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Many Removals: Re-evaluating the Arc of Indigenous Dispossession
- Journal of the Early Republic
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Volume 41, Number 4, Winter 2021
- pp. 623-650
- 10.1353/jer.2021.0078
- Article
- Additional Information
Abstract:
This historiographical essay examines scholarship on Indian Removal, the U.S. Indian policy that sought to dispossess and forcibly relocate Indigenous peoples of eastern North America to lands west of the Mississippi River. Because of the Cherokee Nation’s public relations campaign and their success in Worcester v. Georgia (1832), much scholarship has focused on political relations among the Cherokee Nation, Georgia, and the federal government. Increasingly, however, scholars are encouraging us to expand our understanding of Removal temporally and geographically. Using neglected sources and new concepts, recent scholarship presents a wider range of perspectives and experiences including those of non-elite Native people and tribal nations usually left out of the story. Removal, as these works demonstrate, was both more widespread and varied than previous histories have acknowledged.