Pocahontas has been a constant presence in American life since before the nation existed.

Representing the promise, peril, and dilemmas of the early 1600s, she was in the middle of events during the years when the Jamestown colony floundered, and later when it became a roaring success.

When Pocahontas was born in 1595 in what is now Virginia, almost everyone who lived on the continent was an American Indian.

Her father, Powhatan, was the leader of a powerful confederacy when, in 1607, a hundred Englishmen landed in his vast territory. Even as a child Pocahontas made a striking impression. A frequent visitor to James Fort, she dazzled the English with her self-confidence and outgoing personality. In her teens, when the settlers faced starvation, she brought food.

In 1613, after the colonists abducted her, she learned English and converted to Christianity. Her subsequent marriage to tobacco planter John Rolfe was so consequential that the following years brought a break in warfare known as the Pocahontas Peace. The tobacco strain Rolfe developed made Jamestown rich, and it was a sensation in Europe. When the couple traveled to London, Pocahontas’s presence sent a clear message: the Jamestown colony was safe, successful, and profitable. For the first time in history, Europeans could put a human face on the indigenous peoples of the New World.

When Pocahontas died in 1617, she left behind a son: Thomas Pepsiromeneh Rolfe. Raised in England, he returned to Virginia as a young man. For 400 years elite Virginians, some of whom became the nation’s Founding Fathers, have proudly asserted that Pocahontas’s blood flows in their veins.

The Disney version of Pocahontas is the one most of us know best, but there are many others. Her likeness appears in three places in the U.S. Capitol. Through the centuries she has been seen as a lauded ancestor, a diplomat, a businesswoman, and a spy. She is the subject of countless paintings, illustrations, poems, plays, books, movies, and songs.

The only Indian seen as one of the nation’s founders, Pocahontas’s personal history has become the country’s history.

She has been mentioned in treatises on abolition, racial laws, and presidential tweets. Each projects a different idea about Pocahontas—that rare historical figure who captivated people in her own time and in every generation that followed.

Even today the Indian Removal Act remains one of the boldest and most breathtaking laws in American history.

Passed in 1830, the act imagined a country free of American Indians. It proposed that those living inside the country’s boundaries should leave. They would receive payment and new land west of the Mississippi. One result was the forced relocation of about 16,000 Cherokees in 1838–39, which became known as the Trail of Tears. Americans convinced themselves that removal would be good for the economy and even good for Indians.

In theory, the removal act targeted all Indians within U.S. borders.

But it was really focused on a handful of Native nations that owned fertile lands in the South: the Choctaw, Cherokee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Muscogee (Creek). They were called the Five Civilized Tribes because their lives weren’t so different from those of their white neighbors. They farmed, owned businesses, and published newspapers. Only the wealthiest owned other human beings, and these elites usually were political leaders, too.

Removing Indians from the American South did not happen suddenly, quickly, or in secret. The act was the result of a national debate that began decades earlier. Led by President Andrew Jackson, those in favor saw Indian nations as an obstacle to economic development and a threat to national security. Opponents, including Native leaders, argued that the act went against democratic values. Ultimately removal presented a moral test to the new nation. Could the United States stay true to its ideals? Could it bring prosperity to the South and also treat American Indians with justice and respect? The nation tried to accomplish both goals. It succeeded at only one.

Today we remember removal as a tragedy. True enough. But it was also part of a massive, nationwide transformation. In creating wealth, the law was a spectacular success. The American South became the Cotton Kingdom and United States a global economic powerhouse. Soon Mississippi and Alabama had more millionaires per capita than any other states. That wealth was generated by the enslavement of millions, which led to the Civil War.

What was supposed to be a relatively quick and manageable project spanned nine U.S. presidencies and cost more than 40 times the amount originally estimated. In 1837 and 1838, removal constituted a full 20 percent of the federal budget. The boom enriched contractors, who provided cattle, pork, coffee, sugar, corn, flour, salt, wagons, teamsters, pack horses, boats, ferrymen, road builders, rifles, and ammunition.

Removal was also brutal, and a catastrophe for Indians. Poor planning, incompetence, bad weather, and unforeseen circumstances contributed to extraordinary suffering. About 68,000 Native people were exiled from their southeastern homelands. Even after they rebuilt in Oklahoma, Indian nations endured devastating assaults on their rights of self-government. Against all odds they are thriving today.

For nearly a hundred years, almost nobody talked about removal.

Entire books about Andrew Jackson barely mentioned it, and no one learned about it in school. But in the early 1900s, a handful of Cherokee activists began to popularize the phrase trail of tears. First, the term described only the Cherokee removal of 1838. Later it included the removals of all southeastern Native nations. It then became shorthand for policies toward all American Indians. The core meaning of the phrase, though, still refers to a moment of national shame and a betrayal of American values. Trail of tears resonates in American conversation because the country is still coming to terms with what happened and what it means.

In 1876 the United States was finally emerging from the devastation of the Civil War.

A railroad connected the Atlantic and the Pacific. The telegraph blasted information in minutes instead of days. Manifest destiny, the so-called inevitable fate that all of North America would belong to the United States, was largely achieved.

Indian conflicts still existed, but they were a distant problem, not an existential threat to an industrializing nation of thirty million. So it was inconceivable for Americans to wake up one July morning, just days after celebrating the country’s 100th birthday, to learn that Indians in Montana had wiped out the famous general George A. Custer and 200 of his men. The whole country went through shared disbelief, grief, and rage. For Americans of that time, the U.S. Army’s defeat at Little Bighorn was as shocking as JFK’s assassination a century later.

Who really won?

The Lakota and Northern Cheyenne won the battle. But eight months later the United States won the Great Sioux War and confined to reservations nearly all their Plains Indian adversaries. Little Bighorn, however, never really ended. It was replayed over and over through official hearings, staged presentations, elaborate reenactments, and later in movies and on TV. After 1876, generations of Americans were destined to grow up playing cowboys and Indians.

Little Bighorn was a way for the country to begin to understand the cost of westward expansion. The military defeat of Indians required a story of epic sacrifice against some of the bravest and most brilliant fighters any army had ever faced. The crushing loss at Little Bighorn sanctified the idea of manifest destiny. And Americans still debate the meaning of Little Bighorn because we are still coming to grips with how the West was won.

After the battle, a strange thing happened: the Lakota leaders who defeated American soldiers became celebrities. The stuff of sensational news in 1876 became dramatic material in the years that followed. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West stage show and its many copycats blurred the lines between entertainment and history. The performances, which often featured reenactments of the battle, were advertised as “the great struggle of civilization and savagery, finally enabling our continental expansion.” The shows were only the beginning.

In the following decades, Plains Indian warriors came to represent all Indians, and even the United States itself.

The Lakota and Cheyenne never numbered more than 30,000, and most Indians were nothing like them. Yet even in the most remote parts of the world, anyone can look at a picture of an Indian wearing a feather headdress and know exactly who he is.

Plains warriors in eagle-feather headdresses are everywhere in the 21st century. They sell baking powder, insurance, bottled water, pop music, guns, ice hockey, and America itself. These images are more than stereotypes. There is no phenomenon like them anywhere else—no other case where an ethnic group can symbolize any manner of product, place, or activity. No other case that extends three centuries into the past and shows no sign of ending.

One reason for this American phenomenon is that the country has been deeply entangled with American Indians from the very beginning.

We are still trying to make sense, sometimes in strange ways, of a complicated and powerful history. And the country is still coming to terms with a hard and enduring reality: the United States was built at great cost to Native Americans.