Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory

Claudio Saunt narrows the focus of Native American dispossession in modern day Georgia and Florida during the Andrew Jackson administration, and that focus provides a harrowing account of a racially-driven dispossession machinery in unprecedented detail. It's hard to read some of these accounts and not see echoes of them in Nazism and other bureaucracy-driven genocides in the following years - the huge administration that was stood up to deport Native Americans, the strict accounting processes and budgets, and the dehumanization of an entire people.

Saunt deftly mixes first hand written accounts, historical records, and statistics to provide a holistic perspective on this tragedy. The juxtaposition of atrocities with current cities and attractions in Georgia and Florida is jarring, with the lack of American acknowledgement made that much more difficult to comprehend. While this is a tough read, it should be required reading for those who want to better understand a formative part of American and world history and gain perspective on current attempts to repeat it. Highly recommend

This is one of those books that should replace whatever sanitized history text is promulgated in public schools these days (I'm extrapolating from my school days). Even now, for me this was an eye opener, I hadn't realized the Trail of Tears was not a singular event but a decades long campaign of ethnic cleansing in an unholy alliance of slave owners, wannabe slave owners, real estate speculators, a president with genocidal tendencies (how is he still on the twenty dollar bill?), and New York bankers (what else is new).

Even for those in the genocide-is-bad camp, there's plenty of stereotype-confounding nuance to be learned, like how many Native Americans had thriving farms (including some with slaves, although they tended to be treated better, relatively, sometimes given their own farms like feudal serfs), many applied for citizenship and titles to their land (turns out that "come assimilate with us" was a bluff), and race was not such a notion within Native American society, there were tribes including African Americans and mixed race families. Also, the accounts of how cholera decimated populations in their forced cramp conditions (some on their journey west refused to be packed into steamboats) should turn you into a pro-masker.