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UNIT 13: Federal Indian Policy Series

Removal Era

From 1830 to 1850, the Indian Removal Act displaced tens of thousands of Tribal people from their homelands. This wasn't an accident of history - it was deliberate federal policy. This unit, you research it and publish what you find.

📜 7 Stages
ðŸŠķ Intermediate
⏱ïļ 45–60 min per stage
1830 – 1850

Federal Indian Policy Series: Unit 13 of 19

This unit is part of an eight-era series. Each era gets its own research website. When all eight are complete, you will combine them into one multi-page site in Unit 20.

Unit 12 · Treaty-Making Unit 13 · Removal Unit 14 · Reservation System Unit 15 · Allotment & Assimilation Unit 16 · Reorganization Unit 17 · Termination Unit 18 · Self-Determination Unit 19 · Nation Rebuilding

The Big Idea

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 wasn't a natural disaster or an inevitable outcome. It was a law. Signed by a president who openly defied a Supreme Court ruling to enforce it. Tens of thousands of people were forcibly moved from their homelands - and many nations in Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota carry that history directly.

In this unit, you'll build a research website about the Removal Era. The new CSS pattern is an accordion - a collapsible section where readers click to expand each panel. You'll use it for the key laws and nations of the era.

The history in this unit is hard. It's supposed to be. Knowing what happened - in detail, with names and dates - is how we make sure it's not forgotten or softened.

By the end of this unit, you'll be able to say "I can..."

  • Build a CSS accordion with collapsible sections that expand on click
  • Create a timeline section that walks through events chronologically
  • Research the Removal Era and write your own analysis of its impact
  • Document the nations affected and the resistance that happened
  • Publish your research as a professional archival website

What You'll Build

A research website about the Removal Era (1830-1850) - six sections, same Prussian blue archival design.

A section on the Indian Removal Act. An accordion of the nations affected and their stories. A resistance section - because removal was not unopposed. Connections to Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Your research in your own words.

The history in this unit is heavy. Your website handles it with the seriousness it deserves.

This era shaped the geography of Native America as we know it today. Knowing it is part of knowing who we are.

Your learning path

The 7 Stages

Stage 1 Foundation Design system + hero Stage 2 The Act Indian Removal Act 1830 Stage 3 The Nations CSS accordion: five nations Stage 4 Resistance Courts, holdouts, survival Stage 5 Northern Connections Ojibwe & Dakota removals Stage 6 My Research Live writing section Stage 7 Today Era's living impact
Let's Begin

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Sources

The historical and legal content in this unit draws from federal primary sources, peer-reviewed academic work, and Tribal nation official records. Removal-era events are documented in congressional legislation, Supreme Court decisions, and federal military records that are publicly available through the sources below. When you complete your own research for the My Research section, use the vetted resources linked in each stage's instruction panel.

Primary Legal & Legislative Sources

Academic & Scholarly Sources

  • Perdue, Theda and Michael D. Green. The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears. Penguin Library of American Indian History, 2007. The most widely cited academic account of Cherokee removal, including the internal political division over the Treaty of New Echota.
  • Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. Beacon Press, 2014. Frames the Removal Era within the broader history of U.S. settler colonialism and its connection to ongoing Indigenous dispossession.
  • Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848. Oxford University Press, 2007. Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the period; provides detailed context on Jackson-era politics and the congressional debates over removal.

Tribal Nation Sources

Northern Connections Sources

Timeline Reference

Student Research Resources

Educational Standards

This unit aligns with computer science, social studies, and Indigenous education standards across MN, ND, and SD. Click a panel to expand.

  • OSEU.SS.H.2, Federal Policy and Self-Determination (All Grades): Students will analyze how federal policies affected the sovereignty, land base, and self-determination of Tribal nations over time. (The Indian Removal Act is the most direct demonstration of this standard in the entire curriculum series. This unit examines the Act's text, the political conditions that produced it, and its implementation across five major nations. Students build a section documenting how the U.S. government used legislation, military force, and fraudulent treaties: like the Treaty of New Echota, signed by an unauthorized minority faction: to overcome legal, political, and physical resistance from Tribal nations asserting their sovereignty.)
  • OSEU.SS.H.1, Treaty History and Sovereignty (All Grades): Students will understand the history of treaty-making between the United States and Tribal nations, including the significance and ongoing legal force of those treaties. (The Worcester v. Georgia ruling, which students encounter in the Resistance section, is the clearest Supreme Court affirmation of treaty-based Tribal sovereignty in the removal era. Jackson's refusal to enforce it: "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it": established a precedent of federal noncompliance with its own treaty obligations that defines much of the era. Students build the Resistance section specifically to foreground this legal and political defiance.)
  • OSEU.SS.C.1, Supreme Court and Tribal Sovereignty (All Grades): Students will examine the role of the U.S. Supreme Court in defining the legal status of Tribal nations, including landmark decisions and their ongoing impact. (Worcester v. Georgia is the anchor case of the Resistance section. Students research the ruling's language, Jackson's response, and its long-term legal significance. The section asks students to write in their own words whether Worcester's affirmation of Tribal sovereignty was honored or ignored: and to connect that answer to the pattern of removal policy that followed.)
  • OSEU.ELA.W.1, Research Writing (All Grades): Students will produce clear and coherent writing appropriate to task and purpose, including research-based summaries of historical events. (The My Research section built in Stage 6 is a live-rendering writing environment: students type or paste their research and see it rendered in real time on the right side of the screen. The section is styled as a published article on their website, not a homework submission. Students also write the text content for their Resistance section cards and Northern Connections section, requiring them to synthesize source material into their own words at multiple points across the unit.)
  • CSTA 2-AP-11 (Grades 6–8): Create clearly named variables that represent different data types and perform operations on their values. (Stage 1 reuses the CSS custom property design system introduced in Unit 11 and expands it. Students practice the variable system a second time, now from the perspective of extension rather than initial creation: understanding that professional codebases are built by adding to and modifying existing variables rather than starting from scratch. This is the first time in the curriculum where students deliberately extend a prior unit's design system rather than build a new one.)
  • CSTA 2-AP-13 (Grades 6–8): Decompose problems and subproblems into parts to facilitate the design, implementation, and review of increasingly complex programs. (The CSS accordion introduced in Stage 3 is built in three distinct layers: first the HTML structure (a container, a button, and a collapsible body), then the CSS (max-height transition and overflow: hidden), then the JavaScript (classList.toggle on click). Students build each layer with understanding before adding the next. The finished five-nation accordion demonstrates how a complex interactive component is always decomposable into simpler, teachable parts.)
  • ISTE 1c, Empowered Learner: Students use technology to demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways. (The finished site is a multi-section research artifact presenting the Removal Era through the student's own research and writing. The Act section, the Nations accordion, the Resistance section, the Northern Connections section, and the My Research section each ask students to demonstrate historical understanding in a different format: summary cards, expandable nation panels, a court case breakdown, a regional connections analysis, and a free-form research article. The accordion pattern itself lets students choose what to read and in what depth, modeling the kind of self-directed inquiry that research requires.)
  • ISTE 3b, Knowledge Constructor: Students evaluate the accuracy, perspective, credibility, and relevance of information, media, data, or other resources. (Every stage's instruction panel includes vetted sources before students write a single line of code: the Library of Congress Indian Removal Act text, the National Park Service Trail of Tears documentation, Cherokee Nation's official history, and Tribal nation websites for the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, and Seminole nations. Students are directed to Tribal nation official sources rather than secondary summaries wherever possible, building the habit of going to primary and community-controlled sources for Indigenous history.)
  • MN Social Studies 8.4.4.18.1 (Grade 8): Describe the origin, development, and impact of major federal policies affecting American Indian people in Minnesota and the United States, including removal and relocation. (This unit directly addresses federal removal policy and its application in Minnesota. Stage 5: Northern Connections: focuses specifically on the 1850 Removal Order targeting Wisconsin Ojibwe and the Sandy Lake Tragedy that followed: the government concentrated Ojibwe people at Sandy Lake in Minnesota during fall and winter, where approximately 400 people died of dysentery and malaria. Chief Buffalo's subsequent walk to Washington, DC, to protest the order, and the partial reversal that allowed Ojibwe to remain in Wisconsin, is presented as a case study in successful resistance.)
  • MN Social Studies 9-12.4.4.18.2 (Grades 9–12): Analyze the legal foundations of Tribal sovereignty and the federal trust relationship, including landmark Supreme Court decisions and their ongoing impact. (Worcester v. Georgia's affirmation of Tribal sovereignty: and Jackson's defiance of the ruling: is the unit's central legal case study. Students build the Resistance section to document the gap between what the Court said and what the federal government did, then connect that gap to a pattern of federal noncompliance that shapes federal Indian law to this day.)
  • MN CS K-12 6.2.1 (Grade 6): Use a development process to plan, design, and iteratively develop computational artifacts. (Each stage builds on the previous one. Stage 1 extends the Unit 11 design system; Stage 2 adds the first new section; Stage 3 introduces the accordion pattern; Stages 4–6 add content sections on top of the accordion. Students cannot skip stages because each pre-loaded code file is the completed version of the stage before. The accordion component is introduced in one stage and then reused in a new context in a later stage, demonstrating iterative development and component reuse.)
  • MN ELA 8.3.3.1 (Grade 8): Use technology to produce and publish writing that demonstrates command of the conventions of standard English. (The My Research section is explicitly framed as a publication. Students write 2–4 paragraphs about a removal-era event, law, person, or Tribal nation's story, and see their writing rendered as formatted article text in real time using a JavaScript oninput event. The Northern Connections section also asks students to write their own analysis of how removal policy affected the Tribes in their region.)
  • ND Indigenous Studies, History and Government (All Grades): Understand the historical and political relationship between the United States government and Indigenous nations of North Dakota, including federal removal and relocation policies and their effects on Tribal sovereignty and land. (North Dakota Tribes were not among the primary targets of 1830s removal policy, but the Indian Removal Act established the legal and political framework that would later be used to confine Lakota, Dakota, and Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikara peoples to reservations. Stage 5 connects removal-era policy to the northern plains, including the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty context and how Manifest Destiny ideology: which drove removal: continued to shape federal Indian policy in the Dakotas throughout the mid-19th century.)
  • ND SS 9-12.6.2 (Grades 9–12): Analyze the role of federal law and Supreme Court decisions in shaping the political, legal, and economic status of American Indian nations within the United States. (The unit examines Worcester v. Georgia and the Indian Removal Act as two simultaneous and contradictory federal actions: a Supreme Court ruling affirming Tribal sovereignty, and a federal law authorizing the forced displacement of sovereign nations. Students are asked to analyze how both can exist in U.S. law at the same time: and what that contradiction reveals about the relationship between federal law on paper and federal policy in practice.)
  • ND CS 6.E.1 / 7.E.1 / 8.E.1 (Grades 6–8): Create artifacts by applying existing knowledge of computing concepts and practices. (Students apply CSS custom properties from Units 08 and 11, CSS transitions introduced in Unit 09, JavaScript event handling from Unit 09, and data object patterns from Unit 10: all in service of building the accordion component in Stage 3. The accordion is not taught in isolation: it is taught as a synthesis of prior concepts, making Stage 3 a cumulative demonstration of what students have already learned.)
  • ND CS 9-12.E.3 (Grades 9–12): Design and iteratively develop computational artifacts for practical intent, personal expression, or to address a societal need. (The finished site functions as a genuine public educational resource about the Removal Era. The Nations accordion allows readers to explore each Tribal nation's story independently, at their own depth. The Northern Connections section is written for a regional audience: students in MN, ND, and SD who may not have learned about the Ojibwe removal attempt or the Sandy Lake Tragedy in their school's curriculum. Students are building something useful, not just demonstrating that they can write code.)
  • OSEU Standard 1, History (All Grades): Understand the history of the Oceti Sakowin and other Indigenous peoples, including the impact of federal removal and relocation policies on Tribal sovereignty and land. (While the Oceti Sakowin were not directly targeted by the 1830 Indian Removal Act, the ideology and legal infrastructure of removal were explicitly extended westward in subsequent decades. Stage 5 asks students to trace how the removal framework: the idea that Indigenous peoples could be legally displaced from their homelands to serve U.S. expansion: preceded and enabled the reservation confinement policies that directly affected Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people after 1851.)
  • OSEU Standard 3, Sovereignty and Government (All Grades): Understand the sovereign status of Tribal nations and the government-to-government relationship between Tribal nations and the United States. (The Resistance section is built around the principle that Tribal nations did not accept removal passively. The Cherokee Nation pursued legal remedy all the way to the Supreme Court and won. The Seminole Nation fought three wars over three decades. Some holdout communities, including Eastern Band Cherokee and Florida Seminole descendants, never left their homelands. The section explicitly frames resistance as a political and legal assertion of sovereignty: not as a historical footnote, but as the legal foundation for the sovereignty claims these nations still assert today.)
  • SD Social Studies 9-12.H.2 (Grades 9–12): Analyze the causes and effects of major historical events and federal policies affecting Indigenous peoples of South Dakota, including removal, confinement, and the assertion of sovereign rights. (The Act section built in Stage 2 presents the Indian Removal Act in its full political context: Jackson's personal ideology, the economic interests of southern planters in Cherokee and Creek land, the congressional vote, and the legal challenge that followed. Students build four context cards explaining the forces behind the Act: Land Hunger, Political Power, Judicial Defiance, and Manifest Destiny: then write their own paragraph connecting those forces to a specific removal.)
  • SD CS 6-8.AP.M.1 (Grades 6–8): Decompose problems and subproblems into parts to facilitate the design, implementation, and review of increasingly complex programs. (The accordion component is decomposed across three consecutive stages: Stage 3 builds the HTML structure and CSS transition; Stage 4 adds the JavaScript toggle behavior; Stage 5 reuses the same accordion pattern in a new section for a different content type. Students encounter the same architectural problem (how do you show a lot of content without overwhelming the reader?) and apply the same solution in a new context, which is the core of problem decomposition in software design.)