On March 15, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee tweeted: “Hoping @POTUS tells Hawaii judge what Andrew Jackson told overreaching court-‘I’ll ignore it and let the court enforce their order.’”

This evocation of Andrew Jackson was in response to U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson in Hawaii ruling against Trump’s revised travel ban. There were several things embedded in the subtext of this tweet that stirred a lot of emotions for me — but the glaring fact is that this statement (though the actual quote is a little different, and it is contested if Jackson actually said it or not), led to Jackson ignoring the Supreme Court ruling in Worcester v. Georgia, resulting in forced removal of my Cherokee ancestors from our homelands. These marches at gunpoint over thousands of miles brought the death of thousands of tribal citizens. This is not a moment in United States political history that one should want to emulate. But for some reason, under a Trump presidency, Andrew Jackson has been resurrected, and continues to be held up as someone to idolize. I can’t even tell you how awful that feels as a Native woman each time his legacy is manipulated and polished, and each time the atrocities he orchestrated are ignored and pushed aside.

Sources close to the Trump campaign say it was most likely Steve Bannon who first told Donald Trump that he possessed striking similarities to our seventh president. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Trump himself who figured it out because he recently confessed that even though he “loves” to read, he can’t seem to ever find the time to get started (at the time of the interview he was “looking at” a book about Jackson).

Native folks recognized the similarities right away, such as scholar Cutcha Risling Baldy (from the Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk nations) who started cataloguing the emergence of “Zombie Andrew Jackson” on her blog before Trump even took office.

Trump embraced the comparison to Jackson, and once in the Oval Office, he chose a portrait of Jackson to hang in a place of honor. More recently, the same day as Huckabee’s tweet, Trump spent the night at Jackson’s Tennessee plantation, the Hermitage, and laid a wreath on his tomb. He gave a speech at the site, stating that America will “build on [his] legacy.” He called Jackson a “military hero and genius and a beloved president,” but noted he was “also a flawed and imperfect man, a product of his time.” He ended his speech, “Andrew Jackson, we thank you for your service. We honor you for your memory. We build on your legacy, and we thank God for the United States of America.”

These statements and comparisons terrify me. Jackson’s legacy is nothing short of Native genocide. History has strangely been kind to him, painting him as a populist president, a “common man,” a political outsider who came to shake up the establishment and break the rules to serve the people. But the reality was far from it.

Prior to his presidency, Jackson had been deeply involved in battles with southeastern tribes. From 1813 to 1814 he led troops against the Creek Nation in the Creek War, and in 1818 he waged campaigns against the Seminole in Florida. In these battles, he and his men wiped out entire villages, physically slaughtering Native men, women, and children, and gained millions of acres of Native lands for the U.S. through treaties signed, often under duress, afterward. He used this military experience to gain political trust and influence, and vowed that once elected president he would begin the process of moving Native peoples west — freeing land for the development by and use of white settlers.