Trail of Tears
Georgia 2020. Should two mega-wealthy white people who championed Trumpism remain in the U.S. Senate to represent Georgia and skew the fate of this nation?
It’s personal for me. My son, adopted at birth and part Cherokee, died of a drug overdose this year. The victim, as I see it, of multi-generational genocide aimed at BIPOC.
1838 Georgia. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 finally has legs under the watchful eyes of President Andrew Jackson and white Georgia farmers who want that good cotton and tobacco land the Cherokee tended for thousands of years. Thus began what we now call the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of my son’s forebears by white militias, spurred on by lust for gold deposits found on Cherokee land. Locked in concentration camp stockades, refused decent food. In the harsh freezing temperature of a 1,000 mile forced march to Oklahoma, over 4,000 died — 25% of the Cherokee.
My work as a family therapist gives me a window on inter-generational trauma. It can lead to horrendous consequences within families. I see this within my own Jewish family influenced by World War II and Holocaust trauma. Anxiety, depression and even suicidal ideation have more than occasionally touched us.
My late son’s biological lineage included substantial Portuguese roots. Consider the terror of The Inquisition and that a significant percentage of Portuguese have Jewish blood. Combine that with the Cherokee background and it’s no surprise that alcohol and drug abuse became so prevalent in his biological family. Epigenetic spiraling towards anxiety and depression. Self-medication with substances across decades of inter-generational trauma. Result: Death before age 30.
Today over 33,000 Georgia residents identify as Native American. Save for crimes such as the Trail of Tears, Native Americans could comprise with African-Americans and the growing Asian population, a powerful plurality of the Georgia state population. So, as I make calls to elect two new United States Senators from Georgia, one of African-American descent and one of Jewish descent, I do so with a deep need to address historical outrages wreaked by one group of people who “settled” atop the dead bodies of others.
In the face of all that the Trump Administration and its enablers have done and all they sought to continue to do, the bones of my son and his Native American forebears call out. To me and to you. The ones buried in unmarked graves along “The Trail Where They Cried.”
They say: It ends here. No more. We are here to stay.
To my fellow volunteers for Jon Ossoff and Reverend Warnock:
Let us blaze a new trail of justice for this country. “Warnock your Ossoff” today and every day through Jan. 5th.
Neal H. Brodsky, a family and somatic psychotherapist, writer and activist lives in Connecticut near NYC. A contributor to the upcoming Routledge International Handbook of Play, Therapeutic Play & Play Therapy, he practices online during Covid-19. Originally trained as a script writer, his career includes ten years writing grants supporting families in subsidized housing, more than a decade in marketing positions at major U.S. public television stations and programming management at HBO. Neal curates One Jewish Family: News of Ethiopian Jews social media feeds on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. He also writes for publication in The Times of Israel, Medium, and The Forward.
