Remember the Removal: Cherokee Youth Bike the Trail of Tears

A section of the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail. NPS.

The Remember the Removal Bike Ride is a Cherokee Nation program in which young Cherokee cyclists ride 950 miles along the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail. Amaiya Bearpaw, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and a rider on the 2023 team, described it for the National Park Service.

Why they ride

• Leadership and memory: the ride began as a leadership program for Cherokee youth, and also to remember the Cherokee people who died and survived the forced removal of 1838 and 1839.
• Purpose: to educate people about Cherokee removal and to honor the ancestors' strength, courage and sacrifice.

History of the ride

• 1984: the first ride.
• 2009: the ride returned, and has been held every year since.
• Riders: counting the 2023 team, 228 people had completed it — 150 from the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and 78 from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

Then and now

Forty years on, Bearpaw noted, the gear has changed — from sunglasses to shoes, bikes, technology and support vehicles — but riders still follow the original trail each day. They take in the historic places and markers along the designated highways and test their endurance and emotions over 950 miles of self-discovery. More than 180 years after their ancestors were forced from the Southeast to Indian Territory, she said, they remember who they are and where they came from — and draw resilience from it.

Learn more

• The NPS story map of the ride (best viewed full screen).
• Trail of Tears National Historic Trail.
• National Trails.

Sources

Based on "Trail of Tears: Remember the Removal Bike Ride," Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, National Park Service, drawing on Amaiya Bearpaw's account of the 2023 ride; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The rider's own team photograph and a trails map on a commercial basemap are left out.