Joseph Bruchac Quotes

I did not walk every step of the Trail of Tears at one time. Instead, over the last 20 years, I have walked various segments of it in Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma.

It affords me sincere pleasure to be able to apprise you of the entire removal of the Cherokee Nation of Indians to their new homes west of the Mississippi.

It is amazing to me that so little is still known about the Trail of Tears or the lives of the Cherokees themselves.

Step by step a powerful and enterprising race has driven them back from the Atlantic to the West until at last there is scarcely a spot of ground upon which the Indians have any certainty of maintaining a permanent abode.

I honestly think I was an Indian living in the time of the Trail of Tears. Something like that. Every time I read books about back then, I get so devastatingly sad, so, so... I feel such a deep connection to it.

The case of the Seminoles constitutes at present the only exception to the successful efforts of the Government to remove the Indians to the homes assigned them west of the Mississippi.

Coercion alone will remove them [the Indians] to the western country allotted for the Indians.

The Cherokees tried to do everything within the law and wished only to live in peace on their own lands. Yet they were cheated out of their birthright and treated as if they were less than human.

We gathered all the stock we could find, and made an attempt to move. We left many of our horses and cattle in Wallowa. We lost several hundred in crossing the river.

The Trail of Tears has a great deal of meaning for every person of American Indian ancestry, whether they are Cherokee or not. For me, it has always stood for what is best and worst about the history of the United States.

It would be useless to recapitulate the numerous provisions for the security and protection of the rights of the Cherokees, to be found in the various treaties between their nation and the United States. The Cherokees were happy and prosperous under a scrupulous observance of treaty stipulations by the government of the United States, and from the fostering hand extended over them, they made rapid advances in civilization, morals, and in the arts and sciences. Little did they anticipate, that when taught to think and feel as the American citizen, and to have with him a common interest, they were to be despoiled by their guardian, to become strangers and wanderers in the land of their fathers, forced to return to the savage life, and to seek a new home in the wilds of the far west, and that without their consent.

These tribes cannot exist surrounded by our settlements and continual contact with our citizens. They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement. They must necessarily yield to the force of circumstance and, ere long, disappear.

Following the War of 1812, the young United States had no further need for Indian allies against the British, and as a result the fortunes of the Indians declined rapidly. By 1848, twelve new states had been carved out of the Indian's lands, two major and minor Indian wars had been fought, and group after group of Indians had been herded westward, on forced marches, across the Mississippi River.

Andrew Jackson, to most Native people, is the equivalent of Hitler …. I know people who will not use $20 bills because Jackson’s face is on it.

The search for more good cotton-­growing soil in areas that today are such states as Texas, Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma was a powerful incentive to force Native Americans off their traditional lands and onto reservations, another form of violence by the “military-cotton complex”..

[Andrew] Jackson could be woefully wrong, He was an unapologetic defender of slavery and the main architect of Native American Removal. Even before he was President his many Indian wars destroyed much of tribal culture in a headlong grab for land.

Native Americans were driven off their land. Lincoln even took part in the Black Hawk campaign against the Native Americans in Illinois. While they were being exterminated and driven off their land, Whites were collecting assets.

I don't think we have very good records about what they were thinking except, as I pointed out earlier today, that they did invent our political system.

One could reasonably argue that the Turkish pogrom against the Armenians during World War I qualifies as a crime against humanity, as does the United States' ethnic cleansing of Native Americans.

My ancestors include Monahwee, who was one of the leaders in the Red Stick War, which was the largest Indian uprising in history, and Osceola, who refused to sign a treaty with the United States.

When you start to look at Native American history, you realize that, very far from being a peaceful, morally superior people, Native Americans were not that different from Europeans.

General Howard informed me, in a haughty spirit, that he would give my people 30 days to go back home, collect all their stock, and move onto the reservation.

It is presumed that humanity dictated the original policy of the removal and concentration of the Indians in the West to save them from threatened extinction. But today, by reason of the immense augmentation of the American population, and the extension of their settlements throughout the entire West, covering both slopes of the Rocky Mountains, the Indian races are more seriously threatened with a speedy extermination than ever before in the history of the country

I hope to God you will not ask me to go to any other country except my own. It may turn out to be another Bosque Redondo.

In the past 190 years, the U.S. government has tried every possible way to get rid of the troublesome Indian problem he feels he has on his hands. First the government tried extinction through destruction – where money was paid for the scalps of every dead Indian. Then the government tried mass relocation… Then the government tried assimilation… The termination was tried by issuing forced patents in fee to Indian land owners – land was taken out of the trust relationship with the U.S. government and an unrestricted patent in fee was issued to the Indian whether he wanted it or not or whether he understood it or not.