American Indian Culture and Research Journal

This paper offers a re(-)view of a landscape montage called the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail. The United States National Park Service has placed trail markers along county, state and interstate roadways that generally parallel one route taken by Cherokee Indians who were forced to migrate from the southeast United States to "Indian Territory" west of the Mississippi River during the early part of the nineteenth century. The American roadway, with its pastiche of signage that now includes the Trail of Tears, can be shown to maintain the poetics of "unsettled settledness" often visible in other cultural texts of settler societies. The (in)congruity and (ir)reconcilability of signifiers in anxious negotiation appear haunting and sometimes humorous. I use the method of image-texting to merge signifiers in the landscape. This involves breaking the integrity of photographs and texts to create (sur)real composites in order to reflect the "thinking-feeling" that went along with my reading carefully and deeply this landscape of difficult heritage.