Thursday, November 12, 2009

What reasons did Andrew Jackson give for supporting Indian removal?

This question is from Blankets of the Dead

What reasons did Andrew Jackson give for supporting Indian removal?
The reason at the forefront of Indian removal was desire for more land. This was backed up by Indian hating sentiments and feelings of entitlement of the land. The desire was for Native people to become more "civilized" and this desire did continue but one way of solving the "indian problem" was to relocate Native people to the West ensuring the land of the East to settlers. This is a very intricate issue with a lot of complexities and had DEVASTATING affects for Native people.
Reply:AJ had the same reason for the "original peoples" removal as the other whites, more land and conquest. He also used the removal and the killing of my people (the Creeks --Muskogee) for political reasons. His platform when he ran for President was the fact that he was the great Indian killer.





The removal actually started with the Creeks, Choctaw, and Chickasaw in 1832 when my great, great-grandmother was 2 years old . The Cherokees were the last to be removed in the winter of 1838-39. The whites called the removal the "The Trail of Tears" the Original people called this "The Time When They Cried" Why? because this was the time when our people carried their dead along the path toward Oklahoma.





Of course many of the original people both Creek and Cherokee refuse to be moved. The Northeastern Cherokees hide out in the woods of North Carolina hence their name the "Northern Cherokees" and the Creeks hide out in the in the woods in south western Alabama (The Red Band Creeks) and some escaped to Florida and hid in the Everglades and mixed with escaped slaves and native Indians forming the Seminole Nation.





To this day, all across America, The American Indian War is still being fought in the court rooms.





To the Native Americans America is known as "The Land of Broken Treaties"





What did you get me started for!
Reply:I bet that he basically said they don't belong here and said this is our land now, etc. And he may have used more coarse language, because America wasn't so PC, not even 100 years, so back in the 1800's it would've been okay to show your prejudice. It was expected really, back then the prejudiced/racist people were the majority and if you were open minded about other cultures, you were a weirdo. So racism was out in the open back then in America.
Reply:Actually, I don't think he gave a reasonable one, but he absolutely hated them, and I guess he thought that was reason enough.
Reply:I have no idea what his reason was but here is something interesting. BEnjamin Franklin was actually one of the first to advocate pushing Indians away from the European settlers. His reason was simple. In the earliest days as many as 50% of the immigrants to Philadelphia eventually abandoned the city and went to live with the Indians. The settlers saw that the Indians had a better, slower, more peaceful life and simply left the colony to go live with them. Franklin was worried that the colonies would never grow to a self-sustaining size unless this "temptation" was removed.


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