The forced removal, during the 1830s, of the Indigenous nations of the American Southeast — the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole — from their homelands to territory west of the Mississippi River. Driven by settler hunger for Native land and authorized by the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the expulsions killed thousands on the journey, above all during the Cherokee removal of 1838–39. The nations resisted removal by every lawful means, including a Supreme Court victory the federal government refused to enforce. They endured the removal and rebuilt themselves in the West, and the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations are self-governing peoples today.
These were not wandering bands but settled, farming nations with their own governments, written laws, and constitutions. The Cherokee had a written language and a printed newspaper. That fact alone undoes the excuse offered at the time, because the demand to remove them was never really about teaching them to live differently. It was about taking their land, and the gold found on it. In the 1830s the United States forced five nations out of the Southeast and marched them west to lands they had never seen. Removal came by different means — treaties signed under pressure, state coercion, and, in the Cherokee case, a military roundup. Thousands died on the way. Yet the nations the government tried to erase did not vanish. They rebuilt themselves in the West, and they govern themselves still, which is why this is told not as the end of a people but as a wound they survived.