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ROBERT J. MILLER: American ideas about the frontier are probably sugar-coated. We want to ignore the ugly side of what was really going on. The vast majority of American Indian nations were forcibly removed from their original homelands.

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CLAUDIO SAUNT: Most Americans know about Indian removal. We think of it as a tragic event. But we haven't really fully confronted what its legacy means to the United States.

In the 1830s, some 80,000 Native Americans were removed stretching from Wisconsin and Ohio down South all the way to Florida. There were lots of different Indian nations who were forced off their homelands. But the Trail of Tears, I think, is the best known.

HW BRANDS: The Trail of Tears was the migration route of the Cherokee from Georgia, their ancestral homeland, to Indian territory west of the Mississippi River. The Cherokee undertook this migration reluctantly. It occurred in the middle of winter. And the deaths from exposure and disease were appalling. Perhaps as many as 4,000 people died out of 16,000 who embarked on the journey.

JOHN MACK FARAGHER: The American frontier is really our own version of colonialism. It's about dispossession and repossession. Inevitably, it's about ethnic cleansing and removal. And even in some instances, it's about genocidal attacks.

BUDDY LEVY: Certainly, there is a great deal of irony in this notion of independence, while simultaneously taking the independence from the people who originally inhabited these lands. That irony was not lost on many people, but it didn't seem to matter in the end.

AMY H. STURGIS: Ultimately, in the battle between the high ideals on which the United States was founded versus the ideas of manifest destiny and westward expansion, manifest destiny won. And so the United States was led to undermine its own lofty principles.

JOHN MACK FARAGHER: The American perspective on things includes both the dark side and the light side of American expansion. The way to reconcile ourselves to this complicated past, we have to first tell the truth about the past.

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