“If you talk to the animals they will talk with you and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them you will not know them and what you do not know, you will fear. What one fears, one destroys.” [emphasis added] This quote is from Chief Dan George of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, who were the inhabitants of British Columbia in Canada. Although Chief George was not Cherokee, this quote is undeniably applicable to the issue of the Trail of Tears. But more could be included in that saying, resulting in something like this, “If you talk to the animals they will talk with you and you will know each other. If you do not see them as fellow living beings, you will not talk to them. If you do not talk to them you will not know them and what…show more content… What one fears, one destroys.” Looking back through American history, the seizure of land and the removal of its inhabitants is a common theme. The Choctaw were forced out of the Mississippi territory, the Seminole, who decided to fight rather than give up their homeland, were defeated and kicked off their land in Florida due to black-hearted deception on the part of an American general, the Creek were relocated from their already limited land in Alabama and forced to transplant to the west, while the Chickasaw were forced from their land and promised compensation of three million dollars, a price that was not paid for another thirty years. Then there are the famous Cherokee, who, although they were the epitome of what white Americans claimed they desired the Indians to become and, despite the fact that the Supreme Court ruled in their favor, were forced from their land by authorization of Congress’s Indian Removal Act, an act that was unlawful due to the Supreme Court’s ruling that the government did not have the ability to violate the rights of the Cherokee by appropriating their land. They were confronted by an army and given an impossible choice,…show more content… The greed was due to the fact that in 1829 it was discovered that there was gold on the Cherokee land, causing the state of Georgia to pass new laws eliminating many of the rights of the Native American tribe. They were not allowed to mine the gold on their land, did not have the right to testify against a white man in any court, and they could no longer assemble for political purposes involved with their government. These laws were passed by greedy, “civilized” Americans, who were looking at the Cherokee through a haze of racism and the morals of the self-serving. One of the tribe’s strongest antagonists was Andrew Jackson himself, the seventh and, at that time, current president of the United States. Jackson, having been born and raised west of the Appalachian Mountains, had lived in a society constantly plagued by Indians, not included in the Five Civilized Tribes, who would attack the white settlers in order to defend their land. It was this that led to Jackson’s deep rooted sense of racism towards Native Americans. In the desperation resulting in the world crumbling around them, the Cherokee reached out to the most powerful person they could, President Jackson. Although he claimed to be supportive of centralized government, in this instance he hypocritically turned his back on the Indians,