Indian Removal Act of 1830.

If I could change an event in American history, I would eliminate the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

This is one of those moments where America had a choice—and I believe we made the wrong one.

President Andrew Jackson strongly supported the law, which authorized the federal government to negotiate the removal of Native American nations living east of the Mississippi River to lands farther west.

The justification was that settlers wanted the land and that removing Native peoples would supposedly reduce conflict between them and the expanding United States.

But let’s call it what it was.

People were living on land that other people wanted.

Instead of finding a way for both populations to live under the law while respecting existing Native lands and agreements, the government pursued removal.

Thousands of Native Americans were eventually forced from their homes. The Cherokee removal became known as the Trail of Tears, during which thousands died from disease, exposure, hunger and the terrible conditions of the journey.

And here’s what makes this one especially troubling to me.

The Cherokee weren’t simply refusing every attempt at coexistence. By the 1820s and 1830s, they had established a written constitution and government, developed a written language, published a newspaper and pursued their rights through the American legal system.

They even took their fight to the Supreme Court.

Yet removal still happened.

If I could go back to 1830, I would take a completely different approach.

Honor the treaties.

Recognize Native property and territorial rights.

Use the courts to settle disputes.

Allow Native nations and the growing United States to develop alongside one another rather than assuming expansion required one group to be pushed out of the way.

Would that have been easy?

Absolutely not.

America was expanding rapidly, settlers wanted land, states wanted control over territory within their borders, and conflicts between completely different cultures and governments were inevitable.

But difficult isn’t the same thing as impossible.

Perhaps America could have developed a better system of coexistence. Perhaps Native nations could have retained considerably more of their ancestral lands while gradually becoming economically and politically integrated with the surrounding country on terms they had actually agreed to.

We will never know.

What we do know is that removal didn’t end America’s conflicts with Native peoples. In many ways, it simply moved those conflicts westward.

So if I could change one event in American history, I would eliminate the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and replace removal with negotiation, enforceable treaties and coexistence.

America’s expansion may have been inevitable.

The suffering caused by the way we chose to accomplish it wasn’t.