Indian removal followed the same routes as the domestic slave trade.

Evidence

Some eighty thousand Indigenous people were driven out of the South and the Midwest in the mid-nineteenth century. As the historian Claudio Saunt has poignantly pointed out in Unworthy Republic, the movement of Indian removal followed the same routes as the domestic trade of Black people into the Cotton Belt, which had “served to make plausible the forced migration of other nonwhite peoples.” Native expulsion was, he writes, “the war the slaveholders won.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 503