#dispossession — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #dispossession, aggregated by home.social.
-
#OnThisDayInHistory: May 28, 1830, #AndrewJackson Signs #IndianRemovalAct
by Levi Rickert May 28, 2026
"On this day in 1830 — 196 years ago — President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law.
"The Act created a process that allowed the president to exchange lands west of the Mississippi River for the homelands of Native tribes in the eastern United States. In return, tribes were promised financial assistance, supplies for relocation, and the guarantee that they could live on their new lands under the protection of the United States government “forever.”
"In practice, however, the Indian Removal Act became a tool of #coercion and #dispossession. Under Jackson and his supporters, #NativeNations were pressured, bribed, and forced into signing #RemovalTreaties that stripped them of their ancestral territories across the Southeast.
"By the end of his presidency, Jackson had signed nearly 70 removal treaties, leading to the forced relocation of approximately 50,000 #NativeAmericans to what was then called #IndianTerritory, in present-day #Oklahoma. Entire nations were uprooted from lands they had inhabited for generations and pushed into unfamiliar territory designated by the federal government.
"The policy culminated in the Trail of Tears — one of the darkest chapters in American history. Thousands of Native people died from disease, #starvation, and exposure during the forced marches west, including nearly one-quarter of the #CherokeeNation.
"Because of his central role in Native removal and the suffering it caused, many Native Americans remember Jackson as the '#IndianKiller' president and continue to oppose efforts to honor him, including his image remaining on the twenty-dollar bill."
#USHistory #USPol #Genocide #TrailOfTears #NativeAmericans #NativeAmericanHistory #ForcedRelocation #HumanRightsViolations
-
"... With this arrival, this conquest, one idea reigns supreme. You are a numbers person. You believe in possession through measuring the thing. The land is this many metres, the elevation is this high off the ground. Where a traveller may have seen the land, been curious about what 50 names say about the tree, already your mind was quartering, the stake hammered right in..."
"Possession—the numbers game—requires brute strength and the willingness to eradicate the speakers too."
- Yumna Kassab, The Conquest of Land and Dream
#land #biodiversity #life #quality #diversity #dispossession #commodification #quantifiability #ratability #scalability #values #language #naming #LanguagePolicies #SettlerSociety #EuropeanColonisation #IndigenousPeoples #writers
https://meanjin.com.au/essays/the-conquest-of-land-and-dream/