Hi, my name is Bodaway or fire-maker. I am a Choctaw Indian. The year is 1839. We have just been kicked out of our homeland by the White Men. Apparently they think that we are not civilized enough to have our own territory. Our men wear breach skins, our women wear wraparound dresses made of animal hide or woven fibers. Us kids, wear the same as our mother or father, depending on whether or not we are a boy or a girl. Guys help with the chores and sometimes with the hunt. Girls help the women with household chores and child care.
Lets get back to the journey, shall we? My tribe and I were kicked out of our land because some citizen found a gold seam running along our land. Now thanks to that Jackson character, we are having a forced march to our new "reservations". It sucks. The food problem got so bad that we had to go scavenging for food. One of my friends had a stare-off with a vulture for a dead prairie dog.
The weather was horrible. We all got sick from the cold and one fourth of our tribe died. We blame Jackson for this. Unfortunately, my friend (the one that got into a fight with a vulture) didn't make it. There is a little bit of a good thing to the dying though, and that is the extra food. Now we get to eat a whopping 17 grams of food each day. That's what they ration us with. If we were caught hiding or hoarding food, we had to set the pace as a run for a day. Even if we were sick.
Six months after the disease ran through our bodies, the escorts told us that we were about half-way through or trip. They were acting all cheery, but you could tell from their expressions that they were thinking, "Man, I wish that we could just get rid of these weirdos and go home,". It didn't really bother us, because we were thinking the exact same thing. Except we were thinking, "How can we ditch these people with those stupid guns, and get back to our land?". It was kind of a stalemate between us. We just hated that forced march.
During the march on the Trail, we lost a whole bunch of our medicinal tribes-people, storytellers, musicians, and artists. Those left were told to come up with ways to keep this event in our peoples' history. They drew sketches, wrote burial songs, and came up with many stories to remind us of this. They made all of this up while walking on the Trail. These years will be in our memory forever.
We will pass on our memories to the generations after us.
