Answer: The removal, or forced emigration, of Cherokee Indians occurred in 1838, when the U.S. military and various state militias forced some 15,000 Cherokees from their homes in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee and moved them west to Indian Territory (now present-day Oklahoma. In 1838 and 1839 U.S. troops, prompted by the state of Georgia, expelled the Cherokee Indians from their ancestral homeland in the Southeast and removed them to the Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma.