Trail of Tears…before and after
Back near my home town in northeast Kansas, there are some Indian reservations, most of which are Kickapoo I believe. Whenever I drive by the area, I wonder where those groups are originally from; after all, I have learned a lot about the Indian Removal processes from centuries ago and there are probably not many groups still living in places they originally called home. Were they forced there through the Trail of Tears like so many other groups were during the time? Maybe this is something I should further educated myself on, but after this week the before and after pictures of the Trail of Tears are even more devastating in my mind.
In another class I am taking, we learned of a specific group and how they were forced to part with their beloved homelands in the southeast. The Choctaw were one of many groups who endured the Trail of Tears that relocated them to strange lands. I know about the Trails of Tears and generally what happened, but this particular lesson brought to light a more tragic scene. The Choctaw were a group that believed that they belonged, spiritually, the land they lived on; they were born from it and thrived on it. So naturally they did not understand why they should leave something they belonged so closely to. They had built mounds in which they buried their dead in. The spirits of their ancestors lived there, so that is where they felt they must remain. They believed that if they left their ancestors, something terrible would happen. Worse yet, the west to them was seen as what the white man would call “hell.” It was filled with evil spirits and other horrible things; and this is where the U.S. government wanted them to go.
The Choctaw were given no choice but to locate to those foreign, awful west lands. Suicide sadly became a common practice. Those who lived to the end of the Trail of Tears encountered a couple horrible disasters, including a great flood and a spread of whooping cough, which killed a giant portion of the people. This happened, the Choctaw believed, because they left their ancestors behind in their original homelands.
So, not only were Indian groups dying during the hard duration of the Trail of Tears, but the before and after effects were just as grave. How could one ever come to terms with leaving a land so connected to them, that they felt they would literally die if forced to leave it?
