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- By Native News Online Staff
This Day in History. On this day in 1830, 195 years ago, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act.
The Act established a process whereby the president could grant land west of the Mississippi River to Indian tribes that agreed to give up their homelands. As incentives, the law allowed the Indians financial and material assistance to travel to their new locations and start new lives and guaranteed that the Indians would live on their new property under the protection of the United States Government forever.
With the Indian Removal Act in effect, President Andrew Jackson and his supporters were able to coerce, bribe, and pressure Native American tribes into signing removal treaties that forced them to leave their ancestral lands in the southeastern United States.
By the end of his presidency, Jackson had signed nearly seventy such treaties, resulting in the forced relocation of approximately 50,000 Native Americans to what was then designated as Indian Territory. This area, located west of the Mississippi River, excluded the states of Missouri and Iowa as well as the Arkansas Territory. The government intended for the displaced tribes to settle in a more limited region—what would later become eastern Oklahoma—despite the vastness of the territory.
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