US citizenship was forced on Native Americans 100 years ago − its promise remains elusive

The 100th anniversary of the Indian Citizenship Act has garnered little fanfare. Only a handful of news articles and events have commemorated the centennial of the law giving U.S. citizenship to Native Americans.

Perhaps that’s unsurprising. The legislation has little relevance to most American citizens, and many Native Americans were dismayed when President Calvin Coolidge signed it into law in June 1924.

American citizenship was not an aspiration for the first peoples of the United States, whose primary political allegiance was to their own nations.

Meanwhile, as I’ve covered in my research and teaching on federal Indian law, the Indian Citizenship Act was not a gift or benefit to Native Americans. It was part of a coercive larger effort to assimilate Native Americans into U.S. society.

From nation to assimilation

For centuries after Europeans colonized North America in the 16th century, Native Americans sought to remain separate and distinct from the settlers.

For a while, the U.S. government reinforced that intentional separation. From 1820 to 1850, the federal government had a policy of forcibly removing Native Americans from their homelands and segregating them on reservations in the Indian Territory, now known as Oklahoma.

By keeping Native Americans far from towns and cities, the U.S. hoped to maintain the distinct identities of tribes as sovereign nations – and ensure Native peoples remained non-Americans.

As U.S. ambitions for expansion drove the new nation to push farther west, however, the nation began working to assimilate Native people into American society. The U.S. wanted more land, including in the Indian Territory.

In 1887, Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act, abrogating treaties that had guaranteed tribes and their citizens reserved lands in perpetuity. It broke up reservation lands into individual family allotments for tribal citizens and allowed non-Natives to buy land in the Indian Territory that remained unallocated.

The aim was to push Native peoples into becoming agrarian farmers. By encouraging them to abandon their traditional lives, lawmakers hoped to integrate Native Americans into the non-Native societies that were surrounding them.

Training ‘model Americans’

Of all the U.S. efforts to assimilate Native Americans, none was more notorious than the Indian boarding schools.

First established in 1879, these institutions aimed to remove Native American children from their families and communities, deny them the right to speak their languages and practice their religions, and train them to be model Americans.

Yet, Native Americans were not Americans in the eyes of the U.S. government. They could not vote in U.S. elections, freely sell their land or control their children’s education.

They were, however, eligible to serve in America’s wars. After an estimated 12,000 Native American solders fought in World War I, President Calvin Coolidge, inspired by their service, signed the Indian Citizenship Act into law.

Congress had crafted the legislation over the objections of many tribes. They recognized this unilateral imposition of U.S. citizenship as an infringement on their sovereignty over their citizens.

For lawmakers, that was the point. They wanted to take the assimilation of Native peoples to the next level, by making their Americanness official.

Layered citizenship

After 1924, Native Americans were left navigating a uniquely complex web of layered citizenships.

Most Americans, in addition to their national citizenship, are citizens of a state, a county and a city. Native Americans have all that plus another national citizenship – that of their tribe, which has its own laws and civic responsibilities.

Tribal citizenship is not about race or ethnicity. It confers a political status, one of citizenship in a tribe.

Unlike U.S. citizens, tribal citizens can lose their status.

As sovereign nations, tribes have the right to disenroll members, and they regularly do. About 80 tribes have removed approximately 11,000 tribal citizens from their rolls over the past 25 years over lineage questions, dual enrollment and other disqualifying factors.

The federal government can also terminate tribal membership by terminating tribes. From 1953 to 1970, in what became known as the Termination Era, the U.S. ended its government-to-government relationships with many tribes by withdrawing their federal recognition as sovereign nations.

Officially, this policy ended the tribes’ “status as wards of the United States” in order “to grant them all of the rights and prerogatives pertaining to American citizenship.”

Effectively, it nullified the existence of thousands of Native Americans. President Richard Nixon ended the Termination Era in 1970, leaving tribes and individuals to seek re-recognition in the courts or via congressional legislation. To date, 29 tribes have gotten their federal recognition restored.

Contributing citizens

Though U.S. citizenship was imposed without consent, Native Americans have come to terms with being dual citizens of the same country.

They have learned to navigate the complexities of living in two civic and legal systems simultaneously – with the ups and downs of both – and become active participants in American political life.

President Herbert Hoover’s vice president from 1929 to 1933 was Charles Curtis, an enrolled member of the Kaw Nation. More recently, in 2021, U.S. Rep. Deb Haaland, an enrolled member of the Pueblo of Laguna, became the first Native American appointed as secretary of the interior.

Native Americans have also served in every major U.S. military conflict, starting with the Revolutionary War. They have the highest per capita record of military service of all historically underrepresented populations.

Ely S. Parker, a Tonawanda Seneca, wrote the final draft of the terms of Confederate surrender to end the Civil War. The Code Talkers, who turned their Native languages into an unbreakable code, helped achieve U.S. victories in the two world wars.

Despite these contributions, Native Americans lag behind other U.S. citizens in almost every social and economic measure.

U.S. Census Bureau data shows the median income for Native Americans on reservations is $23,000 a year – 61% below the U.S. average. One in three reservation residents live in poverty, three times higher than the general population. In 2020, Native American students constituted less than 1% of college and university enrollment nationwide.

As these statistics reveal, U.S. citizenship has not guaranteed full access to all the riches and privilege of the United States. Indeed, it wasn’t meant to.