[38] A number of non-Indians who lived with the nations, including over 4,000 slaves and others of African descent such as spouses or Freedmen,[39] also accompanied the Indians on the trek westward.

Scholar and author Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz shows that: Cooper has the last of the 'noble' and 'pure' Natives die off as nature would have it, with the 'last Mohican' handing the continent over to Hawkeye, the nativized settler, his adopted son ... Cooper had much to do with creating the US origin myth to which generations of historians have dedicated themselves, fortifying what historian Francis Jennings has described as "exclusion from the process of formation of American society and culture".

During his presidency, "the United States made eighty-six treaties with twenty-six American Indian nations between New York and the Mississippi, all of them forcing land cessions, including removals".

[45][page needed] Throughout his military career, according to historian Amy H. Sturgis, "Jackson earned and emphasized his reputation as an 'Indian fighter', a man who believed creating fear in the native population was more desirable than cultivating friendship".

The Court ruled in Worcester's favor, declaring that the Cherokee Nation was subject only to federal law and that the Supremacy Clause barred legislative interference by the state of Georgia.

Chief Justice Marshall argued, "The Cherokee nation, then, is a distinct community occupying its own territory in which the laws of Georgia can have no force.

[68] Author and political activist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an account of Cherokee assimilation into the American culture, declaring his support of the Worcester decision.

But having determined to emigrate west of the Mississippi river this fall, I have thought proper in bidding you farewell to make a few remarks expressive of my views, and the feelings that actuate me on the subject of our removal... We as Choctaws rather chose to suffer and be free, than live under the degrading influence of laws, which our voice could not be heard in their formation.United States Secretary of War Lewis Cass appointed George Gaines to manage the removals.

[citation needed] Alexis de Tocqueville, the French philosopher, witnessed the Choctaw removals while in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1831: In the whole scene there was an air of ruin and destruction, something which betrayed a final and irrevocable adieu; one couldn't watch without feeling one's heart wrung.

The Choctaws "have had our habitations torn down and burned, our fences destroyed, cattle turned into our fields and we ourselves have been scourged, manacled, fettered and otherwise personally abused, until by such treatment some of our best men have died".

[83] Friendly Creek leaders, like Shelocta and Big Warrior, addressed Sharp Knife (the Indian nickname for Andrew Jackson) and reminded him that they keep the peace.

He demanded the equivalent of all expenses incurred by the United States in prosecuting the war, which by his calculation came to 23,000,000 acres (93,000 km2) of land.Eventually, the Creek Confederacy enacted a law that made further land cessions a capital offense.

[citation needed] The Creek National Council, led by Opothle Yohola, protested to the United States that the Treaty of Indian Springs was fraudulent.

Opothle Yohola appealed to the administration of President Andrew Jackson for protection from Alabama; when none was forthcoming, the Treaty of Cusseta was signed on March 24, 1832, which divided up Creek lands into individual allotments.

Further, as recently detailed by historian Billy Winn in his thorough chronicle of the events leading to removal, a variety of fraudulent schemes designed to cheat the Creeks out of their allotments, many of them organized by speculators operating out of Columbus, Georgia and Montgomery, Alabama, were perpetrated after the signing of the Treaty of Cusseta.

[88][page needed] A portion of the beleaguered Creeks, many desperately poor and feeling abused and oppressed by their American neighbors, struck back by carrying out occasional raids on area farms and committing other isolated acts of violence.

Escalating tensions erupted into open war with the United States after the destruction of the village of Roanoke, Georgia, located along the Chattahoochee River on the boundary between Creek and American territory, in May 1836.

Forcible removals began in May 1838 when General Winfield Scott received a final order from President Martin Van Buren to relocate the remaining Cherokees.

25, in the text he stated " Every possible kindness, compatible with the necessity of removal, must, therefore, be shown by the troops, and, if, in the ranks, a despicable individual should be found, capable of inflicting a wanton injury or insult on any Cherokee man, woman or child, it is hereby made the special duty of the nearest good officer or man, instantly to interpose, and to seize and consign the guilty wretch to the severest penalty of the laws.

[94] However, during the 1820s and 1830s, "Cherokees [began adopting] the Anglo-American concept of power—a political system dominated by wealthy, highly acculturated men and supported by an ideology that made women … subordinate".

[98] The sparsely inhabited Cherokee lands were highly attractive to Georgian farmers experiencing population pressure, and illegal settlements resulted.

However a few years before forced removal, some Cherokee who opted to leave their homes voluntarily chose a water-based route through the Tennessee, Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

"[106] Dina Gilio-Whitaker draws on research by Choctaw and Chippewa historian Clara Sue Kidwell to show the relationship between the Trail of Tears and a negative impact on the environment.

In tracking the environmental changes of the southeastern tribes who relocated to new lands across the Trail of Tears, Kidwell finds that "prior to removal the tribes had already begun adapting to a cash-based, private property economic system with their adoption of many European customs (including the practice of slave owning), after their move west they had become more deeply entrenched into the American economic system with the discovery of coal deposits and the western expansion of the railroads on and through their lands.

[106] Cherokee ethnobotanist Clint Carroll illustrates how this imposed capitalist system altered Cherokee efforts to protect traditional medicinal plants during relocation, saying that "these changes have resulted in contrasting land management paradigms, rooted in the language of 'resource-based' versus 'relationship-based' approaches, a binary imposed on tribal governments by the Bureau of Indian Affairs through their historically paternalistic relationship".

[106] The separation of American Indian people from their land lead to the loss of cultural knowledge and practices, as described by scholar Rachel Robison-Greene, who finds the "legacy of fifteenth-century European colonial domination" led to "Indigenous knowledge and perspectives" being "ignored and denigrated by the vast majority of social, physical, biological and agricultural scientists, and governments using colonial powers to exploit Indigenous resources".

Elias Budinot, Major Ridge, Speckled Snake, John Ross, and Richard Taylor were all notable Cherokee orators during the 19th century who used the speech as a form of resistance against the U.S. government.

Exposure to the elements, disease, starvation, harassment by local frontiersmen, and insufficient rations similarly killed up to one-third of the Choctaw and other nations on the march.

He writes: "Jackson fully expected the Indians to thrive in their new surroundings, educate their children, acquire the skills of white civilization so as to improve their living conditions, and become citizens of the United States.

[139] Colonial historian Daniel Blake Smith disagrees with the usage of the term genocide, adding that "no one wanted, let alone planned for, Cherokees to die in the forced removal out West".