| Summary: | “Indian Removal” refers to the forced migration of Indigenous communities from their homelands in what is currently the United States. It is often connected to a particular era (the 1820s and 1830s), federal policy (the Indian Removal Act), or event (the singular Trail of Tears). Yet dispossession from ancestral lands has been persistent and pervasive and is an ongoing, lived reality for many Indigenous people. From the first moments of their arrival in what they would call the Americas, Europeans expelled Native Americans and confiscated their lands for themselves. Natives lost not only land but also familial bonds, historical information, sites of religious significance, and ecological knowledge. Beginning with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, in which the United States acquired a vast territory west of the Mississippi, federal efforts to compel Indians to exchange land holdings in the east for lands west of the Mississippi intensified. This practice developed into a political program of ethnic cleansing during the 1820s and 1830s, particularly under the presidency of Andrew Jackson. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 targeted the large southeastern nations (Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles), but since those nations were forced into western territories its effects spread immediately across the Mississippi to tribes such as the Osages. Removal of western tribes onto reservations continued into the 20th century. Many lesser-known communities in the north, such as the Delawares, experienced multiple removals over centuries. The Delaware Tribe currently resides within the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, a forced positioning that has made it difficult for the Delawares to gain federal recognition. Today, the erasure of Indigenous presences and histories from the United States’ national consciousness contributes to public sentiment supporting ongoing forms of removal. Racist sports mascots, stereotypes in film and television, and societal ignorance of specific Native histories and cultures perpetuate the political and cultural marginalization of Indigenous people. It is thus important to recognize the “removal period” as one of immense suffering for the more well-known tribal nations, while also acknowledging removal’s deeper history and ongoing effects. Equally important, Indigenous communities and individuals have always protested and countered the many forms of removal with their own writings, media, cultural practices, and legal and political actions. As it documents scholarship and creative work on Indian Removal, this bibliography also attends to what Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor has termed “Native survivance . . . an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, oblivion.” It highlights the voices and presences of Indigenous authors, scholars, and activists who work to reclaim the past and reimagine the future.
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