(inspirational music)(waves crashing)- This continent has someof the most dramaticlandscapes on the planet.From the ocean shorelinesto the alpine mountainsand the sandy deserts,and also in this landmass from coast to coast,and everywhere in betweenthere lived hundreds,if not thousands of different nations,tribes of people whose landthis was, this was their home.But then others showedup to these shorelinesin their boats, and thatis when everything changed.(pensive music)(text clicking)(button clicking)(lively music)Okay.(hands rubbing)In the spring of 1803,two American politiciansvisiting Paris closed thesweetest real estate dealthey had ever seen.With the simple stroke of a pen,their country doubled in size,all for just $15 million.But in this deal, which wascalled the Louisiana Purchase,the US didn't actuallybuy this land from France.France didn't actually own the land.What the United States wasbuying was the imperial rightsto this huge swath of North America.This basically meant thatFrance would stay out of the wayand let the buddy new empire,the United States, colonizeit without interfering.If the United States reallywanted ownership over this land,they would need to get itfrom the people who were here first,which at the time was lotsof different native tribes.These are the people who had been herefor thousands of years,way before Europeans had the ideaof leaving their continent.And this land that the USjust bought was theirs.(dramatic music)Oh, and this isn't justme, like some modern,enlightened person looking backand judging the UnitedStates at this time.The US knew that this wasn't their landand that they were going to have to buy itfrom the people living there.And their big plan wasto do things differently,not like the old imperial powersthat they had just broken away from.In fact, George Washingtonwas quote, "Determinedthat the US government's administrationof Indian affairs shallbe directed entirelyby the great principlesof justice and humanity."Go, USA.Let's do this in the right way.So instead of conquest,they would negotiateand sign formal treatieswith these native nations.Then they would pay them fortheir land, fair and square.(camera snapping)After all, this was a countrywhose founding documenthighlights justice, tranquility,welfare, and liberty.In our series, "How the US Stole,"we get to see how the US grewfrom a group of Englishsettlers to a global superpower.But none of those storieswould exist without this one,the origin story, the firstthing that the US ever stole.(film whirring)(dramatic music)So Europeans are pouring intothis newly formed country,the United States, and thegovernment is making dealsand signing treaties with the tribes,allowing these newcomer immigrantsto settle on their land.At first, this is a fairlypeaceful transactional process.The US would offer food,farming equipment, cash,the services of a blacksmith,all exchange for ownership over this land.But unsurprisingly, a lot ofthese tribes had no interestin moving out of their ancestral landsin exchange for like farming equipment.And this is where all ofGeorge Washington's idealsof justice and humanityreally start to dissolve.The US was becoming amore powerful nation.They needed more land fortheir booming population.So the inpatient settlersand their governmentstarted playing dirty.- [Reporter] The westward movementwas like a green tidal wave.- You start to see what happenswhen these tribes say noto the newly powerful United States.In one instance, one group oftribes up near the Great Lakesdidn't wanna sell their land.They told the United Statesthat this river would be the borderand to not cross it,to stay off their land.The US said no.And they took them to war and lost twice.But on the third time, they won the battleand forced the tribes tosign a treaty giving away allof this land, basicallyall of present-day Ohio.Something very similar happened down herewhen the Seminole tribesrefused to leave their land,the US military came in,another war killing thousands,forcing the tribes to sign a treatyand pushing them into the swampy interiorof the state where they had no accessto their farmland or the ocean.Down here in what was becoming Alabama,the Muskogee nation refusedto sign a relocation treatybut not wanting to go to war,agreed to sell a portion of their landin return for a guaranteethat they could keep the rest.And the United States agreed,and they actually did.And the Muskogee kept theirancestral lands forever.Wamp, wamp, no, that didn't happen.Four years later, a bunchof white settlers moved in,boxing the Muskogee outof their ancestral land.As tensions grew becauseof this violated agreement,the US military was called into force the Muskogee out of their lands.No treaty was ever signed.I mean, the shenanigansranged the whole gamut here.They would get triballeaders drunk to trick theminto signing this paperthat gave them all the land.They would appoint randompeople to be the tribal leadersand then tell them to sign away the landfor the whole tribe.In another conflict, theSioux and Arapaho nationsdefeated the US military over and overuntil the US finallysigned a peace treaty,acknowledging their land.(text clicking)And they were safeuntil gold was discoveredeight years laterand the US broke theirtreaty, redrew the boundaries,built roads on their land.And before you know it, you've got a bunchof white guys with goldpans harvesting this land.Treaties and justice be damned.(dramatic music)Eventually, other tribes caughtonto what was gonna happen, realizingthat refusing the USgovernment would mean violence.So they would sign the paper,take the money and leave.Over the course of almost 100 years,the United States signed 368 treatieswith tribal nations whowere driven out one wayor another to make wayfor white settlers who established controlover this land that theirgovernment had stolen for them.And yes, you have all the paperwork,all the spreadsheetsthat they were making,all the treaties, a nice paper trailbut this was all a facade of justice,a thinly veiled campaignfor imperial conquest.(dramatic music)Before we go on to the story,I just needed to tell youthat we don't have asponsor for today's video.Lately, I've been hearingfrom some sponsors that myvideos are too political,which is kind of a bummerbecause we work really hardto tell really cool stories.And if that meansthat people don't want tosponsor us, that's fine.Luckily, we have a Patreonwhere all of you can support this work.It's called The Newsroom.We call it The Newsroom'cause it just sounds cooler than Patreon.But it is a place where youcan support what we are doing,which is something more and more we need.On The Newsroom, you getan extra video every month.It's a behind-the-scenesvlog from all of the peopleand processes and happeningsaround here in the studio.You get to see my scripts.You get royalty free musicfrom our composer, Tom Fox,that you can use in yourvideos and live Q&As with me.Members of The Newsroom getto chat with me on a Q&Awhere they can ask me anything.But more importantly, youget the warm, fuzzy feelingof supporting independent journalism.And if that floats yourboat, you can go to the linkin my description,patreon.com/JohnnyHarris.Let's get back to the story.Okay, so we have all of thislike fake treaty shenanigansgoing on to help the United States feellike they're doingjustice and it's working.They are moving loads of native people outof their ancestral lands sothat white people can settle it.But there was one region thatproved particularly difficultfor this exterminationproject that was going down.Here in the deep south,you had these five largenations that lived side by sidewith the settlers for a long time.They had all signed treatieswith the United Statesthat acknowledged theirright to this land.Many of them spokeEnglish, practiced farming,wore European clothes,some even owned slaves.Because of this,these five tribes, theCherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw,Muskogee, and Seminole were knownas the five civilized tribes.And there's an alternativeworld where these tribescould have remained on theirland living side by sidewith the Europeans as they settled.But that's not what happened,mostly because of cotton.(pensive music)Farmers down here weregetting super rich offof a very valuable cash crop called cottonthat they could sell totextile mills around the world.It was an industry madeeven more profitableby its key input: freelabor from stolen Africans.There was this one stripof land down here calledthe Black Belt Prairiethat was particularlydesirable for farming cotton.But as you can see, it was locked upin what the United Statestreaties had formally acknowledgedas belonging to Native Nations.But the farmers down herewere looking at this as likethis is a perfect place toexpand our cotton kingdom.So these southern slaveowners did what was kindof becoming US policytowards the people living onthe land that they wanted.They made up their own rules.The state of Georgia wasparticularly aggressivein trying to clear thisland out, or in the wordsof their governor at thetime to replace, quote,"All of the red with white population."They targeted the Cherokeenation, passing a lawthat abolished their governments.The Cherokee are not gonna stand for this.So they fight back usingthe same shenanigansthat the United States is trying to use:the US legal system.They take Georgia to court,a case that went all the wayto the Supreme Court.And guess what?The Cherokee Nation won.Like there was no wayaround the fact thatthey had ironclad rightsto this land signed and sealed.The highest court inthe country just ruledthat the states could notimpose on tribal sovereignty.But as we all learned in government class,a ruling from thejudicial branch only worksif the executive branch enforces it.Oh, and who was in chargeof the executive branch?Oh, this guy.The guy who wrote a letter to his wifeduring the War of 1812from the battlefield sayingthat he had successfullyslaughtered 170 Native Americansin quote, "An elegant style."Oh, and the guy who's on our $20 bill.Yeah, him, Andrew Jackson thoughtthat negotiating treaties with the peoplewho were living herewas a ridiculous notion.So he looks at the Supreme Court rulingthat validates the Cherokeesright to their land.And he literally respondsin the snarkiest way possible saying,the chief justice JohnMarshall has, quote,"Made his decision.Now let him enforce it."No, he was not going to enforce it.Jackson had a different plan in mind.It came in the form of a new lawthat he pushed throughboth Houses of Congress.His whole worldview towardsFirst Americans embodiedin a piece of American legislation,the Indian Removal Act of 1830.This law used taxpayermoney to get tribes outof the United States,and to relocate them toan uninhabitable placethat surely no Americansettler will ever end up.- [Reporter] The great plainsseemed an inhospitable landto people familiar with theeastern states and of Europe.- This became their dumping groundand it came with a promise.Move here and we willnever mess with you again.And what's crazy to meis that even after all of theshenanigans, all the facades,they continued to play thischarade saying that the nationof Indians may chooseto exchange their landwhere they now reside.The law says that the governmenthad to negotiate thesetreaties fairly, voluntarily,peacefully, and that thegovernment would, quote,"Forever secure and guaranteethem their new land."And that they wouldn't break anyof the preexisting agreementsthat they had made in previous treaties.But no, this was just morepretending, a paper trailof pretend humanity.Just as Andrew Jackson hadignored the Supreme Court ruling,he had no intentionin following the lawthat he helped create.But he kept up the ruse, moredocuments, more signatures,more paper that madethese civilized justice-minded people feellike they weren't orchestratinga mass ethnic cleansingsanctioned by the government,paid for by taxes.But they were.So this law is implementedand the United States government, militaryand even privatecompanies start to ramp uptheir removal efforts of First Americans.They focused in on these five tribesthat were sitting atop the landthat they wanted for their cotton empire.More bribes, more pretend negotiations.And when push came to shove,more threats of violence.The Cherokee eventuallysigned a treaty agreeingto sell their last portion of land.And they moved west outto their little rectangleof land that had been allocatedto them by the government on maps.The only problem was that the leaderwho signed the treaty on behalfof the Cherokee people wasnot actually the real leader.They had no authorityto make this decision.The Cherokee chieffuriously protested thisbut the US didn't care.They had their signature from someone.In their eyes, all was justified.(pensive music)Between 1831 and 1838, nearly every memberfrom the five tribes wasexpelled from their land.100,000 people whose home this wasnow forced to walk by footfor more than 1,000 milesthrough brutal weather andterrain towards a little boxon the map, a place theyhad never been before.The Cherokee would eventuallycall this journey The TrailWhere We Cried or The Trail of Tears.Some tried to fight backagainst their oppressorsand others stood their grounduntil they were forcibly boundin chains by the US governmentand herded west at gunpoint.Their land was vacant and cotton farmerswith their slaves movedin and the economy grew.(dramatic music)We'll never know how manypeople died during all of this.How many lives were really destroyed.Some people say 3,000,other estimates say 15,000but you don't need those numbers to seehow destructive this was.It was systematic, it was documentedand it was enshrined in law.We've a paper trail of allof it showing the receipts,the payments, the treaties,the bureaucracy of it all.It's like a bunch ofspreadsheets from the 1800s.American settlers, in aneffort to be differentfrom the Old World empires they fled,ended up carrying outthe first state-sponsoredethnic cleansing.There's a reason whyHitler 100 years laterreferences this exact event, this processwhen he was carrying outhis own ethnic cleansing.He said that the Volga,which is a river in Russia,would be, quote, "Our Mississippi."He said that Europe,not America would be the landof unlimited possibilities.(dramatic music)The story of what happenedto many nations of the FirstAmericans doesn't end here.In fact, this is kind of the beginning.We're gonna make a secondpart to this video.And in that part two, I wannashow you what happens nextonce these tribes arriveto their little rectangle onthe map, Indian territory,the place where thesetribes were forced out,dumped and left to build a new lifeand how they once againtried to fight backusing the legal frameworksthat had pushed them outand how all of that led tothe establishment of one statein our country that couldhave looked a lot different.(pensive music)Hey, thanks for watching this video.I need to tell you about something.We have a poster.I finally have a poster.I've been dreaming about thisposter for a very long time.All maps are wrong and indeed they are.This poster shows dozensof map projections,all the weird quirky shapes that you getwhen you try to map a sphere,which is what our globe isonto a piece of paper, whichis flat is available right now.You can go buy it and doingso supports this channelbut it also gets youa really sweet poster.We printed it on really nice paper.I spent a very long timenudging every one of these maps.I got help from some of my best friendsand designers like Beckifrom Becki and Chrisis like a really earlygood graphic designer.I literally sent her the Illustrator fileand I was like, "Hey,can you like do this?"And she was like, "I got you."So she made it better.Anyway, it's a fantastic cool thingand I'm really excited about it.So link in the description.We also have a big thinggoing on over at Patreon.A few thousand people areover there supporting usso that we can make more videos like this.Something I am very grateful for.So that's patreon.com/JohnnyHarris.What else do I need to tell you about?Maybe things like LUTs and presets.We use LUTs to color our videos.If I don't put my LUT on thisvideo, it looks like this.Yeah.It'd be really bad.So we worked with a professionalcolorist to make this LUTso that our videos look likethis and it's much better.So we do that alsofor photos of presets forlike Lightroom and stuff.Those are available in the description.This startup that Ifounded a few years agois still cruising along.Bright Trip.We're publishing courses aboutcool places around the world.You can go check that out.Boy, what else?I mean, more importantly,we're just gonna keep making videos.So thanks for being here.We'll see you in the next one.(hands knocking)End tag bonanza.Look at these people.(lively music)
