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Cherokees On The Trail Of Tears

Cherokees on "The Trail Where They Cried"

Until 1828, Cherokee Indians called Georgia and several other southeastern states, home. After the first "non-Indians" arrived, Cherokees, along with other Indian cultures experienced the worst over the next 300 years. They would be exposed to disease, famine, warfare, and over 90% of the Indian population would be wiped out.(1) All of the Indian population would be forced to leave their way of like behind and take on the white culture. An example of how poorly the Indians were treated would be the Trail of Tears.
In 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act and Jackson immediately signed it. This disastrous Act was a federal permission slip for states to coerce various tribal communities of the north and eastern areas to extract themselves from their own properties, some of which had been in their families for thousands of years and included sacred spiritual and burial sites, and move out west to land that the white people admittedly did not want to occupy, Western land that was already inhabited by other Indians tribes and could prove to be hostile to the newcomers.
Those who voluntarily relinquished their grounds were promised a monetary sum; those who remained and protested the move often received harsh treatment. First the Georgia Legislature passed laws allowing the states to police the Cherokees and policies were ratified that forbid the Cherokees to mine for gold, purchase alcohol, to conduct tribal business or to testify against a white man. There were lotteries held to give away land and gold rights to "non-Indians." Cherokees were limited to their rights. (2)
The Cherokee's resisted the Removal Act and appealed to Washington for help, only to be turned away. Then that the Indians challenged the Removal policy in the Supreme Court. At first the Court refused to hear their case because they were not a sovereign nation -ruling that: "Their (the Cherokee's) relation to the United States resembles...