The Trail Of Tears Summary
“Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race…From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population.”-Martin Luther King Jr. In this quote, King is referring to the policy that the United States encompassed to take hold of the land pertaining to the Native Americans, The Indian Removal Act. But even before “The trail of tears” occurred the Indians suffered at the hands of the early European discoverers. It was in the year 1492 that the newly kings of a centralized Spain sent forth an expedition that would result in the European
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The first assumptions made regarding their nationality by the French, the Spanish and the English sought to relate the Natives with the Chinese, ideal that was soon abandoned. Today, according to years of study, anthropologists and historians assure that the Indian societies were created by “thousands of years of migration, splitting apart, rejoining, exchanging mates, settling and adapting-essentially the same process that shaped European lives and culture.” (The Birth of America 3) Just like European history is based on migration, so the American history begins with the migration from eastern Asia of the descendants of the Native Americans, a fact proven by linguistics and genetic studies. “Together they suggest that ancestors of the American Indians probably began crossing to North America roughly 30.000 years ago, Asia and North America were joined at what is now the Bering Strait and archeologists have found evidence of human settlement in northeast Siberia from about 40.000 years ago.”(The Birth of America 4) Before what geologists term Holocene occurred, about 10.000 years ago, some Natives had already crossed from Asia. What occurred was that much of the ice covering North America melted and the sea levels rose as much as 120 meters, resulting in the submersion of the bridge that had allowed them to
The first assumptions made regarding their nationality by the French, the Spanish and the English sought to relate the Natives with the Chinese, ideal that was soon abandoned. Today, according to years of study, anthropologists and historians assure that the Indian societies were created by “thousands of years of migration, splitting apart, rejoining, exchanging mates, settling and adapting-essentially the same process that shaped European lives and culture.” (The Birth of America 3) Just like European history is based on migration, so the American history begins with the migration from eastern Asia of the descendants of the Native Americans, a fact proven by linguistics and genetic studies. “Together they suggest that ancestors of the American Indians probably began crossing to North America roughly 30.000 years ago, Asia and North America were joined at what is now the Bering Strait and archeologists have found evidence of human settlement in northeast Siberia from about 40.000 years ago.”(The Birth of America 4) Before what geologists term Holocene occurred, about 10.000 years ago, some Natives had already crossed from Asia. What occurred was that much of the ice covering North America melted and the sea levels rose as much as 120 meters, resulting in the submersion of the bridge that had allowed them to