How does the Trail of Tears affect the U.S. today?

The Trail of Tears (and Indian Removal in general) does not really affect most Americans in ways that we can feel as we live our lives each day.  The Trail of Tears helped to create the country we live in today.  It helped make the Southeast the way it is today.  It helped to create the history that we all share.  But it does not really directly affect the way we live each day.

The Trail of Tears is our name for the episode in which the Cherokee Indians were forced to move from their land in the Southeast to “Indian Territory” beyond the Mississippi.  They were forced to move in order to make room for white settlers (and their black slaves).  When we talk about the Trail of Tears, we are usually also talking about the removal of the other Indian tribes from the Southeast.

These acts, which happened almost 180 years ago, do not affect most of us in ways that we can feel.  We cannot say things like “because of WWII, my grandfather was able to go to college on the GI Bill, which allowed our family to move into the middle class.”  The Trail of Tears is too remote in time for things like that.  In addition, very few people in the US are of Native American ancestry (let alone specifically Cherokee ancestry).  This means that the Trail of Tears does not affect as many people as, for example, slavery does.  If we are of Cherokee descent, it might affect us directly.  If we are not, it likely does not have that sort of direct effect on us.

To the extent that the Trail of Tears affects us today, it affects us in two ways.  First, it helped to create the Southeast as it exists today.  It removed Native Americans from their land and allowed white Americans to move in.  This began the process of building the Southeast that has resulted in the present-day existence of cities like Atlanta.  It is hard to know what the Southeast would have looked like today if Indian Removal had not occurred.  Second, the Trail of Tears helped make America a less just country.  Our history contains many examples in which Americans treated others unjustly.  Slavery is one example of this as is Indian Removal.  These injustices hurt our country by helping to create tensions between various ethnic groups today.  The Trail of Tears helped to create whatever tension exists between Native Americans and other Americans today.

Thus, the Trail of Tears does not really impact us in ways that we feel every day.  However, it did help to create the country in which we now live.  In that sort of indirect way, it continues to affect us today.