Indian Removal Act Quotes

It may be underfunded and at times mismanaged, but the [Endangered Species] Act is an unprecedented attempt to delegate human-caused extinction to the chapters of history we would rather not revisit: the Slave Trade, the Indian Removal Policy, the subjection of women, child labor, segregation. The Endangered Species Act is a zero-tolerance law: no new extinctions. It keeps eyes on the ground with legal backing-the gun may be in the holster most of the time, but its available if necessary to keep species from disappearing. I discovered in my travels that a law protecting all animals and plants, all of nature, might be as revolutionary-and as American-as the Declaration of Independence.

Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct. But it is a powerful construct because it calls out to a deeply internalized sense of superiority and entitlement and the sense that any advancement for people of color is an encroachment on this entitlement.

On May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson unlawfully signed the Indian Removal Act to force move southeastern peoples from our homelands to the West. We were rounded up with what we could carry. We were forced to leave behind houses, printing presses, stores, cattle, schools, pianos, ceremonial grounds, tribal towns, churches. We witnessed immigrants walking into our homes with their guns, Bibles, household goods and families, taking what had been ours, as we were surrounded by soldiers and driven away like livestock at gunpoint. There were many trails of tears of tribal nations all over North America of indigenous peoples who were forcibly removed from their homelands by government forces. The indigenous peoples who are making their way up from the southern hemisphere are a continuation of the Trail of Tears. May we all find the way home.

States. It was not easy for Chinese to get into the country. In 1882 Congress had passed a law suspending the entry of Chinese laborers and “all persons of the Chinese race” except officials, teachers, students, tourists, and merchants, at the same time formally prohibiting the naturalization of Chinese. The 1882 Act was the culmination of decades of anti-Chinese propaganda and discrimination. In 1852 California Governor John Bigler described Chinese immigrants as “contract coolies, avaricious, ignorant of moral obligations, incapable of being assimilated and dangerous to the welfare of the state.” In 1854 the California Supreme Court reversed the conviction of a white man for killing a Chinese miner by invoking Section 14 of the California Criminal Act, which specified that “no Black or mulatto person, or Indian shall be allowed to give evidence in favor of, or against a white man.” In support of the decision Chief Justice Hugh Murray declared that “to let Chinese testify in a court of law would admit them to all the equal rights of citizenship. And then we might see them at the polls, in the jury box, upon the bench, and in our legislative halls.” In 1879 the California State constitution prohibited corporations and municipal works from hiring Chinese and authorized cities to remove Chinese from their boundaries.1 My father never told us how he got around the restrictions of the Exclusion Act, and we knew better than to probe because it was generally understood that the distinction between being here legally and illegally was a shadowy one.

Buddhist Psychology You can use enlightening Buddhist practices to transform your life. Unfortunately, many people do not know it, but the Buddhist Dharma, or teaching, is actually a scientific system of psychology, developed in India and further refined in Tibet. It is a psychology that works. I call it a „joyous science of the heart“ because it is based on the idea that while unenlightened life is full of suffering, you are completely capable of escaping from that suffering. You can get well. In fact, you already are well; you just need to awaken to that fact. And how do you do this? By analyzing your thought patterns. When you do, you realize that you are full of „misknowledge“ - misunderstandings of yourself and the world that lead to anger, discontent, and fear. The target of Buddhist practice and the constant theme of this book is the primal misconception that you are the center of the universe, that your „self“ is a fixed, constant, and bounded entity. When you meditate on enlightened insights into the true nature of reality and the boundlessness of the self, you develop new habits of thinking. You free yourself from the constraints of your habitual mind. In other words, you teach yourself to think differently. This in turn leads you to act differently. And voila! You are on the path to happiness, fulfillment, and even enlightenment. The battle for happiness is fought and won or lost primarily within the mind. The mind is the absolute key, both to enlightenment and to life. When your mind is peaceful, aware, and under your command, you will be securely happy. When your mind is unaware of its true nature, constantly in turmoil, and in command of you, you will suffer endlessly. This is the whole secret of the Dharma. If you recognize delusion, greed, anger, envy, and pride as the main enemies of your well-being and learn to focus your mind on overcomming them, you can install wisdom, generosity, tolerance, love, and altruism in their place. This is where enlightened psychology can be most useful. Psychology and philosophy are really one entity in Buddhism. They are called the inner science, the science of the human interior. In the flow of Indian history, it is fair to say that the Buddha was a great explorer of the human interior rather than some sort of religious prophet. He came into the world at a time when people were just beginning to experiment with self-exploration, but mostly in an escapist way, using their focus on the inner world to run away from the sufferings of life by entering a supposed realm of absolute quiet far removed from everday existence. The Buddha started out exploring that way too, but then realized the futility of escapism and discovered instead a way of being happier here and now. (pp. 32-33)

More than a third of all the men, women, and children on this march perished from cold, starvation, and disease. Thanks to President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, Cherokee land was left to white farmers who used it to grow cotton with slave labor and to mine gold.

This was an elaborate ruse to get S K Srivastava, off the investigation of NDTV for its tax evasion. After some time, P Chidambaram, much against his wishes, became the Home Minister and got Delhi Police under him. Srivastava says that Chidambaram promptly got false and mischievous criminal cases lodged against him, to get him removed from service. Not only that, Chidambaram got him arrested on the premises of the Court [Patiala House Court, Delhi, Jan 8, 2010]. A few illustrative but not exhaustive instances of such monumental persecution of a member of the Indian Revenue Service S K Srivastava are being listed below: Srivastava had found that his junior Income Tax official Shumana Sen IRS was conniving with NDTV in fudging their accounts[10]. In this, she was also supported by her batch mate and partner-in-crime, Ashima Neb, claims Srivastava. Shumana Sen was Assessing Officer of NDTV’s Income Tax circle and her husband Abhisar Sharma was a news presenter of NDTV being a serious violation of Govt. rules and law governing the conduct of employees of Govt. [MHA OM No.F.3/12/(S)/64-Ests.(B), dated 12.10.1965) and Rule 4 of the CCS (Conduct) Rules, 1965] and despite there being mandatory requirement of serving IRS officers to declare pecuniary interest like employment of spouse, etc., by a Company or Firm to the Govt. and failure of which is to be visited with severest punishment including dismissal from service; Shumana Sen never declared to Govt. that her husband was a staffer of the company which she was assessing to all the Direct Taxes, a serious breach which invites dismissal from service without any benefits. The vicious and criminal vilification of an IRS officer for nothing but doing his duty and protecting the public revenue and public interest which were being prejudiced by NDTV, Minister P Chidambaram and hired mercenaries Shumana Sen and Ashima Neb is something that would send shivers down the spine of any right thinking person. Srivastava was forced to face the allegations and court cases as Minister P Chidambaram was desperate to protect NDTV and hush up its crime, criminality and criminal acts – acts that caused defrauding of public revenue of India running into thousands of crores of rupees.

By the 18th century, the Mound Builder hypothesis had become firmly entrenched in public opinion as the leading explanation of North American prehistory (13). Scholars and antiquarians continued to debate the identity of the Mound Builders into the 19th century, with the majority agreeing that they were not the ancestors of Native Americans. President Andrew Jackson explicitly cited this hypothesis as partial justification for the Indian Removal Act of 1830, barely 40 years after Jefferson published his book. In the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the west, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated, or has disappeared, to make room for the existing savage tribes (14). Thus did the idea of Manifest Destiny become inexorably linked with concepts of racial categories. When someone asks me why I get so incensed about the concepts of “lost civilizations” and “Mound Builders” that are promoted by cable “history” shows, I simply remind them of this: In the years that followed Jackson’s signing of the Indian Removal Act, over 60,000 Native Americans were expelled from their lands and forcibly relocated west of the Mississippi River. Thousands of people—including children and elders—died at the hands of the US government, which explicitly cited this mythology as one of its justifications.

Native Americans were not prepared to become more prosperous at the cost of losing their identity: We must recognize and point out to others that we do want to live under better conditions, but we want to remember that we are Indians. We want to remain Indian people. We want this country to know that our Indian lands and homes are precious to us. We never want to see them taken away from us ... Many of our friends feel that the Indian’s greatest dream is to be free from second-class citizenship. We as youths have been taught that this freedom from second-class citizenship should be our goal. Let it be heard from Indian youth today that we do not want to be freed from our special relationship with the Federal Government. We only want our relationship between Indian Tribes and the Government to be one of good working relationship. We do not want to destroy our culture, our life that brought us through the period in which Indians were almost annihilated. We do not want to be pushed into the mainstream of American life. The Indian youth fears this, and this fear should be investigated and removed. We want it to be understood by all those concerned with Indian welfare that no people can ever develop when there is fear and anxiety. There is fear among our Indian people today that our tribal relationship with the Federal Government will be terminated soon. This fear must be removed and life allowed to develop by free choices. The policy to push Indians into the mainstream of American life must be re-evaluated. We must have hope. We must have a goal. But that is not what the Indian people want. We will never be able to fully join in on that effort. For any programme or policy to work we must be involved at the grassroots level. The responsibility to make decisions for ourselves must be placed in Indian hands. Any real help for Indian people must take cultural values into consideration. Programmes set up to help people must fit into the cultural framework... Indian tribes need greater political power to act. This country respects power and is based on the power system. If Indian communities and Indian tribes do not have political power we will never be able to hang on to what we have now...

At this time, 1890, we are too near the removal of the Cherokees for our young people to fully understand the enormity of the crime that was committed against a helpless race. Truth is, the facts are being concealed from the young people of today. School children of today do not know that we are living on lands that were taken from a helpless race at the bayonet point to satisfy the white man’s greed.   Future generations will read and condemn the act and I do hope posterity will remember that private soldiers like myself, and like the four Cherokees who were forced by General Scott to shoot an Indian Chief and his children, had to execute the orders of our superiors. We had no choice in the matter.

Interestingly, Jockey’s first attempt to enter India wasn’t with the Genomals. It was with Associated Apparels in 1962. Through the 1960s, many foreign innerwear brands were launched in India. Associated Apparels introduced the then world-famous Maidenform bras (owned today by Hanes) and tied up with Jockey to launch Jockey underwear in 1962. The international brand, Lovable, entered India in 1966 through a licensing deal and became a huge success. Along with it entered the brand Daisy Dee, through a subsidiary of Lovable, followed by Feelings. In 1971, Maxwell Industries launched VIP-branded innerwear for men in the economy segment, catching the attention of the discerning public with an advertisement featuring a Bollywood actor. In 1973, however, Jockey decided to leave India after the Indian government used the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA) to force multinational companies to dilute their ownership in their Indian ventures to 40 per cent. After Jockey exited India, its competitors flourished. Associated Apparels continued to focus on mid-premium innerwear during the 1980s and was successful in establishing themselves as a dominant player in the mid-premium innerwear segment through Liberty (men) and Libertina (women). Maxwell Industries, during the 1980s, launched the brand, Frenchie, to cater to the mid-premium innerwear segment. In 1985, Rupa & Co. emerged in the innerwear market, offering products across categories, including men, women and kids, and became one of the biggest manufacturers and sellers of innerwear in India. The success of Rupa was followed by many other domestic brands in the 1980s and ’90s, including Amul, Lux Cozi and Dollar in the men’s category, while Neva, Bodycare, Softy, Lady Care, Little Lacy, Red Rose, Sonari, Feather Line, etc., were the key players in the lingerie market. Then came the liberalization of 1991. With the regulatory hurdles to enter India removed, Jockey decided to return to India. And this time, it chose the right partners.

Upon its passing, the Indian Removal Act effectively kicked out almost 125,000 Native Americans, mostly from the Cherokee nation, from their ancestral homes in Georgia, and sent the people, both young and old, trekking thousands of miles on foot towards their new settlements in Oklahoma. An estimated 4,000 Native Americans died, either through exhaustion, hunger, or exposure, while on the way to Oklahoma. This huge number of casualties is what led to this forced exodus to get the moniker “The Trail of Tears.

Of course, numerous Native Americans were averse to the new law that forced them to leave their homes, one of which was the Cherokee tribe. The Cherokees tried to fight the Indian Removal Act. They filed a case against the entire state of Georgia, and it eventually found its way to the Supreme Court where Justice John Marshall declared that the government had no right to claim the Cherokee’s ancestral lands as its own. Unfortunately, President Jackson overruled this declaration and allowed it to push through.

Between 1787 and 1871 America entered into over 400 treaties with the Indians, and promptly broke every last one of them. President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 initiated a series of genocidal wars against the remaining Indian Nations. The policy confined the survivors to about 310 “reservations,” where they can be found today.

Perhaps the belief that the Indians were destined to vanish originated in early colonial times as a means of justifying the massacres of Indians by the Puritans. If, as the New England colonists believed, Indians were under a cosmic curse and in a state of rapid decline, killing a few was not really a criminal act and in some instances might actually be doing the Lord’s work. It was not all Thanksgiving dinners in those early days. No one questions that the Indian population in the East did decline precipitiously as whites settled the New England area. Many Ind­ians were killed, others hid in obscure places, and still other Indians moved west before the American Revolution. Many eastern Indians were allies of Great Britain in both the Revolution and the War of 1812. Believing they should not stay behind in the United States when their English friends fled to Canada after the Revolution, they left with the departing British troops, vanishing from the United States but remaining very much a part of things north of the border. The virtual disappearance of Indians east of the Mississippi can be traced directly to Andrew Jackson’s policy of removing the tribes of that region to Oklahoma and Kansas, not to some cosmic decree commanding their inevitable extinction. Even then only the largest and most threatening tribes were removed. Smaller tribal groups simply remained in the backwaters of the eastern United States where they had always lived.

Be it Europeans’ initial assumption of the right to invade in the 1600s, the Indian Removal Act in the 1800s, or the English-only acts in the 1900s, the white settlers established and the white government of the United States has enforced a model of dominance and assimilation that elevates those who can fit the prescribed mold while excluding and destabilizing those who can’t.

Meenakshi, then as now, is the city’s great fertility goddess, and the focus of her cult lies in her union with Sundareshvara. Every night in the temple the images of Meenakshi and Sundareshvara are brought together in the latter’s bedchamber. The last act of the priests before they close the doors is to remove Meenakshi’s nose-jewel, lest the rubbing of it irritate her husband when they make love – an act, so the priests will tell you, that ensures the preservation and regeneration of the universe.

As a white person, I can openly and unabashedly reminisce about “the good old days.” Romanticized recollections of the past and calls for a return to former ways are a function of white privilege, which manifests itself in the ability to remain oblivious to our racial history. Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct.

Removal was devastating emotionally and physically for the Five Tribes, but it was not an immediate change in their lives; rather, tribal members moved gradually, with complete migration occurring over a period of nearly a decade. Native peoples were compelled to leave their homes, their buried love[d] ones, and many of their belongings. Even before the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, trauma brought on by the expectation of removal permeated the lives of Native peoples.

Pratt created the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and his motto was "kill the Indian, save the man." At this school, and others that would open and follow in its wake, tens of thousands of Native children faced abuse and neglect. They were often forcibly removed from their homes and taken to these schools that were sometimes across the country from their original lives. When they arrived, the children were forced to cut their hair and change their names. They were made to become White in look and label, stripped of any semblance of Native heritage. The children were not allowed to speak their Native tongues, some of them not knowing anything else. They were prohibited from acting in any way that might reflect the only culture they had ever known. At Pratt's Carlisle Indian Industrial School alone, the numbers revealed the truth of what this treatment did. Of the ten thousand children from 141 different tribes across the country, only a small fraction of them ever graduated. According to the Carlisle Indian School Project, there are 180 marked graves of Native children who died while attending. There were even more children who died while held captive at the Carlisle school and others across the county. Their bodies are only being discovered in modern times, exhumed by the army and people doing surveys of the land who are finding unmarked burial sites. An autograph book from one of the schools was found in the historical records with one child's message to a friend, "Please remember me when I'm in the grave." The US Bureau of Indian Affairs seemed to think Pratt had the right idea and made his school the model for more. There ended up being more than 350 government-funded boarding schools for Natives in the United States. Most of them followed the same ideology: Never let the children be themselves. Beat their language out of them. Punish them for practicing their cultures. Pratt and his followers certainly killed plenty of Indians, but they didn't save a damn thing.

When healthy sexuality is difficult to achieve for heterosexual women and men, the dilemmas of a young person navigating a  different  sexual  orientation  that  is legally a criminal act are difficult to imagine. India’s attitude towards homosexuality is gradually moving towards acceptance. This is despite the flip-flop of the courts in removing section 377 of the Indian Penal Code written by the British Raj over a century and a half ago. This act criminalizes ‘carnal activities against the order of nature’, a reflection of British sexual fears rather than Indian culture which at that time had a much more relaxed acceptance of the human body, fluidity of gender and sexuality in its many forms. Section 377 legalizes fear of homosexuals.

Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct. But it is a powerful construct because it calls out to a deeply internalized sense of superiority and entitlement and the sense that any advancement for people of color is an encroachment on this entitlement. The past was great for white people (and white men in particular) because their positions went largely unchallenged.

And then in 1830, when Jackson was president, he signed the Indian Removal Act, which forced these tribes to move west of the Mississippi into what is now known as Oklahoma. The brutal journey they took is known as the Trail of Tears. A little-known fact about the Trail of Tears—one I never learned in grade school—was that both free blacks and enslaved blacks accompanied the Five Civilized Tribes on this journey.

But a more deadly example of why rights matter was shown by what happened in the early years of the United States to America’s unfortunate Cherokee Indians. These were one of the continent’s original races, who had on paper become a recognised partner in the newly United States. The Americans confiscated the Cherokee’s land under a special law called the Indian Removal Act, and whose idea was that? None other than Thomas Jefferson who’d written those glowing words for the Declaration of Independence that I start the chapter with!

Wilma spent her first ten years on her paternal grandfather’s land, called Mankiller Flats, in rural Oklahoma. This was his allotment at the end place of the Trail of Tears, the infamous forced march of the 1830s that deprived Cherokees of their Georgia homeland. More than a third of all the men, women, and children on this march perished from cold, starvation, and disease. Thanks to President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, Cherokee land was left to white farmers who used it to grow cotton with slave labor and to mine gold. Mankiller

What kind of Earth do we think we belong to? If the world is a dance of atoms, regulated by physical laws and no more, then one answer to the question of an ethic of belonging must be ethical nihilism. Our two trees, living in such different climates, suggest a similar path. If we’re a species made merely of atoms like all other species, no more and no less, evolution brought us here. Yet I seek something less fractured, an ethic that is fully biological yet does not walk us into a starry, cold universe, empty except for self constructed miasma. A hint at such an ethic might be found with the little girl who heard the “huge” sound in the ponderosa, she and her family were attending to Florissant with delight and unaffected east. The girl heard the tree. The boy examined fallen ponderosa cones, peering between their open scales, then poking at immature cones on the tree. The parents noticed and pointed out the wavelike motions of wind on meadow grasses. They stood and admired the giant stone, remarking on its variegated colors. They remained at the stump far longer than the minute or two allotted in the walks of most visitors. This family was present, a start of a sensory, intellectual, and bodily opening to the place. The people formerly indigenous here- the Ute Indians and their ancestors- were forcibly removed in the 19th century, an act of violence that broke humanity’s millennia long relationship within this part of life’s community. The girl and her family were taking the first small steps in relearning part of what has been forgotten. The family’s attention to the particularities of Florissant seems at first to have little to do with understanding the ethical import of mud slides in the Eocene and in the present day. The family’s behavior gives no direct answers to the questions about the ethics of climate change. Instead they may show how to move toward answers by engaging the community of life. From this engagement, or reengagement after cultural fracture and amnesia, comes a more mature ability to understand what is deeply beautiful in the world.

For the first time in his life, the Indian removed the piercings from his ears and his fleshy lips and shaved his mustache, taking as much care as if this were his last day on Earth. This was, in fact, the final act in his metamorphosis and disappearance. The fakir had evaporated forever in the steamy bathroom, and a writer had been born.

Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct.

Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct.

Thanks to President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, Cherokee land was left to white farmers who used it to grow cotton with slave labor and to mine gold.