after the indian removal act of 1830 what did the seminoles do and have done to them

(part 3 of 7)

National Archives Bankhead National Wood, Alabama "Their environments shaped their senses of identity."

These v tribes of the southeast were village dwellers. They amassed effectually streams and rivers, which by and large defined territorial hunting ranges. They raised numerous varieties of corn, beans, and squashes, but their master supply of meat came from hunting. Deer, deport, and woodland buffalo were their prey.

Their environments shaped their senses of identity. The tribes of the southeast maintained a fragile residual with the forces of the surroundings around them. The woods were full of spiritual forces who could harm someone who wandered solitary into their domain. Vehement storms, sudden floods in the river valleys, lightning-set fires in the woods, all were reminders of the power of the globe. The Dark-green Corn ceremony, variations of which occurred in the Cherokee, Creek, and Chickasaw communities, renewed the earth in the jump for the upcoming year.

During the belatedly eighteenth century, major changes began to affect the lifestyles of the southeastern native people. The introduction of domesticated livestock among the Choctaws in the 1790s provided a new source of food that began to replace deer meat in the diet. Hunting deer for skins to trade with French and English agents had depleted deer populations throughout the southeast. Although domesticated cattle roamed gratis in the forests and prairies, they could be hands captured. Other introductions to the Choctaw diet included domesticated pigs and potatoes, and some families cultivated fields of cotton. Past the early on 1800s a missionary could study that Choctaw women had spinning wheels, cards, and were weaving yards of textile.

Although Indian removal is generally associated with the 1830 act of Congress, the process was already beginning past the tardily 1700s. Pressure of white settlement led small parties of Choctaws, Cherokees, and Chickasaws to move west of the Mississippi, and past 1807 they were settling in Arkansas, Indian Territory, and east Texas. There they could chase and enhance their crops. This voluntary removal to escape disharmonize with white settlers and government agents thus preceded forced removals.

Federal policy toward Indians was ambivalent. Thomas Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory in function to find a identify for Indian communities who would not digest into white society and who wished to pursue their traditional hunting ways of life, only he also promoted government-run trading posts in Indian land so that Indians would build upwards such great debts that they would be willing to give upward some of their land in payment. Indians might choose to move, but Jefferson also found ways to force them to make the choice.

	C. Piereman Warrant issued to a Revolutionary War soldier for 100 acres of western country as payment for his service, 1784 enlarge prototype

Despite the integration of domesticated cattle and the engineering of weaving into their lifestyles, Americans still considered the southeastern tribes savages. The increasing American population led to pressure to develop new western lands. The War of 1812, a definitive victory over the English, gave Americans a sense of national identity, merely it besides created a demand for Indian land. The U.s. paid its soldiers from the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 not with money simply with warrants that they could substitution for western land.

	"In going up the stream there were houses and farms on both banks of the River. The houses were decently furnished, and their farms were well fenced and stocked with cattle. They had everything they needed: food, clothes, h2o and skilful land." Nuttall, Journal, 1819, on a Cherokee ring in the Arkansas Territory

The pressure for the development of western lands required the removal of Indians from those lands. Even while government agents were belongings out promises of western lands that would be theirs forever, Americans were exploring those lands. In 1819, Thomas Nuttall, an English botanist, traveled to the Arkansas territory. His account painted a picture of a fertile and productive environment for agriculture, a clarification seemingly designed to inspire interest in the minds of land speculators. The Choctaw leader Pushmataha, however, when pressed to sign a treaty ceding his tribe's state in central Mississippi in commutation for others in the west, protested: "We wish to remain here, where we have grown up as the herbs of the woods; and do not wish to be transplanted into another soil."

"Indeed almost of the streams on this side of the Arkansas are said to afford springs of table salt h2o which might exist wrought with profit." Thomas Nuttall, A Journal of Travels into the Arkansas Territory during the Twelvemonth 1819

In the period between 1817 and 1825, however, the tribes signed treaties like-minded to commutation eastern lands for western ones. These early treaties did non require the tribes to movement west, and about remained in their homes, just pocket-sized vanguards crossed the Mississippi to take up residence in the new territory, some joining relatives already settled at that place. Some Choctaw families moved later the Treaty of Doaks Stand up, signed in 1820. Some Creek and Cherokee groups moved westward afterwards treaties they signed in 1818.

The pressures on the tribes culminated in 1829 and 1830 when the legislatures of Mississippi and Georgia passed laws to extend their jurisdiction over the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee Nations. The deportment brought into precipitous relief the dilemma that faced the tribes. Were they to submit to the laws of a strange authorities to remain in the lands that they considered their homeland, or were they to move to the westward to retain their autonomy?

	FLA SA Sorrows of the Seminoles, Banished from Florida, c. 1835 Vocal near the Seminoles' difference sung in the Muskogee language.   Library of Congress

Congress followed the actions of the states with the 1830 Indian Removal Human action that directed the federal government to negotiate with Indian tribes to exchange their lands east of the Mississippi River for lands to the west. Under the provisions of the deed, the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and ultimately the Seminoles, who had fled to Florida in the early nineteenth century, moved to Indian Territory (what is now the state of Oklahoma) in the menstruum from 1831 through the 1840s.

"it is (with sorrow) that nosotros are forced by the potency of the white man to quit the scenes of our childhood, but stern necessity says we must go, and nosotros bid a final farewell to it and all we concur dear East of the Father of Waters . . ."George Hicks, Cherokee, on the "Trail of Tears," November 1838   full text

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Source: http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nattrans/ntecoindian/essays/indianremovalc.htm

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