Earlier today I reported New York critic Howard Halle's comment re Palestinian-American Emily Jacir's show: "It’s also worth noting that when, for example,
Andrew Jackson evicted the Cherokee from Georgia, there was no CNN or
BBC to report the fact, no horde of indignant university students to
condemn his actions. Israel enjoys no such refuge from international
opprobrium."
It's always a mistake to be glib on the internet.
Even though that ethnic cleansing took place 170 years ago, good people opposed it. A friend sent along the following link. In 1838 Ralph Waldo Emerson was appalled to learn that the US was planning to remove the Cherokees from Georgia and, with the hope that the Indians "shall taste justice and love from all to whom we have delegated the office of dealing with them," wrote this letter to President Martin Van Buren:
The newspapers now inform us that, in December, 1835, a treaty
contracting for the exchange of all the Cherokee territory was
pre-tended to be made by an agent on the part of the United States with
some persons appearing on the part of the Cherokees; that the fact
afterwards transpired that these deputies did by no means represent the
will of the nation; and that, out of eighteen thousand souls composing
the nation, fifteen thousand six hundred and sixty-eight have protested
against the so-called treaty. It now appears that the government of the
United States choose to hold the Cherokees to this sham treaty, and are
proceeding to execute the same. Almost the entire Cherokee Nation stand
up and say, " This is not our act. Behold us. Here are we. Do not
mistake that handful of deserters for us ; " and the American President
and the Cabinet, the Senate and the House of Representatives, neither
hear these men nor see them, and are contracting to put this active
nation into carts and boats, and to drag them over mountains and rivers
to a wilderness at a vast distance beyond the Mississippi. And a paper
purporting to be an army order fixes a month from this day as the hour
for this doleful removal.
In the name of God, sir, we ask you if this be so. Do the newspapers
rightly inform us? Men and women with pale and perplexed faces meet one
another in the streets and churches here, and ask if this be so. We
have inquired if this be a gross misrepresentation from the party
opposed to the government and anxious to blacken it with the people. We
have looked in the newspapers of different parties and find a horrid
confirmation of the tale. We are slow to believe it. We hoped the
Indians were misinformed, and that their remonstrance was pre-mature,
and will turn out to be a needless act of terror.
