The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians - Assignment Example

The removal of Indians from their centuries old ancestral lands comprising among other places their thriving towns, villages and economically hubs, sacred temple grounds and cemeteries, is perhaps one blemish in his otherwise glorious historic legacy. He is solely responsible for initiating and perpetuating the horrors that are remembered in American history as the “Trail of Tears”: a tragic episode in the American history when thousands of Student 2 Indian women, children, and infirm old men lost their valuable lives and houses and other properties when the militia of the State of Georgia at gun-point forcibly trans-located (the word used in the historic context is removal) them to the present known state of Oklahoma, back then a swamp, waste land from their fertile agricultural lands with an abundant supply of wildlife.

Historically, speaking federal and state policies involving the Red or American Indians date back to approximately two hundred and fifty years from the earliest colonial era to what later became to be known as the United States. These policies have had their ups and downs; accommodation and dispossession on the one hand and assimilation and segregation on the other as these policies were primarily based on social, political and economic ideologies. The framers of these Indian centered or more appropriately Indian phobic policies were primarily concerned with initiating religious, economic, agricultural and education reforms among the Indian communities, in the words of Wallace forgetting that the nation they were bent to ‘civilize’ or rather mold into some sort of or an off-shoot of the white culture, were : …those (people)… (who) benefitted from the diffusion of agricultural practices before Colombus,… people who lived east of Mississippi River valley.

The vast land of temperate climate, extensive forests, and fertile meadows and prairies were inhabited by well over a million Native Americans…divided into a dozens of tribes, each with its own unique language…: a subsistence economy based on growing corn and other vegetables in carefully tended gardens, supplemented by hunting…particularly Student 3 the Cherokees had large …urbanized populations, with…elaborate ceremonies and…impressive architecture… (16). So it is a blatant mistake if the historians, at least, some among them painted the picture of the native Indians as uncivilized barbarians.

Further Wallace cites that the Indians were adept at: …irrigation, agriculture, metallurgy, system of writing and numerical calculation, centralized political power, elaborate religious beliefs and ceremonies….long before the arrival of Columbus. (15-16). The real spirit of these Indian centric policies and the chief aim of the founding fathers was social, economic, political and cultural advancement of the Natives, forgetting or rather criminally over-looking that the Native Indians had a highly developed culture and civilization though not on the fashion of what we refer to as or take as granted as civilization, which is anyway a relative and ambiguous term.

The practice of the Europeans of treaty making with the Indian chieftains with each state having its own distinct policy in order to address this problem which in a way validated the issue of