Furthermore, their differences meant that Indians and whites could not live together. Once an Indian, they believed, always an Indian. The assumption that distinct cultures reflected racial differences began to take hold in the United States, and policy makers increasingly believed that American Indians could not be assimilated. In Europe, for example, the Congress of Vienna in 1815 had tried to redraw the national boundaries of post-Napoleonic Europe to reflect the supposed innate differences among people. These efforts had barely gotten underway when objections arose.Д«y the 1820s, new ideas about human differences as immutable had begun to emerge on both sides of the Atlantic. The United States appointed agents to live among the tribes, hired farmers and artisans to teach the Indians skills, and provided funds for missionaries to establish schools and churches.

Therefore, American Indians could be вЂњcivilizedвЂќ and assimilated into white American culture as individuals. Cultural disparities, policy makers had thought, stemmed from education and opportunity, not inherent differences. The Enlightenment idea that вЂњall men are created equalвЂќ had shaped US Indian policy in the three decades following the writing of the Constitution. This change of heart accompanied an intellectual shift in the United States and Europe. In the 1820s, however, some politicians, most notably Andrew Jackson, began to question the practice of making treaties with, and thereby recognizing the sovereignty of, Indian nations. Treaties that regulated trade, cemented alliances, and provided for the cession of land became a cornerstone of US Indian policy. In order to cement their title, colonial governments recognized the legitimacy of tribal governments by entering into treaties with them, something only sovereign nations do. When Native people died out, moved away, or forfeited their rights, the European title became absolute. The use of that neutral sanitized term obscures both the motivations and effects of the policy.Д®uropean legal principles, which the United States inherited, recognized a вЂњright of discovery,вЂќ which gave title to newfound land to the Christian, вЂњcivilizedвЂќ European nation that discovered it and limited the rights of indigenous вЂњsavageвЂќ peoples to occupancy.

In this period, the dispossession of Indians fell under a federal policy called вЂњremoval,вЂќ taken from the title of the 1830 Indian Removal Act that authorized the negotiation of treaties to rid the east of American Indians. A student at a mission school in the Cherokee Nation, which lay within the chartered borders of Georgia, North Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee, demanded to know, вЂњthey have got more land than they can use, what do they want to get ours for?вЂќ American Indians have grappled with that question ever since Europeans arrived, and historians have tried to understand exactly what motivated hostility to Indians, especially peaceable groups such as the Cherokees and others, who were ejected from their homelands in the early nineteenth century. In 1828 pressure was building among white Americans for the relocation of American Indians from the eastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi River.

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