This persuasive essay was submitted to ICTMN by Matthew Scraper, Megan Scraper's father. Megan, 12, is a student at Marlow Middle School in Oklahoma. They are citizens of the Cherokee Nation, and Matthew pointed out that their last name is an English translation of the Cherokee word disugasgi, which means something along the lines of the one who repeatedly scrapes the skin. She chose to write about the Trail of Tears on her own when given a class assignment.
The Trail of Tears set a national precedent for the confiscation of Indian lands. What this means is it started the Removal Era, and later the Land Run Era that included land that had once been Cherokee without any respect for the people who lived there before. They wanted the land for a few reasons, but a couple are: farming, and belief in the existence of gold. They were told that it would only happen once, but it continued on with different tribes later, after it happened during the Trail of Tears.
A fact you may not know is that the Trail of Tears represented the largest percentage of deaths within a single indigenous tribe due to the action of the U.S. government in American Indian history. This killed around 4,000 members of the Cherokee tribe. These people died because of lots of reasons: poor weather conditions, little food and water, long walks with little rest, sickness with no medicine, and lastly being killed by soldiers.
This is a word that people use when someone tries to wipe out an entire race: genocide. That happened to these people, my people, it was very hard for them for many reasons, but they weren't allowed to give their loved ones proper burial rites, they had to bury them on the side of the Trail and then just keep walking. Can you imagine having to bury a family member on the side of the road and then just having to leave them there? The deaths of these people, my people, were very hard on the Indians. The name of the Trail of Tears actually came from a Cherokee phrase that meant the place where they cried.
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