Trail of Tears Review Theda

Trail of Tears Review

Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green's new history of the Cherokee people, the Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears, was a very interesting read. As a direct descendant of a member of the Cherokee nation who marched along the so-called "Trail of Tears," I found this book to be much more than just a history text. The story that the authors tell of the Cherokee people and the way they were treated by the European colonizers who make up the bulk of my ancestors, as well as being the founding fathers of this whole nation, is very personal. Strangely, at the same time the history seems somewhat removed; it is almost impossible to imagine being forced to leave my home and walk hundreds of miles just because someone else wanted to live there. It is equally difficult -- perhaps even more difficult -- to imagine being on the other side of things and forcing someone else to leave their home just because I wanted the land they were on. This is basically what happened to the Cherokee people, and the unfairness of it makes me feel sad and frustrated for the Cherokee, and angry and hugely embarrassed for the "white man" that forced all of this to happen. The book, though, does not focus solely on the Trail of Tears and the basic destruction of the Cherokee lands and way of life. Instead, it focuses on the people and the struggle that led up to the Trail of Tears. The thesis of the book, though the authors never really come out and say it, is that the governments of the Unites States and Georgia were going to take the Cherokee land no matter what. Each chapter of the book deals with this issue and goes a long way in effectively proving it. Even the first chapter, which describes the Cherokee people, shows the changes the white man forced on the Cherokee, both knowingly and unknowingly. Everything that occurred since their arrival was at the loss of the Cherokee people.

Even when the Cherokee Nation used the court system of the invading white man to keep their land, they were denied. I found these parts of the book especially interesting. Though they are a little more dense than some of the other sections, such as at the beginning of the book when the authors describe the basic way of life for the Cherokee people and how it began to change when the European settlers arrived, they are also the part of the history that I really knew nothing about before reading this book. The authors use the various court actions that he Cherokee became engaged in to show that the new Americans -- that is to say, the white people on the continent -- were completely unbending in their determination to take over the land. Even when the Cherokee won a ruling by the Supreme Court, then-President Andrew Jackson refused to listen to the judicial body and went ahead with his plan to forcibly remove many Native Americans from their land. This shows the lack of respect that the white Americans had for their own law when confronted with something they wanted, and this greed did not have good results for any Native American tribe.

I was surprised to learn that the Cherokee had their own written language and their own codified system of law. This must have made the sting of their losses in court -- and their losses despite winning in court -- even more bitter. They had learned and played by the new rules even though that system was unfair to begin with (in all fairness, the Americans should have used the Cherokee legal system to try and get what they wanted), but the system refused to give them fair access. This is more evidence that the American and Georgian governments really did not want to see the Cherokee as equal or deserving the same protections and rights under their own laws as they themselves were, and that they were willing to do whatever it took to get the land that the Cherokees had lived on for generations. The advancement of Cherokee language and culture would have been an indicator to any eye, even a heavily racist and otherwise biased one, that these people were not mere "savages" but had a way of life similar in complexity to that of European man. In fact, by our modern standards, they were actually far more advanced in some ways. Their efforts at conservation were very sophisticated; the authors describe how they would pass three ginseng plants when herb collecting before picking the fourth, this ensuring that there were always more plants to be found. They lived with nature rather than seeing themselves as needing to control it and be protected from it, as the white man did. But just because they lived with nature doesn't mean there weren;t the signs of civilization that Western eyes would have looked for. As the authors say, "Awareness and conservation...do not mean that Cherokees did not alter their environment...they built villages on sites that they had cleared from the forest" (Perdue, Green, 8). This is just the kind of thing that the European settlers were doing, or trying to do, when they first arrived. Therefore there is no justification, not even the often used and morally repugnant excuse that the Native Americans were an inferior race or civilization, for taking their land and forcing them out of their way of life. Yet this is exactly what the Americans did, to the Cherokee and to many others, proving the author's point that this was all about greed, and nothing else.