Cultural Routes and Heritage Trails - Tourism and Trails: Cultural, Ecological and Management Issues - page 32

trade. Beginning in villages, slave forts and monuments in West Africa (Teye &
Timothy, 2004; Timothy & Teye, 2004; Yankholmes & Boakye, 2010), the Slave
Route connects countries, locations and organizations into various itineraries
(Shackley, 2003), some of which can be traced by vehicle or foot, although
much of it is trans-oceanic and therefore figurative and inaccessible directly
to individual travelers. In addition to locations in Africa, North America and
the Caribbean, some parts of the route emphasize sites in the metropolitan
countries of Europe (e.g. the UK and France) that colonized the Americas
(Casbeard et al. , 2010).
The Slave Route Project aims to fight racism and other intolerances and
build international understanding about the malevolence of slavery. As
noted by UNESCO (2012), the threefold purpose of the Slave Route is:

• To encourage a better understanding of the causes, forms of operation,

issues and consequences of slavery, especially in Africa, Europe, the
Americas, the Caribbean, Asia and the Middle East;

• To shed light on the global transformations and cultural relationships

that have resulted from the history of slavery; and

• Contribute to a 'culture of peace' by commemorating cultural pluralism,

intercultural dialogue and the promotion of new identities.

In 1830, to make way for increased European settlement in the eastern
US, the government passed the Indian Removal Act. This law resulted in the
forced removal of thousands of Chickasaw, Cherokee, Seminole, Muscogee
and Choctaw Indians from their native lands in the southeastern US to the
newly created Indian Territory (most of today's state of Oklahoma) (Gaines
& Krakow, 1996; Simms, 1992). Members of each tribe were removed in suc-
cessive waves from 1831 until 1838. Numerous of these American natives
perished from disease, starvation and exposure during their coerced foot
journey westward. Today, a series of original routes used by the US govern-
ment to relocate Native Americans in the 1830s was combined to commemo-
rate the involuntary exodus and the thousands of deaths that occurred on
the trail into the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail. It comprises roads,
highways, rivers and walking trails in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois,
Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee (Gaines &
Krakow, 1996; Stewart-Spears, 1993).

Religious routes/pilgrim trails
One of the oldest types of organic cultural trails is pilgrimage routes.
These have existed for centuries, millennia in some cases, and are popular
tourist tracks in Asia, Europe and the Americas (Cerutti & Dioli, 2013;
Digance, 2006; Kušen, 2010; Rizzello & Trono, 2013). In India there are
customary trails along which Hindu pilgrims make their journeys to the