Ben Franklin's world is a production of the

Omaha Institute.

Hello and welcome to and welcome to episode 297 of Ben Franklin's world.

The podcast dedicated to helping you learn more about how the people and events of our early American

past have shaped the present-day world we live in. And I'm your host, Liz

Kovart. The history of Native American land dispossession is as old as the story of colonization.

European colonists and white settlers came to the Americas and the Caribbean wanting land for farms and settlement.

So they found ways to acquire lands from indigenous peoples

by the means of negotiation, squatting, bad faith, war, and violence.

Now one of the questions that you send to my inbox on a fairly regular basis is about the period

of Indian removal during the 1830s.

It's a topic that I've always thought was a bit late to cover on this podcast because we try to cover history up to about 1820.

But you request this topic so often and the more I thought about it,

the more I realized that the history of Indian removal, even in the 1830s, is deeply rooted in the history of early America.

So today, Claudio Saint, a scholar of Native American history at the University of Georgia and the author of the book

Unworthy Republic, The Disposition of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory,

joins us to discuss the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and how Native Americans in the

southeastern part of the United States were removed from their homelands and

resettled in areas of what is now southeastern Kansas and Oklahoma.

Now as we investigate Indian removal with Claudio, Claudio reveals the origins of the Indian

Removal Act of 1830 and what the Act meant for Native Americans living in the southeastern United States.

Information about how the Act passed Congress amid much opposition.

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