Through the lens of American history, the plight of the Native Americans was derived from events which occurred squarely in the past, and which involved only a small handful of tragedies. This is, of course, absurdly incorrect; abuses and full-scale genocides continued to occur well into the establishment of America as a country, and are deeply ingrained in the country’s politics to this day.
In season 2, episode 13 of the Teaching Hard History podcast, the hosts discuss how although the removal of the Cherokee is sometimes taught in classrooms, the many other removals of Native Americans are not, falling to the wayside as the history lesson moves on. But teaching history in this piecemeal fashion undermines how direct and explicit the federal government’s abuses were. These removals were not committed by lone bands of racists on lone Indigenous Nations, they were part of a coordinated government effort to purge habitable land of its existing inhabitants as the European colonizers moved westward. But again, that is not how the history has been taught, painting an incorrect and sanitizing picture of America’s involvement in these atrocities.