Elsie Law's Daily Dose Of The Law

Before "terrorists" became a "threat to national security." The American government deemed Native Americans as threats to the nation's security. This label was placed on America's original inhabitants when the government enacted a plan to seize America's valuable land from them.

The Indian Removal Policy was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Jackson. States, notably Georgia, began to implement sinister methods of removing Native Americans from their land- citing their "legal right" to do so.

In the book, "The Cherokee Nation and The Trail of Tears," authors- Perdue & Green state: "Georgia's legislation of harassment rested on three motivations. The most powerful was the desire to acquire the nearly five million acres the Cherokee Nation held and refused to sell. Some Georgia politicians dreamed of building a canal through to the Tennessee River and thus giving Georgia access to the vast interior market served by the Ohio-Mississippi River network. But most saw the land as the means to cement their political futures...Legislation that denied Cherokees the right to testify in court but subjected them to Georgia law threw open the door to legalized theft of their property, brutalization of their persons, and intimidation of every conceivable kind. Legislation that declared Cherokee law null and void, forbade the Cherokee government to function...Georgia justified its campaign of land grabbing and legal aggression by claiming it had a charter right as one of the original colonies to exercise dominion over all the land and people within its borders."

[SIDEBAR: When legal rights and moral rights don't line up together, disaster strikes on several different levels.]