Don Wildman

American History Hit

The idea of the frontier, to which we've dedicated so much time lately in this series, lives on in our collective American imagination, still charges the spirit of this country.

But the idea of white settlers of the colonial period into the American Republic is, of course, in direct opposition to those already living upon that land.

As settlers pushed westward, Native nations were pushed aside, pressured, killed.

This painful legacy in mind, in this, our fifth and final episode of our Frontier miniseries, we turn to one of the darkest chapters of this checkered past.

The Trail of Tears is a story of forced removal and migration, but it is also one of endurance, identity, and survival.

And today, we explore it all in its particulars, when, why, and how it all happened, and of course, what it meant and still means to the Native nations who were driven from their homelands.

To lead in this telling, I'm joined by Ryan Spring, Cultural Research Associate in the Historic Preservation Department of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, himself a member of the Choctaw Nation.

Hello, Ryan.

Thank you so much for being with us.

Thank you, Don.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Before we discuss the Trail of Tears itself, I want to mention that the Trail of Tears is not one thing, but several.

There were different forced march migrations for different nations, and we'll discuss all this later.

The Choctaw were the first, and so it's helpful especially to understand their experience.

But as I say, it's the first of several that happened over a kind of 20-year period, roughly 1830 to 1850.

Regarding the Choctaw, who were they and where were their native homelands geographically?

So we're talking about Mississippi, Louisiana, what is today those areas.

How large a population are we talking about as far as the Choctaw are concerned?

It is a political system, I suppose you could call it, a cultural system that has been developed for thousands of years, right?