Two of his principal arguments-that mass expulsion wasn’t inevitable and that it was a “turning point for indigenous peoples and for the United States”-are largely accepted among scholars. In Unworthy Republic, Claudio Saunt, a historian at the University of Georgia, offers a damning synthesis of the federal betrayals, mass deportations, and exterminatory violence that defined the 1830s. “They are on an outside of us,” a Senate committee exulted, “and in a place which will ever remain an outside.” More than 25,000 Native people died. Over the next decade, the United States repeated the pattern from Ohio to Alabama, banishing some 80,000 women, men, and children beyond the Mississippi River, to the western fringe of an unabashed American empire. Survivors called their new home “the Land of Death.”Įxpulsion was a windfall for the white Mississippians who raced into Choctaw houses, harvesting the crops and supping on the spoils.
Abandoning the schools, spinning wheels, and carpentry shops they had built throughout what is now Mississippi, the Choctaw embarked on an arduous journey to Oklahoma, their eviction “an experiment on human life,” as an outraged Massachusetts congressman warned. Now they were being forced west anyway, the first indigenous nation to be expelled from its ancestral homelands under President Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act. official had ensured their territory in perpetuity. The Choctaw had fought alongside Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812, and a U.S. “And yet here you are, still part of the mix, still part of this family, still devoted to them in many ways.T hey held back tears as they left, touching the autumn leaves one last time. “Beyond the question of how could all this happen to just one family, the real driving question for me in writing the book was: You could’ve walked away from this family at the age of 18, moved to L.A., gone to law school, become a lawyer, sent them Christmas cards once a year and be done with it,” Kolker says of the daughters. Among the many fascinating elements of the story, Kolker says on this week’s podcast, is the fate of the family’s two daughers, neither of whom had the disease, and their desire for Kolker to tell the Galvins’ story.
Robert Kolker’s new book, “Hidden Valley Road,” tells the terrifying story of the Galvins, a large family beset by schizophrenia - six of its 12 children were afflicted with the disease. Subscribe: iTunes | Google Play Music | How to Listen
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