Libby’s Reviews > Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory > Status Update

"Through all of the mudslinging and rhetorical smokescreens, indigenous Americans stayed focused on the debate's central question: Would the United States disregard its treaties, ignore their appeals, and launch an ambitious and unprecedented plan to deport 80,000 people?

From the Capitol Building, situated among Washington City's empty fields and scattered abodes, congressmen began to speak confidently in the late 1820s of launching a massive operation to expel indigenous peoples from their homelands.

While U.S. officials would continue to complain about the bonds forming between their citizens and native peoples, they also insisted with growing urgency and dwindling evidence that the two ways of living were fundamentally irreconcilable. In truth, only one thing was truly irreconcilable: native and white ownership of the same land.