact. The fact describes the Trail of Tears as anywhere that Chuck Norris has been. Should this be mentioned? Scott Gall 01:30, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Only when hell freezes over. :-) Kevin (complaints?) 15:47, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] concordance...

why is it that the article states that Nunna daul isunyi is the cherokee language term for the trail, while the cherokee language article is given an entirely different name?-Kızılderili 07:41, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

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