USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -Between the 1830 Indian Removal Act and 1850, the U.S. government used forced treaties and/or U.S. Army action to move about 100, 000 American Indians living east of the Mississippi River, westward to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma.

Detailed explanation-2: -Under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole nations – known as the Five Tribes – were forced from their ancestral homelands in the southeast and relocated to “Indian Territory, ” as Oklahoma was then designated.

Detailed explanation-3: -The Shawnee and Delaware ceded lands in Missouri for land in Kansas. The Kaskaskia and Peoria ceded lands in Illinois and Missouri. The small nations of Stockbridge, Munsee, Brotherton, and New York Oneida ceded lands. These nations in particular relocated in the northeast corner of Indian Territory.

Detailed explanation-4: -Working on behalf of white settlers who wanted to grow cotton on the Indians’ land, the federal government forced them to leave their homelands and walk hundreds of miles to a specially designated “Indian Territory” across the Mississippi River.

Detailed explanation-5: -Although many Oklahoma Indians became U.S. citizens upon receiving land allotments, they ultimately lost their lands by fraud and deception from white opportunists. During the Great Depression that began in 1929 and held on into the 1930s, Indian communities suffered, as did all Americans.