The geographical region disputed in the authors’ text, includes North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama. This land was home to Native Americans hundreds and thousands of years before the Europeans arrived. Cherokee …show more content…
“Congress’s approach to the problem rested on the same theories that had governed the diplomats in Paris. According to the international law, England had owned the American colonies by right of discovery, a concept that gave Christian European governments the right to claim and occupy the lands of non-Christian and ‘uncivilized’ peoples, and by right of conquest, by which England had acquired France’s right of discovery claims at the conclusion of the French and Indian War.”1 This creates the complexity of land ownership in the United …show more content…
Monetary awards were given to guides and supporters of the removal plan. Indians who resisted migration west were put into stockades for long periods of time, until the arrangement for removal began. “They are prisoners, without a crime to justify the fact”.5 Voices of Andrew Jackson, John Ridge, Lewis Cass, the Cherokee women, Evan Jones, Elias Boudinot and many more could not change the course of events happening to the Cherokee nation.
The complexity of this time in history raises many concerns for the survival of the Native Americans. The authors posed many questions as to the actions and decisions of the Cherokees. “For us today, Indian removal may well retain its moral simplicity, but the issue as it unfolded was exceedingly complex. Not all white Americans supported Cherokee removal; not all Cherokees opposed it; and the drama itself took place against a complicated backdrop of ideology, self-interest, party politics, altruism, and