100 years ago, Native Americans were forced to turn into US residents – their promise stays unfulfilled

The one hundredth anniversary of the Indian Citizenship Act has attracted little attention. Only a handful Newspaper article And Events remind us of the centenary of the introduction of the Native American Citizenship Act.

This is maybe not surprising. The law has little meaning for many American residents, and lots of Native Americans were dismayed when President Calvin Coolidge signed it into law in June 1924.

American citizenship was not a goal of the Native Americans, whose primary political loyalty was to their very own nations.

Meanwhile, as I already mentioned in my research and teaching on federal Indian lawThe Indian Citizenship Act was not a present or profit to Native Americans. It was part of a bigger coercive measure to integrate Native Americans into U.S. society.

From nation to assimilation

Even after the colonization of North America by Europeans within the sixteenth century, Native Americans tried for hundreds of years to separate themselves and distinguish themselves from the settlers.

For a time, the U.S. government reinforced this deliberate separation. From 1820 to 1850, the federal government pursued a policy of forcibly removing Native Americans from their homeland and Separation in reservations within the Indian Territorynow often called Oklahoma.

By keeping Native Americans out of the cities, the United States hoped to preserve the tribes' separate identities as sovereign nations – and make sure that the Native Americans didn’t remain Americans.

As US Expansion ambitions drove the brand new nation to advance further west, however the nation began to work on integrating the natives into American society. The USA wanted more land, including in Indian Territory.

In 1887, Congress passed the Dawes Majority Lawwhich repealed treaties that had guaranteed tribes and their residents reserved land in perpetuity. It divided reservation land into individual family allotments for tribal residents and allowed non-natives to buy land in Indian Territory that had not yet been allotted.

The goal was to get the Native Americans to turn into farmers. By encouraging them to desert their traditional lives, lawmakers hoped to integrate the Native Americans into the non-Indian societies around them.

Training of “model Americans”

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

First founded in 1879The goal of those institutions was to separate Native American children from their families and communities, deny them the correct to talk their language and practice their religion, and educate them to be model Americans.

However, within the eyes of the US government, Native Americans weren’t Americans. They weren’t allowed to vote in US elections, couldn’t freely sell their land, and had no control over the education of their children.

However, they were eligible to serve in America's wars. After an estimated 12,000 Native American soldiers fought in World War I, President Calvin CoolidgeInspired by her service, the Indian Citizenship Act into law.

Congress had drafted the laws concerning the objections of many tribes. They perceived this unilateral imposition of US citizenship as an infringement on their sovereignty over their residents.

For the legislators, that was the purpose. They desired to assimilate the natives into the next levelby making their Americanness official.

Multi-layered citizenship

After 1924, Native Americans had to seek out their way in a uniquely complex web of various citizenships.

Most Americans have state, county, and city citizenship along with their national citizenship. Native Americans have all of those citizenships plus one other citizenship—that of their tribe, which has its own laws and civic responsibilities.

Tribal citizenship has nothing to do with race or ethnicity. It gives political statusone among tribal citizenship.

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

As sovereign nations, tribes have the correct Unsubscribe membersthey usually do that commonly. About 80 tribes have removed roughly 11,000 tribal members from their tribal rolls over the past 25 years due to questions on lineage, dual enrollment, and other disqualifying aspects.

The federal government may also end tribal membership by dissolving tribes. From 1953 to 1970, in what’s often called because the termination erathe USA ended his government relations with many tribes by depriving them of federal recognition as sovereign nations.

Officially, this measure ended the tribes’ “status as wards of the United States” so as to grant them “all the rights and privileges incident to American citizenship.”

In fact, the existence of hundreds of Native Americans was destroyed. President Richard Nixon ended the Termination Era in 1970, leaving tribes and individuals to look for Re-recognition in court or via Congressional lawsTo date, 29 tribes have their federal recognition was restored.

Contributing residents

Although U.S. citizenship was forced upon them without their consent, Native Americans have come to terms with having dual citizenship of the identical country.

They have learned to take care of the complexities of living concurrently in two social and legal systems – with the ups and downs of each – and to turn into energetic participants in American political life.

President Herbert Hoover’s Vice President from 1929 to 1933 was Charles Curtisa registered member of the Kaw Nation. More recently, in 2021, US Representative Deb Haalanda registered member of the Pueblo of Lagunabecame the primary Native American to be appointed Secretary of the Interior.

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

Ely S. Parkera Tonawanda Seneca, wrote the ultimate draft of the terms of the Confederate give up ending the Civil War. Code talkerwho transformed their native languages ​​into an unbreakable code helped the USA to victory in each world wars.

Despite these contributions, Native Americans lag behind other U.S. residents in just about all social and economic points.

Data from the US Census Bureau shows that the median income of Native Americans on reservations is $23,000 per yr – 61% below the U.S. average. One in three residents of a reservation lives in poverty, 3 times higher than the final population. In 2020, Native American students lower than 1% of school and university enrollments across the country.

As these statistics show, U.S. citizenship doesn’t guarantee unlimited access to all of the riches and privileges of the United States. Nor is it intended to.