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A Backstabbing Country

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A Backstabbing Country There is a knock at your door. You open it to see that it is a general of the United States army. He tells you that you must leave your home immediately and move to a piece of land that the government has assigned you. If you refuse, the military will have to interfere. All of your tight-knitted community members have heard the same message within the last week. This, in a less modern sense, is what happened to the Northwest Indians of the United States in the late 1800s to the early 1900s. Although the relocation of Native Americans was far superior than the earlier genocide, it was still distant from the ideal “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” that the United States was hypothetically offering all people. When the English settlers first arrived to North America, they fought the Eastern Indians in a form of self-defense; however, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, the United States government started relocating Native Americans entirely because the government wanted their land. “These Indian nations, in the view of the settlers and many other white Americans, were standing in the way of progress” (Vanderstel) and from the white Americans having that land for cotton. It seemed that the United States government would do anything to acquire the land that the Eastern Native Americans owned and they did just that with the relocation of tribes to reservations. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson passed the “Indian Removal Act.” Through this act,

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