The damage of a "Trail of Fears"

In previous posts I’ve made mention of my purported Cherokee ancestry, so I’ll not revisit those claims, but I want to focus on misguided use of term “Trail of Fears” with a recent announcement¹ from my town as an example:

Let me caveat this by stating that I do not believe that the term is used with a malicious intent to cause pain to those who claim Cherokee ancestry, who might have predecessors may have endured the horrific event that is known as the “Trail of Tears”. I do find it ironic that a community who just had one of its biggest events of the year, the Annual Trail of Tears Commemorative Bike Ride, make its way though town about a month ago.

That being said, I am offended when someone tries to get cutesy and calls their haunted-whatever event a “Trail of Fears”. That wordplay still resonates the evil that was perpetrated against a native population by a group of invaders whose land lust was insatiable. The part of north Alabama I live in was once part of the Cherokee Nation².

What is also disconcerting to me is the upward trend in the use of the term over the past couple years³:

https://ssl.gstatic.com/trends_nrtr/4356_RC01/embed_loader.js trends.embed.renderExploreWidget(“TIMESERIES”, {“comparisonItem”:[{“keyword”:”\”Trail of Fears\””,”geo”:””,”time”:”2004-01-01 2026-03-14″}],”category”:0,”property”:””}, {“exploreQuery”:”date=all&q=%22Trail%20of%20Fears%22″,”guestPath”:”https://trends.google.com:443/trends/embed/”});

(Click here if chart does not load.)

Like many things in life, meanings lose significance over time. Given the historic significance of the Trail of Tears, it’s disheartening to see it used so flippantly as a wordplay.

Footnotes:

1. City of Madison, Alabama. (2012, October 26). Trail of fears haunted hay ride.
   https://web.archive.org/web/20211018020823/https://www.madisonal.gov/Calendar.aspx?EID=1238
   ↩︎
2. Kitchin, T. (1760). A new map of the Cherokee Nation: With the names of the towns & rivers: They are situated on No. lat. from 34 to 36 [Map]. London Magazine. Retrieved from Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2021586055/ ↩︎
3. (Update: March 13, 2026): Thankfully in the 14 years since I originally wrote this post, the use of the term has declined. ↩︎