The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of TearsBy: Theda Perdue, Michael D. Green In the early nineteenth century, the U. S. government shifted its policy from trying to assimilate American Indians to relocating them, and proceeded to forcibly drive seventeen thousand Cherokees from their homelands. This journey of exile became known as the Trail of Tears. Historians Perdue and Green reveal the government's betrayals and the divisions within the Cherokee Nation, follow the exiles along the Trail