Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. In 1831, the French political thinker and writer Alexis de Tocqueville visited Memphis, Tennessee. As he stood on the banks of the Mississippi River, he caught sight of a horrendous scene. Mass removals of native Choctaw people from their ancestral homelands. In his book, Democracy in America, he described what he saw that day.
In the whole scene, there was an air of ruin and destruction, something which betrayed a final and irrevocable adieu one couldn't watch without feeling one's heart wrung. He asked one man why they were leaving. The answer came back simply, to be free.
What Tocqueville witnessed that day would come to be remembered as one of the darkest chapters of American history, the beginning of what is now commonly referred to as the Trail of Tears. 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?
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Chapter 2: What is the Trail of Tears and its significance in American history?
And so we are a Western Muskogean speaking people. That's our language group. And so we speak the Choctaw language, which is in common with some of our related tribes that are still here with us today.
Yeah.
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?
Yeah. So in the 1831 Armstrong rule that the U.S. government took of Choctaw people, they estimated Choctaw was around 20,000. But we know that our people... were much larger than that. So while our homelands are in Mississippi and Alabama, we had several Choctaw people that were living in Louisiana and Arkansas.
And so a lot of those people had left the tribe and they had made new homes to the West. How was this society organized? So our society on a large scale level was made up of three districts, which we call Ulfti. These districts each had a district chief. And Each district chief represented all of the individual village chiefs that were under him.
So we see at the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830, there's over 60 chiefs in attendance. Wow. So that means that each district had, plus or minus, about 20 villages underneath them. And so each of these villages would have a village chief, and they had a war chief. And so the village chief, called the miko,
And the servant chief called the Tishamenko helped run all of the political affairs for the village. The war chief would run all affairs when it came to war, attacking, defending the community, that sort of thing. But all the day-to-day life was run by the women. And so our kinship is passed matrilineally, which means all of our bloodlines go through our women. And so each village had two ixa.
Ixa is the word that we have for our moiety and also for our clans. And so moiety is the closest word that we have. There's not many tribes that organize themselves like the Choctaw did. And so we borrow that Scottish word for moiety. And it basically means that each village had two groups in there. You had the beloved people and the people on the other side, also known as the divided people.
And so that basically just means, you know, underneath those two Ixa were several clans. But that's how our communities and that's how our, you know, our tribe was organized.
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Chapter 3: Who were the Choctaw people and what were their ancestral lands?
And so by the 1790s, there was someone new that came into the scene, and that was the Americans. And so Choctaw leaders... We created relationships and alliances. We were large, we were prosperous, and these colonial powers feared our military. And so we would make military alliances with these different European powers.
And so what you see is in the late 1790s, you see Choctaw warriors traveling up the Mississippi River to go fight in the Northwest Indian War. Alongside the United States. Okay. You see Choctaw scouts that are volunteering themselves during the revolution. But for the most part, the Choctaw nation stayed out of the revolutionary war.
They stayed out of, you know, to them, it was just another colonial conflict.
Yeah.
You know, they had bigger and better things to do. So it wasn't until the war of 1812, the Choctaw nation really got involved.
Yeah. It's such an important factor. These nations have been in these lands. How sophisticated they were, how strong they were, having recovered from a lot of what you're talking about, the disease and so forth, they were reorganized and retrenched. And suddenly comes a new kind of threat. And that's what we'll be talking about.
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We're back discussing the Trail of Tears with Ryan Spring of the Choctaw Nation. Ryan, we've talked about the ancestral lands and the origin stories of this nation, and then the Europeans arriving, the Spanish, the French, the English even. I want to now turn to the United States, which has become such a player now in terms of the Louisiana Purchase and all that's going on.
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Chapter 4: How did European colonization impact the Choctaw community?
In 1990, we had citizens from the Republic of Ireland visit the Choctaw Nation, and they reawakened a story about the Choctaw Irish Gift Exchange. So in 1847, there were two gifts of donations from the Choctaw people given to the people of Ireland during the famine. One gift at Scullyville was for a little over $170, and the second gift down in Dokesville was a little over $150. Wow.
So we had forgot about this history. We forgot about these gifts. And so in the 90s, this knowledge was reawakened by visitors from Ireland that came to talk with us about this. Choctaw people were excited about relearning this history, reawakening this history.
And so a delegation of our leaders went to the Republic of Ireland in 1991, and they participated in Archbishop Desmond Tutu's famine walk that he was hosting. I see. As part of the memorial walk. Nice.
I want to ask you a question, one I struggle with, and I imagine a lot of listeners share this confusion. The United States, we talk about it a lot, as a nation, roots itself in the ideals of fairness and justice.
Yet, when you look at this history of removal, the Trail of Tears, how do you, as a member of this nation, make any sense of the contradiction between that national self-image and the historical reality? Where do you guys come down with this and process this?
That is a difficult question. I will say that, you know, on an individual level, that's something that every Choctaw person has to come to terms with. You know, we are a bicultural people. We're not just Choctaws. We're also modern Americans.
And so it's something that I've struggled with, you know, growing up, doing the Pledge of Allegiance every day in class, attending events and doing the Pledge of Allegiance. You know, where does all that fit in? And I have my grandfather and my father both fought for the U.S. Armed Forces. And so we have a legacy of Choctaw people that have fought and died for the United States.
And so at the end of the day, we have to continue moving forward and we have to continue being positive. This is something that happened to us. You know, this was ethnic cleansing. You know, this was genocide. But we have to move on from that, and we have to continue forward. We have to learn our history so that it doesn't happen again to us.
But we have to do that in a positive way that we continue to rebuild our communities. You know, as Choctaw people, we are the indigenous people of the United States. We are elders here, and we have so much that our culture and our history can share with modern-day American people.
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