“Murder is murder, and somebody must answer. Somebody must explain the streams of blood that flowed in the Indian country in the summer of 1838. Somebody must explain the 4000 silent graves that mark the trail of the Cherokees to their exile. I wish I could forget it all, but the picture of 645 wagons lumbering over the frozen ground with their cargo of suffering humanity still lingers in my memory.” (Private John G. Burnet’s Account [1890]) Private John G. Burnet knew Indian removal was wrong, but he participated anyway. Putting aside questions of morality and individual guilt, how did larger structural forces like the law, politics, ideology, and economic factors shape Indigenous dispossession from the Conestoga Massacre in 1763 (Week 5), to the destruction of Haudenosaunee villages in the American Revolution (Week 7), to the forcible relocation of the Cherokee in the 1830s (Week 9)? In your essay, be sure to include at least one primary source by an Indigenous author.
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