DR__Trail Of Tears Death March 1838 Flashcards
Ref: Trail of Tears Amazon Prime 5 Episodes.
With all of the thousands and thousands of immigrants coming to America they had to make room by removing the Indian tribes East of the Mississippi to west of the Mississippi in Oklahoma.
These people were forced to march through the fall and early winter on foot in Moccasins. Snow and ice, mud, rotten food to eat. 4000 People died when they arrived in Oklahoma very few elderly people were still alive and most of the children were dead.
All of their possessions were left behind they were not allowed to take anything with them. Their livestock there clothes, their houses their land everything was left behind for the white men to pillage and profit from.
President Andrew Jackson through the government hired overseers,conductors, and doctors to make provisions along the way of the trail of tears for the Indians to venture out west. However this became a corrupt practice as the suppliers sold off the goods instead of giving it to the Indians and gave the Indians rotten worm infested meat and as a result most Indians got sick, most elders died and most children died as well.
One of the original plans was to transport the Indians west of the Mississippi by boat. But because there was such a bad drought the water levels were too low and many people got stranded and got diseases on the boats.
The rest of all the tribes and nations had to march mostly on foot with only a blanket and Moccasins for protection against the elements.
Some of these tribes were civilized with farms nice housing and even government representation. They took the case to the supreme court and the Supreme Court agreed that the Indians should be able to remain in their homeland. Yet some people in the US government’s higher power forced the march anyway and drove the Indians west of the Mississippi.
Some of the Indians were wealthy. They had plantations with cotton and slaves yet they had to desert all their possessions, giving it all up to the white men and March west of the Mississippi to the territory of Oklahoma.
All other possessions that was left behind was quickly plundered by the white man. The white man also took over their houses and their plantations for their own.
Many of the Indian slaves were captured and also had to march west on the trail of tears.
Indian boarding schools. Most Americans know nothing of the Indian boarding schools today.
The first 300 years of white men occupation, was aimed as making American Indians like themselves. In other words they wanted to educate them and turn them into Christians. There were missionaries everywhere, and all the Indians were forced to give up their past views and accept the new European Christian views of reality.
This first started when Columbus landed in Central America.
Indians by their very nature were taught by tribal elders with stories of the historic past. The white men in the Indian boarding schools stripped away that past and gave them a new past in a new future. The Indians that survived the boarding schools had no idea of their past and were force-fed their purpose in life for the future.
Their new life would consist of learning a new language learning how to be a Christian and learning the ways of the white man.
The Indians were totally isolated from all Indian adults and had to learn all these culture changes of the white man.
The Indians were not allowed to practice their native ways or ever speak in their native tongue anymore.
It was determined that the best way to educate the Indians and convert them all to Christianity was to force them to live in isolated reservations.
In these boarding schools the Indians were not taught to be doctors and lawyers but rather to be secondary Service people like cooks and to clean up horse stalls, and farming. More or less they were a second class citizen. The purpose was to destroy the Indian in them, but to save the man.
These boarding schools were set up like prisons. They had high fences, guard towers, and actual jails.
They all had their hair cut short. They were given uniforms and their old clothes were burned in front of them. They were given baths and baptized and then they were given new Christian names and forbidden to ever mention their old name or ever speak their old language ever again.
Indians that would slip up in school and speak their Indian name or an Indian word we’re forced to wear a dunce hat and have their mouth washed out with soap.
Other punishments for the recalcitrant Indians were being spanked with the cat of Ninetails and then stuffed in a dark closet for hours.
Another measure was to eat a chunk of soap to wash their mouth out from the Indian language.
They also had to run through what was called belt lines. This was a long double line where the child had to run through the beltline while all the other kids would hit the child as hard as they could with her belts to inflict much pain and sores.
Sexual molestation and abuse ran rapid. Where supervisors and matrons and other boys and girls would gang rape other students in all kinds of sexual manipulation.
It is estimated that in 1492 the area of the United States was populated by indigenous people in an amount of 15 million people. By the end of the 19th century that number was down to 1/4 of a million people.
For most of the boarding school Indians after 12 years or so were released back into their original Indian reservations were they did not fit in. They no longer understood the Indian language. All the skills that they were taught like bricklaying blacksmithing nursing cooking meals and everything, like taking care of sick people was not used back at Indian reservations. Their parents and grandparents were very disappointed in them because they did not know how to trap animals or to hunt game for food.
The hope of the boarding schools was that these people would join the white man’s culture and engage in doing menial work. But for the overwhelming majority it just left a lot of boarding school Indians with no place to fit in. A tragedy. A whole generation of boarding school Indians with no place to fit in.
After all is said and done, the boarding school was both a success and a failure. The success was that it helped a lot of Indians to be on equal footing with the white man. The failure is lots of Indians became drunks and misfits with no place to fit into either society.
