Marjorie Taylor Greene’s 14^th District in the northwest corner of Georgia lies in the center of the lands the Cherokee Nation was forced to vacate at gunpoint during the horrific ethnic cleansing known as the Trail of Tears.

Greene is the infamous Q-Anon follower who now sits in the House of Representatives where she faces calls for her expulsion over her behavior, death threats, and endorsement of outlandish conspiracy theories. Greene has berated fellow legislators in the halls, called for the death of Nancy Pelosi, and stated that the Sandy Hook school shooting and aspects of the 9-11 terrorist attacks were staged. Fellow Republicans have called her “bat-shit crazy” and a “more aggressive” version of Trump, and decried her blatant racism.

Greene won the 14^th District easily. The area, known for its “diehard Christian conservatives”, is disproportionately white, poor, and uneducated.  It wasn’t always that way.

It sits in the center of the final remaining piece of Cherokee lands before removal. By the 1830s, the Cherokees were building a functioning nation-state, complete with a constitution, a bicameral legislature, a newspaper, and a museum. They were more literate (90% literacy in their own language and syllabary) and had more wealth than the white pioneers who would displace them.

Regardless of their degree of “civilization”, the State of Georgia was doing everything in its power to force the Cherokees out. Most notoriously, they passed a law preventing Cherokees from testifying in court. This left them vulnerable to all kinds of depredations by white pioneers, including theft, rape, and murder with impunity. There are accounts of grandmothers raped along roads in daylight.

Thanks to two white missionaries, Samuel Worcester and Elizur Butler, the Supreme Court was forced to rule on the issue in 1832. (My great-great-great grandfather, James Allen Thompson, was one of seven other ministers arrested with these two.) In Worcester v Georgia, the Supreme Court ruled, “The Cherokee nation, then, is a distinct community, occupying its own territory, with boundaries accurately described, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force…” This remains the basis for tribal sovereignty over states to this day.

In response, Georgia held a lottery and awarded Cherokee land, divided into 160-acre parcels, to its white settlers. In a policy that can only be described as socialism and affirmative action for whites, each new title-holder was required to pay only a nominal fee of $18.

But they all had to wait six years until Andrew Jackson became president, ignored the Supreme Court ruling, and ordered General Winfield Scott and the US Army to remove the Cherokee by force. Beginning in May, 1838, the Cherokee were rounded up at gunpoint and marched to stockades. In the chaos, children were separated from parents, spouses from each other. Often by nightfall Cherokee homes were looted of clothing, bedding, and furniture by white pioneers.

Cherokee removal, or ethnic cleansing, proceeded through the winter of 1838-9. They were divided into seventeen detachments of about a thousand people each. Four thousand died in the stockades, along the route or shortly after arrival in Indian Territory (Oklahoma), where no services awaited them. I had dozens of relatives on several different detachments, as well as some who removed early and others who stayed behind (because they had a white spouse). The white Reverend Daniel Butrick recorded my ancestor Richard Fox Taylor’s detachment’s journey in a diary. Besides the rain, mud, cold, and difficulty finding suitable camp sites, among the most difficult challenges along the route was the lack of sleep due to the incessant noise made by drunk white settlers who would enter their camps in the night to harangue them.

The fact that Greene could get elected from this land is exhibit A (out of thousands of examples) of the straight line between white pioneers and white supremacy today. Trump’s greatest support came from the same locations where ethnic cleansing was most dramatic, where Natives were massacred, where Native land was immediately given to white settlers, and, in many instances, where descendants of those white settlers still live on the same parcels to this day. This is the legacy of settler colonialism. White supremacy is the justification, then and now; it will remain until white Americans reconcile with the people they displaced and enslaved.