The Trail of Tears was the foremost crime that US government made. It was the migration route members of the Cherokee Nation followed in 1838–1839 when the federal government forced their removal from the southeastern United States to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. During this removal, estimated 4000 of 16000 Cherokees died. In 1835, President Andrew Jackson appointed Reverend John F. Schermerhorn as a treaty commissioner to organize a negotiation with the Cherokee. The US government would pay $4.5 million to the Cherokee as compensation to their land, which known as the Treaty of New Echota. Then, Schermerhorn had a meeting with a small number of Cherokee Council members who were prepared to accept the treaty. Actually, they were not the main members of Cherokee Council. These Cherokees signed the document on December 30, 1835. This treaty ceded all Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi River. Although Chief Ross, who is the leader of Cherokee, presented a 15000-signature petition for opposing the treaty, the US government still set a date of May 23, 1838 as the deadline for the removal of the Cherokee. This was definitely an unethical behavior of US government. It was just like giving …show more content…
The significant case was the Dawes Act, or General Allotment Act of 1877, which was signed by President Grover Cleveland. The major purpose of this act was to assimilate Natives into European cultural and behave like white Americans, and their slogan was “Kill the Indian, save the man”. The first step was to break reservations into smaller parts called allotments, it’s just for making them more individual. The second step was asking them to live separately from their tribes, in return, they would be granted US citizenship. The most important step was transmitting the whites’ culture and traditions, for example, families were supposed to farm on their allotments rather than hunting bison. They also founded schools for Native American children. These school were mostly established by Christian missionaries, and the main purpose was to educate Natives European-American cultures, such as cutting their hair short. They also introduced Christianity to them to build up their concepts of religion. In practice, this act was failed. The main reasons were that all of these Native Americans lived in the lands that were not fertile, hence they didn’t even have the condition to farm or ranch. Some of them didn’t want to adopt a different way of life. Others sold their lands to white settlers for money. Furthermore, Sioux tribe felt their cultural