In May 1830, President Andrew Jackson passed the Indian removal act. With a stroke of his pen, Jackson set off a process that would see the coerced, militarily-enforced migration of approximately 100,000 Indigenous people from their homelands in the Eastern United States to “new” Western lands in what is now Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Indian removal is widely regarded as a central touchstone in American history and one of the most important events of the American past.

This course tells its story. Moving beyond well-worn stories of U.S. might and Indigenous tragedy, we will explore a fuller and more complex story of removal. While we will seek to understand the creation and conception of removal as a project, as well as its destructive implementation, we will also centre our focus on the experiences of Indigenous communities who experienced, endured, and resisted removals. We will explore the best-known periods of federal removal that followed the 1830 Removal Act – including the infamous Cherokee “Trail of Tears” (1838-1839) – alongside broader, unfamiliar tales. These will include Northern removals in the Great Lakes, earlier waves of relocation, removals “by another name” that saw some Native groups forcibly reclassed as Black, as well as significant histories of resistance to removal and thousands of peoples’ successful efforts to avoid it. We will also broaden our chronology, charting American efforts to forcibly relocate Native peoples both before and after 1830 in order to contextualize removals in a wider history of American settler colonialism, exploring historian John Bowes’ contention that “the American era is a removal era.” We will also think critically about the archives that scholars use to tell these histories, the impact of archival silences on the ways we have understood removal, as well as learning how to find and use Indigenous-centred sources and methods.

By understanding one of the most infamous events of American history, we will gain new insights into American history as a whole, highlighting both the long history of U.S. settler colonialism and Indigenous Nations’ ongoing efforts to resist it.