Eviction

This week marks the anniversary of the first involuntary departures of Cherokees from Ross's Landing. On June 6, 1838 an estimated 800 people were forced onto 6 flatboats lashed to a steamboat. According to witnesses, the boats creaked and beams cracked under the load. Many feared the make-shift vessel would sink before it cast off. On June 12 or 15th another 876 people were forced onto a cobbled together boat and driven west. Finally on June 17 nearly 1,100 people were forced from their homeland on foot. This last group crossed the river on the ferry at Ross's Landing, camped on the low ground now occupied by Renaissance Park and then were forced to westward.

The events that unfolded here in 1838 are hard to think about. How could a country founded on the idea that all men are created equal so brutally treat others? How could a nation dedicated to the rule of law justly enforced ignore the findings of its own highest court? How could Americans seeking a new home be blind to the fact that their own independence on the land came at such a high cost for others? How could a nation that valorized the home and women act with such arbitrary cruelty to people abiding in their homes and taking on the values of American domestic life?

To ask these questions is not an act of historical revisionism -- it is not asking questions of the past unknown to the past (or as some would put it being "presentist"). Indeed these questions were hotly debated at the time. Among European descended Americans, ministers and humanitarians decried the eviction. Mass meetings denouncing the Indian Removal Act of 1830 (the national legislation that ratified the eviction of the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Cherokee people from their homeslands) were held in towns across New England and the northeastern states. Essayists attacked the high-handedness of the Jackson administration in the wake of Worcester v. Georgia case. Some Anglo-Americans agonized over the decision to make claims on Cheorkee lands.

The Cherokee people themselves also engaged the constest for their future. They penned petitions and memorials stating their desire to stay on the lands of their ancestors. Representatives of the Cherokee Nation toured the northeast working to gather support to defend their national soverignty (recognized by the U. S. Supreme Court). Groups worked to resist the squatters who flooded into the Cherokee lands after 1830. Children at the Brainerd Mission asked their teachers why the Americans were so insistent on gaining possession of their homeland. Most Cherokee, in fact the vast majority of Cherokee, made it clear they wanted to stay in the mountains and valleys in which they had been born. And they resisted until the United States Army invaded their homes and fields.

We know how the story played out -- how the army drove men, women and children to concentration camps scattered across what is now western North Carolina, north Georgia, southeast Tennessee, and northeast Alabama. How the army camps at Ross's Landing were ill-prepared for the thousands of Cherokee who were driven there in late May and early June 1838. How families worked to re-unite after the disruptions of the initial round-ups. How sickness swept the camps around Ross's Landing and how dozens of Cherokee died before the long-marches began. We also know that scores of Cherokee resisted to the end by stealing away into the woods and mountains. We also know that some of the soldiers and militia-men who enforced the eviction order winced at what they saw -- that they believed what they were doing was wrong. We also know that many of the soldiers and militia-men behaved arrogantly and cruely.

It is easy to assign blame and attach guilt 171 years later. But assigning guilt and identifying the wrong doings of those who occupied the past achieves little of real value. Rather, the value of thinking about the events of June 1838 is that it requires us all to think hard about the meaning of citizenship. How do various interests and desires intersect with those of others? How can we reconcile conflict? How do we define justice and act justly? How do we engage in a civil discourse about what the future should look like? How do institutions continue to fail to provide a structure for achieving the idealistic goals that in many ways define the United States?

It is not enough to say that we should learn from the past so we are not doomed to repeat the past. To me that is far too deterministic view that suggests that the past and future play out in some cyclical and predictable way. I prefer to think about the past's lessons as being lessons in contingency. I want to think about how the structures of living and the decisions made by people living within those structures shaped the experiences of people in time. And from that learn how we can better understand the assumptions that structure our own lives and how we can better negotiate the present to create a more just future.