Editing Trail of Tears (section)

=== Historical background ===
Before 1838, the fixed boundaries of these autonomous [[Federally recognized tribe|Indian nations]], comprising large areas of the United States, were subject to continual cession and annexation, in part due to pressure from [[Squatting|squatters]] and the threat of military force in the newly declared [[Territories of the United States|U.S. territories]]—federally administered regions whose boundaries supervened upon the Indian treaty claims. As these territories became [[U.S. state]]s, state governments sought to dissolve the boundaries of the Indian nations within their borders, which were independent of state jurisdiction, and to expropriate the land therein. These pressures were exacerbated by U.S. population growth and the expansion of [[slavery]] in the South, with the rapid development of cotton cultivation in the uplands after the invention of the [[cotton gin]] by [[Eli Whitney]].<ref name="Jahoda">{{Cite book |last=Jahoda |first=Gloria |url=https://archive.org/details/trailoftears00jaho |title=Trail of Tears: The Story of the American Indian Removal 1813-1855 |publisher=Wings Books |year=1975 |isbn=978-0-517-14677-4}}</ref>

Many people of the southeastern Indian nations had become [[Economic integration|economically integrated]] into the economy of the region. This included the plantation economy and the possession of slaves, who were also forcibly relocated during the removal.<ref name="Jahoda" />

Prior to Jackson's presidency, removal policy was already in place and justified by the myth of the "[[Vanishing Indian]]".<ref>{{Cite book |last=O'Brien |first=Jean |title=Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England |publisher=[[University of Minnesota Press]] |year=2010 |isbn=978-1452915258}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Berkhofer |first=Robert |title=The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian, from Columbus to the Present |year=1979 |isbn=9780394727943 |pages=29 |publisher=[[Alfred A. Knopf|Knopf Doubleday Publishing]]}}</ref> Historian Jeffrey Ostler explains that "Scholars have exposed how the discourse of the vanishing Indian was an ideology that made declining Indigenous American populations seem to be an inevitable consequence of natural processes and so allowed Americans to evade moral responsibility for their destructive choices".<ref name="Ostler2019">{{Cite book |last=Ostler |first=Jeffrey |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvgc629z |title=Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas |date=2019 |publisher=[[Yale University Press]] |isbn=978-0-300-21812-1 |doi=10.2307/j.ctvgc629z |jstor=j.ctvgc629z |s2cid=166826195}}</ref> Despite the common association of Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears, ideas for Removal began prior to Jackson's presidency. Ostler explains,&nbsp;"A singular focus on Jackson obscures the fact that he did not invent the idea of removal…Months after the passage of the Removal Act, Jackson described the legislation as the 'happy consummation' of a policy 'pursued for nearly 30 years{{'"}}.<ref name="Ostler2019" /> [[James Fenimore Cooper]] was also a key component of the maintenance of the "vanishing Indian" myth. This vanishing narrative can be seen as existing prior to the Trail of Tears through Cooper's novel ''[[The Last of the Mohicans]]''. Scholar and author [[Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz]] shows that:

{{blockquote|Cooper has the last of the 'noble' and 'pure' Natives die off as nature would have it, with the 'last Mohican' handing the continent over to Hawkeye, the nativized settler, his adopted son&nbsp;... Cooper had much to do with creating the US origin myth to which generations of historians have dedicated themselves, fortifying what historian Francis Jennings has described as "exclusion from the process of formation of American society and culture".<ref name="Dunbar-Ortiz2014" />}}