The Trail of Tears in US Settlement Colonialism

The Supreme Court ruled in the 1880s that indigenous people writ large are not citizens and don't enjoy the same kind of civil rights as anyone else because they are essentially domestic dependent nations. That is a really consequential legal principle. It's often how I teach the history of settler colonialism in the US and its relationship to US Empire more broadly. And so the notion all of the ways that the state often authorizes its severe intrusion into people's lives, abducting them, kidnapping them, taking them away from their families, displacing them... gets strengthened by these sorts of legal principles.