And the kid they said that the Trail of Tears Association Annual Maine, you know of course that five tribes were removed from the southeast in the period between 1830 and 1840: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole nations. What you may not know is that these were not the only removals during the period. And you also may not know that the efforts to rid the south of Indians, to get all these Indians out of the region, in fact, lasted much longer. It was not simply an event of 1832-1842 but extended over a century. Today, in our consideration of the Trail of Tears, first, we’re going to include native peoples other than the five tribes, and secondly, to examine removal over a longer span of time. Such a consideration has important implications for our understanding of the past and of the dangers that continue to threaten American Indian nations.

I’ll begin with a very brief overview of the remnants of removed tribes that remained in the South. Although they remained at the end of the Trail of Tears, they remained under considerable pressure. Tribes and secure federal recognition charities in North Carolina who had received private reservations under a 1819 treaty and subsequently lived outside the Cherokee nation formed the nucleus of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians recognized by Congress in 1868.

There are the other three tribes that had women’s remaining in the south, federal recognition—that is, a government-to-government relationship—came much later. Thousands of Choctaws who unsuccessfully sought reservations under their removal treaty remained in Mississippi, landless and impoverished, until the United States stepped in after World War I, and in 1942-45, after World War II, accepted the private constitution that formally established them as the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.

In southern Florida, Indians who averted capture in the Seminole War struggled to survive in the swamps and marshes. In 1957 and 1961, they constituted the Seminole and Miccosukee tribes under the Indian Reorganization Act. A private reservation granted under an 1814 treaty that ended the Creek War provided a land base in Alabama on which a community coalesced, one that the United States recognized in 1984 as the Poarch Band of Creeks.

Our organizations indicate that in the aftermath of removal, the United States did not even officially acknowledge any of these remnants as tribes, and before, too, only the charities had a government-to-government relationship with Washington. The absence of formal governments and federal relations made these remnants vulnerable to exploitation by whites. For example, Jim Moyer, Creek headman, returned to Alabama in 1848, a decade after creeks had been remitted to rescue creeks left behind in his tribe’s chaotic removal and enslaved by white planters. He saved 65 of his countrymen but failed to secure the freedom of at least 100 others.

They simply remained concisely, with little tolerance for racial anomalies. Planters had converted previously free Indians into slaves and had driven home the message that the South aspired to be a region of free whites and enslaved people of color, regardless of whether their ancestry was Indian or African. The wholesale enslavement of Indians remaining in the south did not happen, but the federal government acted in concert with the states to turn the south into a vibrational region by continuing to try to expel the remnants of removed tribes in the 1840s.

The federal government attempted to entice Choctaws deprived of private reservations promised them in Mississippi to leave the state by issuing script redeemable for public land, half of which was available only upon their arrival in Indian Territory. Many desperate Choctaws took the offer, but about 1,500 still remained in Mississippi at the end of the decade.

In the same year, the United States made an effort to convince the Cherokees in North Carolina to move west, but the only people who demonstrated much interest were white men with Cherokee families or highly acculturated Cherokees who had tired of trying to assimilate into white society. In 1848, Congress passed an act granting over fifty-three dollars to any North Carolina Cherokee who emigrated—an inducement to some, perhaps, but a reminder to most that the threat of removal persisted.

In the 1850s, the United States renewed efforts to rid the Seminoles militarily and prevailed in the Third Seminole War. The capture and deportation of Billy Bowlegs’ band in 1858, just right on the eve of the Civil War, ended hostilities but not the determination of remaining Seminoles to resist removal.

In short, efforts to remove all former members of the five tribes in the southeast did not end once the nations had reestablished themselves in Indian Territory. The same factors that gave rise to the pre-Civil War expulsion of the five tribes—greed, racism, and political posturing—led to the dispossession