The spectacle of Mother Earth cleansing and cooling herself is mesmerizing
– even for those who can’t quite make out what they’re watching on
television – and the consequences for people and other living beings are
enough to break the hearts of all but the stoniest of characters.

The sadness and hurt on the faces of the Gulf Coast evacuees, especially
the elders and children as they leave their homes and all their precious
things, make me understand more about my Muscogee ancestors in the deltas
and bayous of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.

I look at the tragedies appearing endlessly on the cable stations, at the
pain of people too stunned to cry or too angry to stop their tears. One
after another whispers or shouts or speaks in the perfectly modulated tones
of shock about loss and not knowing if they will ever see anyone or
anything familiar again.

I see the people evacuating New Orleans and Mobile and Pass Christian, and
imagine them with Muscogee faces – but the Muscogee removal was with hands
and feet in chains, with bayonets at their backs.

The Muscogee people were forced to march by orders from Pres. Andrew
Jackson from home to hard places, from night to day, from happy lives to
early graves. Thousands were murdered, starved and walked to death.

People read about the Trails of Tears – and all Native nations have had at
least one – as movements of peoples, without appreciating the humanity of
the individuals.

Grant Foreman wrote about the humanity and documented the Trails of Tears
of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, as well as the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw
and Seminole Nations, in his 1932 “Indian Removal,” describing them as
“people of fixed habits and tastes.”

Foreman, an author and former Dawes Commission attorney, wrote that the
“southern Indians” were not “nomads like some western Indians” and were
“less inclined to wander to strange places than white people.”

“They loved their streams and valleys, their hills, and forests; their
fields and herds, their homes and firesides, families and friends; they
were rooted in the soil as Choctaw Chief Pushmataha said, ‘where we have
grown up as the herbs of the woods.’

“More than white people they cherished a passionate attachment for the
earth that held the bones of their ancestors and relatives. Few white
people either understood or respected this sentiment. The trees that shaded
their homes, the cooling spring that ministered to every family, friendly
watercourses, familiar trails and prospects, busk grounds, and council
houses were their property and their friends; these simple possessions
filled their lives; their, loss was cataclysmic.

“It is doubtful if white people with their readier adaptability can
understand the sense of grief and desolation that overwhelmed the Indians
when they were compelled to leave all these behind forever and begin the
long sad journey toward the setting sun which they called the Trail of
Tears.”

The Trails of Tears were spawned by Gen. Andrew Jackson, who enjoyed a long
career of fighting Indians: and the ones he despised the most were Creeks.
Jackson went on to Congress, where he and his former military cronies took
over the Indian affairs committees and crafted the first Indian removal
bill, which he signed into law just weeks after his presidential
inauguration.

The Creeks and other so-called “civilized tribes” were coerced into removal
treaties and driven at gunpoint to Indian territory. Foreman compiles
descriptions from myriad sources to document the removal of one group in
this way:

“It was ‘very slow moving them in irons, chained together, and Montgomery
is the nearest point we could take water,’ wrote Capt. John Page. The
sullen warriors, manacled and chained, marched in double file. The
venerable Chief Eneah Emathla (at 84) was not exempt from this humiliation
…

“In the wake of the manacled warriors followed a long train of wagons and
ponies conveying the children and the old women and sick who were unable to
walk. As they approached Montgomery where they were to be placed aboard the
boats, their despair led them to commit numbers of excesses: One warrior
who was being brought through the streets in a wagon, drew a knife and cut
his throat; another killed a guard with a hammer and was shot dead; another
was bayoneted by a guard …

“On July 14, 2,498 of these unhappy people … were crowded aboard two
little river steamboats … and two barges in tow of each, and conveyed
down the Alabama to Mobile. ‘From the inauspicious season of the year and
the crowded condition on the boats’ the Montgomery Advertiser predicted the
Indians would suffer much from disease.

“This body included 900 Yuchi and 500 Kasihta … Twenty-three hundred of
them were embarked aboard two boats that evening for the Mississippi river;
the next night a severe storm was encountered and the terrified Creeks were
battered in the holds of the vessels for safe keeping.

“These Indians reached New Orleans on the eighteenth. ‘One of the barges
was retained for the purpose of taking the sick, infirm, children and
baggage up the Canal, and was towed by the Indians themselves to their
present encampment’ … ‘The excessive rains of Monday night, and which
continued nearly without interruption all of yesterday, have proved
peculiarly unfortunate to these poor savages … They have put up a few
rude tents, which afford them, however, but feeble protection against the
driving rains.’

“‘… The flies are most distressing; a horse can hardly be controlled from
lying down to roll, such is the torment. The heat is excessive and the
water of the worst description.’”

Foreman quotes from a Dec. 25, 1836 letter from Little Rock, which was
printed in the New York Observer on Feb. 11, 1837, to describe another
group:

“Thousands of [the emigrating Creeks] are entirely destitute of shoes or
cover of any kind for their feet; many of them are almost naked, and but
few of them anything more on their persons than a light dress calculated
only for the summer, or for a warm climate … In this destitute condition,
they are wading in cold mud, or are hurried on over the frozen ground, as
the case may be. Many of them have in this way had their feet frostbitten;
and being unable to travel, fall in the rear of the main party, and in this
way are left on the road to await the ability or convenience of the
contractors to assist them. Many of them, not being able to endure this
unexampled state of human suffering, die, and are thrown by the side of the
road, and are covered over only with brush, etc. – where they remain until
devoured by wolves.

“… When the extreme of winter does fall upon these most miserable
creatures, in their present suffering and desperate condition, the
destruction of human life will be most deplorable.”

Revisiting this history with the perspective of today’s man-made and
natural disasters makes me appreciate even more the Muscogee and other
ceremonial people of this time who stoop low with humility to carry
medicine to honor those who carried council fires on their backs.

This is in appreciation for those who keep the fires in Oklahoma and
throughout the Southeast, where even those Native people who were harmed by
Katrina are sharing what they have with non-Native victims.

Why? Because we know what it means to be uprooted, dispossessed and
displaced.

Because we hear echoes in the denials that race and environmental
degradation have nothing to do with what has happened.

Because we hope that non-Native people will one day help protect the sacred
places Native people were forced to leave but never left behind.

Suzan Shown Harjo, Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee, is president of the
Morning Star Institute in Washington, D.C. and a columnist for Indian
Country Today.