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Cherokee Removal Argumentative Essay

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During one of his powerful speeches, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said “Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race.” Scholars talk of what happened to the Indians as a great tragedy, but never anything further. We deny what happened to the Indians, particularly the Cherokees. During the 1830’s, the United States government set out to remove all Cherokee individuals from their homes and relocate them west. Relocation meant ending up on a land foreign to them, and presented with environmental conditions that posed difficulties for human living. This journey, known as the Trail of Tears, left countless of Indians physically and spiritually dead. The Cherokee did in fact suffer a genocide. With the help of a reputable source explaining the term genocide, along with the explanation of documents written during the time, people discover the undeniable truth that a genocide happened during the Cherokee Removal. To grasp how the events made the removal a genocide, the meaning of the term …show more content…

If scholars and historians fail to recognize the true devastation that the removal caused, they undermine the pain Indians endured. People like to think of the removal as a positive thing for Indians; the United States granted them an opportunity for a new life rid of the threats from Georgia. President Jackson himself, when talking about American citizens, remarked “How many thousands of our own people would gladly embrace the opportunity of removing to the West on such conditions!” People trusted what Jackson said because of his presidential position. However, people failed and still fail, to recognize that Jackson hoped not only a removal, but an act of genocide against the Cherokee. He and many other did not like them, and they intended to destroy the “wretched

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