NEW YORK — Growing up in Oklahoma, Becky Hobbs noticed some of her Cherokee elders wouldn’t even touch a $20 bill because they so despised Andrew Jackson. To this day, the 66-year-old songwriter pokes him in the face whenever she gets one.

For Hobbs and many other Native Americans, the U.S. Treasury’s decision to replace Jackson’s portrait with Harriet Tubman’s is a hugely meaningful change.

A slave-owning president who forced Cherokees and many other Indian nations on deadly marches out of their southern homelands, being succeeded by an African-American abolitionist who risked her life to free others? Unprecedented.

“We’re just thrilled that Andrew Jackson has had a removal of his own,” said Hobbs. “The constant reminder of Andrew Jackson being glorified is sad and sickening to our people.”

The Obama administration’s decision is groundbreaking in many ways — there hasn’t been a woman on paper money in over a century, and there’s never been an African-American. Change also is coming to other bills: The history-making appearances of Martin Luther King Jr. and opera singer Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial will be displayed on the back of the $5 bill, and suffragettes on the steps of the U.S. Treasury marching for the right of women to vote will be on the back of the $10 bill.

But Tubman’s arrival is the one many people have been hoping for, much to the dismay of Jackson supporters, and it comes amid ongoing, emotional debates about other symbols Americans choose to honor, like the Confederate flags and statues being removed from public life in places across the South.

“Every time you pick up that $20 bill, it’s a reminder that we can’t ignore or pretend like we didn’t have 400 years of slavery,” said Amrita Myers, a historian at Indiana University who focuses on 19th century black women.

“Not only is this going to be the first African-American historical figure on U.S. currency, but it’s a woman specifically from the era of slavery,” Myers said. “We still live in a nation that doesn’t like to acknowledge its history of racial and gender oppression. Black women experience those things simultaneously.”

Making the change on currency is especially powerful, said Suzan Shown Harjo, president of the Morning Star Institute, a Native rights organization.

“A country usually puts forward its best when it shows the world the people on a stamp or on money,” said Harjo, who is both Cheyenne and Muskogee. “They’re really saying, ‘this is what we want you to think of us ... these are our best people.”’

Compared to all his predecessors, Jackson, who served from 1828-1836, arrived at the White House as a self-made everyman whose populist message resonated with a country still solidifying its democracy a half-century after declaring independence. But for Native Americans, Jackson stands for genocide — the polar opposite of a unifying figure.

“He’s not the poster boy for America, and it’s good to see it changed,” said Bill John Baker, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.

Baker points out that a fourth of the Cherokees died after Jackson and his troops forced them onto what became known as the Trail of Tears. Other tribes that were forced to move to reservations in Oklahoma and beyond include the Seminoles, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Muscogee-Creek.

Many Americans still celebrate Jackson for his victory over the British during the War of 1812. Gen. Jackson then orchestrated the invasion of Florida in 1818, and convinced the Spanish government a year later to give up the territory. Along the way, he warred against Native Americans — although some were his allies for brief periods — and his 1830 Indian Removal Act expanded U.S. territory at a critical time.

“As horrible a policy as it was, it was something that was widely appreciated by many voters at the time,” said Andrew Frank, a historian at Florida State University.

On the centennial of his election, Jackson’s legacy was honored by promoting him to the $20 bill, while U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton replaced Jackson on $10 bills as the first modern-sized currency notes began circulating in 1929.