Molly’s Side Deal

My family’s complicated experience with ethnic cleansing

In 1832, Molly Nail, my 4x great grandmother, sold her land – the land of her ancestors – for $100 and “four young negroes.” As a 60-year-old Choctaw woman, she was being forced out by white pioneers who had just elected Andrew Jackson on a platform of “Indian removal.”

Molly was recently widowed. Her son, Joel Henry Nail, was among the Choctaw leadership who signed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. That sealed the deal for the tribe, forcing them to walk to Indian Territory. Their ethnic cleansing paved the way for new slave plantations in the rich Black Belt soils of central Mississippi. This setting serves as the backdrop to the movie Sinners.

The Choctaw Trail of Tears happened in stages, the first of which occurred during a winter blizzard. Their crossing of the Mississippi was witnessed by Alexis de Tocqueville. Painting: Choctaw Removal, 1966, watercolor by Valjean McCarty Hessing. Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Molly left behind the grave of her husband and those from countless generations of the past.

More details of the story are here, in this excerpt from my book project.

The letters from Molly to Secretary Cass can be found here.

The story above, Molly’s Side Deal, exemplifies key elements of American history:

· The systematic ethnic cleansing of Native Americans using all the apparatuses of the federal government, motivated by white supremacy and greed.

· The connection between ethnic cleansing and slavery; the former facilitated a massive expansion of the latter across the Black Belt. The politics and economics of this are discussed in detail in

Rebecca Nagle

’s new book, By the Fire We Carry.

· The unofficial American caste system, where whites could ethnically cleanse Natives, who could buy enslaved Blacks.

· The colonization of Natives, who were called “civilized” precisely because they enslaved Blacks – and helped catch runaways as well.

· The economic exploitation of oppressed peoples. Not only was Molly forced to sell her ancestors’ land, she was probably selling two sections, which is two square miles, or 1,280 acres. Of course, where Natives got pennies on the dollar for their land, Black people had no land, nor payment for their (forced) labor.

A map of the concentration of enslaved Blacks in 1860, with the former Choctaw Nation superimposed. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, Andrew Jackson’s landmark legislation, played on rural white racism, but its real goal was big money for the rich, opening up the Black Belt for large slave plantations.

Molly lived nine more years in Indian Territory before she died. The ensuing generations were plagued by poverty and early deaths.

This is just one story. The several Cherokee sides of my family have other stories of pain and regret (and resilience) – the Cherokee Trail of Tears, the Treaty Party and the Cherokee Civil War, and fighting with Andrew Jackson against the Red Stick Creeks.

The is just one of hundreds of stories in my book project, tentatively titled Memories of the People. It employs the style of Eduardo Galeano’s Mirrors and Memory of Fire trilogy to create a chronological history-by-vignette, with approximately one short chapter for each year, 1491 to the present. It is explicitly from a Native perspective. I’m still looking for Native reviewers from certain tribes. More details and a few more sample chapters here.

As I sift through family records and historical writings, I regularly encounter statements from Andrew Jackson, or from his secretary of state, or his secretary of defense, that closely echo statements today from Trump, Rubio, Bondi, Miller, and others. I could give a flurry of comparisons, but I’m going to skip that for now. They are offensive and infuriating.

America remains afflicted by white supremacy, seemingly cursed into destroying itself, to sending people away when we have a labor shortage, to destroying one of our top exports (university education) when we have a trade deficit, and to strangling our scientific and medical research while we are faced with climate change and pandemics. The arc of colonization is built on racism and bends toward self-implosion. The Native answer is to embrace our people, all of them. And not to allow batshit crazy men to be leaders.