Cherokee Removal on the Trail of Tears through Southern Missouri

Historical archeologist Erin Whitson examines one of the darkest times in our nation as 60,000 Native Americans were forced from their ancestral lands on the deadly Trail of Tears to Oklahoma. In 1889, Wahnenauhi (Lucy Keys), a survivor of the infamous “Trail of Tears”, wrote, that “despair in its thickest blackness” settled down on the Chiefs of the Cherokee as they prepared their people to relocate from their traditional homelands to “Indian Territory” in 1838. Whitson will discuss how archaeological approaches may provide ways to better see aspects of Removal that have been overlooked and how collaborative approaches offer descendants space to explore their histories in the places where their ancestors lived and died.