Guest essay. AlreadyAlthough the United States is approaching its 250th anniversary, it was only a hundred years ago that Native Americans were made American citizens.
In 1884, John Elk sued Charles Wilkins for preventing him from registering to vote, arguing:
. . . that more than a year previous to the following grievances of which he complained, he had severed his tribal relations with the Indian tribes and completely and entirely surrendered himself to the jurisdiction of the United States, and is still subject to the jurisdiction of the United States ; and asserts that, under and by virtue of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, he is a citizen of the United States and entitled to the rights and privileges of citizens of the United States.
The US Supreme Court ruled that even though John Elk may have withdrawn from his tribe, because he had not voted, was not taxed and had never been recognized as a citizen of his state or the US, he could not be a citizen and therefore could not vote . The Court specifically ruled that neither the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) nor the Fifteenth Amendment (1868) provided citizenship or the right to vote for John Elk.
[In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, Native News Online will publish during the month of June guest essays to provide our readers with various perspectives from prominent Native Americans on the subject. Today’s was written by Professor Victoria Sutton.]
During the debate surrounding the Civil Rights Act of 1866, there was awareness of the law’s potential effect on Native Americans. Senator George H. Williams (Oregon-R) expressed concern about the consequences of citizenship if it were granted to Native Americans. He noted that states could not exclude Native Americans for prohibiting them from purchasing alcohol and firearms, as they did, if they had equal protection of the law. As Prof. Maltz noted, “This argument bears an almost uncanny resemblance to Taney’s warnings against the dangers of black citizenship in Dred Scott.”(Dred Scott was the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that held that enslaved persons were not citizens and therefore did not enjoy civil rights protections.
Citizenship was used during the assimilation period
The Dawes Act of 1887 forced Native Americans to take allotments and for that, by renouncing their tribal citizenship, they received citizenship. This was another American Indian policy designed to break up tribal nations and assimilate Native Americans by forcing them into farming, while in some cases requiring the dissolution of their entire tribal governments. (The Residential School Program, 1819-1970 – another U.S. policy designed to destroy Native American tribes, cultures, languages, and family relationships – stood in the way of the other destructive allotment program and sent children to residential schools. This meant that there were no one at home who could continue the US government’s agricultural demands, but that’s another story. Children didn’t “earn” citizenship by attending these indoctrination camps either.
It was thought that service in the military could help the cause of citizenship for Native Americans. More than 12,000 Native Americans served in the military during World War I, according to a former Baptist minister, Joseph Dixon, who documented their service in hopes of helping them obtain citizenship. Despite the fact that many Native Americans fought in wars for America, they were denied citizenship and even served in the military in disproportionate numbers among all racial categories in the US.
American citizenship for Native Americans without obligations did not come until 1924
You might think that the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, granted all American citizens the right to vote, regardless of race; as well as the equal protection of the Fourteenth Amendment would grant citizenship to America’s first inhabitants, but Native Americans were still excluded.
Native Americans therefore had to be specifically granted the right to American citizenship through legislation. It was not until June 2, 1924 that the Indians received citizenship without the conditions of renouncing their own tribal ties. Some may have been granted citizenship as part of taking an allotment during the Allotment Act period.
The law was passed in December 1923 and signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge on June 2, 1924, authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to issue certificates of citizenship to Native Americans. This law (also called the Snyder Act) made no distinction between Indians who had left their tribe and those who remained with their tribe, so for the first time Indians did not have to renounce their tribal ties. However, voting rights are a state regulatory area and many states continued to refuse to allow Native Americans to vote. New Mexico and Arizona had laws as recently as 1948 that prohibited Native Americans from voting.
In 1948, the Arizona Supreme Court overturned Porter v. (1928) in a case, Harrison vs. Laveen (1948) which gave Indians the right to vote. Two weeks later, Miguel Trujillo, a citizen of the Pueblo of Isleta and a World War II veteran, filed a lawsuit against the local county official. The New Mexico court ruled against Trujillo and upheld the right to vote for Native Americans in New Mexico. The last western state where Native Americans could vote was Utah in 1957.
Some of you reading this will remember Native American people who became citizens in 1924, and many who said they did not want to be citizens of the United States after the long history of genocide and abuse by the US and refused to grant citizenship .
Interestingly, Native Americans have served in the House and Senate of the United States Congress since 1893 to the present.
Voting rights were still an illusion
It wasn’t until 1965 that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited all states from discriminating against voters. Tribes and individual Native Americans in the eastern United States had already experienced the literacy tests that attempted to ban all “colored people” from voting. Even if they passed the literacy test, they were still often banned from voting.
Even today, state voting laws often do not fit the structure of elections in tribal governments. For example, many Reservations send ballots to a PO box because there are no house numbers and most people receive their mail at a central location. This is often contrary to state election law. But some states are passing state voting rights laws that accommodate the structure of Native American election processes.
Other Citizenship Issues in Indian Country
Some Tribal Nations are located on the borders of lands that did not exist until after these Tribal Nations had long existed. For example, the Tohono O’odham Nation in the US-Mexico border area has part of its territory in Mexico and part of its territory as a reservation in the US (Arizona). For tribal citizens, crossing that border still means immigrating as citizens of another country every time they cross that border on their own traditional land.
Citizenship comes with rights that were denied to Native Americans for the first 150 years. So this year on June 2, 2024, a commemoration of the 100th anniversary of that decision to make Indians citizens has mixed messages. Many felt it was just another assimilation program just to force Native Americans away from their own tribal governments, traditions, and language. Some felt it necessary to enable voting and have some control over the laws and legislatures that governed their lives. Voting as a benefit of citizenship was a long and difficult journey beginning in 1924, and the fact that states are passing Native American voting rights laws shows that ensuring that the right to citizenship is fully available to all Americans.
Professor Victoria Sutton (Lumbee) is a professor of law on the faculty of Texas Tech University. In 2005, Sutton became a founding member of the National Congress of American Indians, Policy Advisory Board of the NCAI Policy Center, positioning the Native American community to act and lead on policy issues affecting Native communities in the United States.
About the Author: “Levi \”Calm Before the Storm\” Rickert (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation) is the founder, publisher and editor of Native News Online. Rickert was awarded the Best Column 2021 Native Media Award for the print category\/ online by the Native American Journalists Association. He is a member of the advisory board of the Multicultural Media Correspondents Association. He can be reached at levi@nativenewsonline.net.
Contact: levi@nativenewsonline.net
