Susan Sleeper-Smith

Great book! We hear about the so-called five civilized tribes of the South and their Trail of Tears, but too little about the Native Americans of the Great Lakes and their Trail of Death during Jacksonian Indian Removal. The later were usually portrayed as primitive nomads, however careful research, especially in French and Catholic sources shows how prosperous they were, with extensive crops and orchards, when the Americans demanded their land. Another topic drowned in our jingoistic history is how some bands and individuals remained in their country, despite ongoing attempts to ship them west. At the same time slave catchers were hunting runaway slaves from the deep south, “Conductors” and State militias were combing the Midwest for Indians to tear away from hearth and home for the Great American Desert. One reason there is so little of a paper trail is they had to keep a low profile, hide in plain sight or back in less accessible marshes, even avoiding the 1840 and 1850 census, which I’ve already discovered to be the case with some of my ‘missing’ ancestors. Racism was rife, people tried to ‘pass’ into white society just as lighter skinned blacks did, hiding links to their origins, which makes their descendants root search difficult or impossible, even with DNA.… (més)