The Trail of Tears was the forced removal of around 60,000 Native Americans—including the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole—from their ancestral lands in the southeastern United States to designated “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi River during the 1830s. Ordered under the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and carried out under President Andrew Jackson, the march was brutal: thousands lost their lives from disease, exposure, starvation, and exhaustion. The Cherokee alone lost