The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 declared, "That all noncitizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Citizenship_Act

In some ways, it is remarkably easy for most of us to become a citizen of the United States. For most U.S. citizens, the simple fact that we were born within the country's borders qualifies us. We become citizens at birth. But it was not until well into the 20th Century that a large group of native-born people were given citizenship.

The full meaning of citizenship was, in fact, behind many of the debates of the early 20th Century. 

• Votes      for women was a struggle over allowing women to participate fully in our      democracy.
• African Americans were given citizenship after the Civil War, but discrimination      and racial tensions prevented them from voting until well into the new century.
• The Progressive Movement was able to enact a series of changes in law that made elections more representative.

Finally, progressives turned their attention to the relationship between Native American people and the U.S. government. 

The struggles of women and African Americans point out the fact that citizenship does not automatically ensure voting rights. The road to citizenship for native people was even longer than for the African Americans and women. All Native Americans did not become citizens until 1924, and it would be even longer before all Native Americans gained the right to vote. 

This is a story of treaties, reservations and legal fights. Throughout the 1800s, native tribes gradually lost claim to the lands they had inhabited. And it was not until the 1879 Standing Bear trial that American Indians were even recognized as persons in the eyes of the white man's law. Judge Dundy declared that yes, Indians were people within the meaning of the laws, and that they had the rights associated with a writ of habeas corpus. However, he left unsettled the question of Indian citizenship. 

How did the Native Americans finally acquire citizenship? Was it by congressional law, a constitutional amendment, presidential decree, or a Supreme Court decision? There is no one answer. There was a patchwork of approaches before Congress finally tried to fashion an answer for all native peoples. 

The journey by Native Americans on the road to citizenship was marked by travels through a maze of U.S. Federal Indian polices that left the Indian nations exhausted and nearly extinct by the time they were given citizenship. And it was another 20 years before they had the right to vote throughout the U.S.

Native American Citizenship 

A Long History of Treaties

 From 1778 to 1871, the U.S. federal government tried to resolve its relationship with the various native tribes by negotiating treaties. In each of hundreds of treaties that were negotiated, these were formal agreements between two sovereign nations. So Native American people were citizens of their tribe, living within the boundaries of the U.S. The treaties were negotiated by the executive branch on behalf of the president and ratified by the U.S. Senate. The native tribes would give up their rights to hunt and live on huge parcels of land that they had inhabited in exchange for trade goods, yearly cash annuity payments, and assurances that no further demands would be made on them. Most often, part of the land would be "reserved" exclusively for the tribe's use. 

The obvious effect of the treaty process was to speed the transfer of Indian land to white settlers. As early as 1803, Thomas Jefferson recognized that the American people wanted land and that it might be difficult to get the land needed as long as native people continued their current lifestyles. In confidential Jefferson's letter to Congress asking for funds to explore the new territory, he wrote: 

"The Indian tribes residing within the limits of the U.S. have for a considerable time been growing more & more uneasy at the constant diminution of the territory they occupy, although' effected by their own voluntary sales... In order peaceably to counteract this policy of theirs, and to provide an extension of territory which the rapid increase of our numbers will call for, two measures are deemed expedient. First, to encourage them to abandon hunting, to apply to the raising stock, to agriculture and domestic manufacture, and thereby prove to themselves that less land & labor will maintain them in this, better than in their former mode of living. The extensive forests necessary in the hunting life will then become useless, & they will see advantage in exchanging them for the means of improving their farms, & of increasing their domestic comforts. Secondly to multiply trading houses among them & place within their reach those things which will contribute more to their domestic comfort then the profession of extensive, but uncultivated wilds, experience & reflection will develop to them the wisdom of exchanging what they can spare & we want, for what we can spare and they want." 

The treaties helped set the stage for a later and more dramatic policy of Indian removal. Indians who resisted attempts by the whites to obtain Indian land via treaty arrangements found themselves facing "removal" further westward. The white settlers created Indian territories in Oklahoma and the western half of present-day South Dakota where the Indians would be out of the way of westward expansion. In 1830, President Jackson convinced the U.S. Congress to pass the Indian Removal Act that appropriated funds for relocation — by force if necessary — of Native Americans. Federal officials were sent to negotiate removal treaties with the southern tribes, many of whom reluctantly signed. 

However, the Cherokees in the state of Georgia, fought their removal in the federal Supreme Court. They thought they had won when Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the Cherokees were a "domestic dependent nation" that could not be forced by the state of Georgia to give up its land against its will. Unfortunately, President Jackson and the state of Georgia ignored the decision and moved the Native Americans to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. The Cherokees refer to their trip as "The Trail of Tears." 

Native American Citizenship    

The Reservation System 

Under the reservation system, American Indians kept their citizenship in their sovereign tribes, but life was harder than it had been. The reservations were devised to encourage the Indians to live within clearly defined zones, and the U.S. promised to provide food, goods and money and to protect them from attack by other tribes and white settlers. The reservation policy also reflected the views of some of the educators and protestant missionaries that forcing the Indians to live in a confined space with little opportunity for nomadic hunting would make it easier to "civilize the savages." 

Native Indians, after 1830, found themselves being confined to reservations. But, even the Indian Territory was not safe from white settlers. In 1854, the Federal Government abolished the northern half of Indian Territory and established the Kansas and Nebraska Territories, which were immediately opened up to white settlement. Many of the tribes occupying the land ended up on vastly reduced reservations. 

The reservation system proved a disaster for the Indians as the government failed to keep its promises. The nomadic tribes were unable to follow the buffalo, and conflict among the tribes increased, rather than decreased, as the tribes competed with each other for dwindling resources. 

 Native American Citizenship 

The Reservation System:

Native American Lands Sold under the Dawes Act 

By 1871, the federal government stopped signing treaties with Native Americans and replaced the treaty system with a law giving individual Indians ownership of land that had been tribal property. This "Indian Homestead Act," official known as the Dawes Act, was a way for some Indians to become U.S. citizens. 

There were two reasons why the treaty system was abandoned. First, white settlers needed more and more land, and the fact that tribes were treated as separate nations with separate citizens made it more difficult to take land from them and "assimilate" them into the general population. Assimilation had become the new ideal. The goal was to absorb the tribes into the European-American culture and make native people more like mainstream Americans. Second, the House of Representatives was angry that they did not have a voice in these policies. Under the constitution, treaties are ratified by the U.S. Senate, not the House, even though the House has to appropriate the money to pay for them. So the Congress passed a compromise bill in 1871 that, in effect, brought an end to the treaty system. The bill contained the following language buried in an appropriations law for the Yankton Indians:

"PROVIDED, That hereafter no Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe , or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty. . ." 

The end of the treaties meant the end of treating tribes as sovereign nations. Attempts were made to undermine the power of the tribal leaders and the tribal justice systems. Tribal bonds were viewed as an obstacle to federal attempts to assimilate the Indian into white society. Assimilation of the American Indians would become the basis for much of the government policy toward the Native American from the 1880s to the 1930s. 

"It has become the settled policy of the Government to break up reservations, destroy tribal relations, settle Indians upon their own homesteads, incorporate them into the national life, and deal with them not as nations or tribes or bands, but as individual citizens."

   — Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas J. Morgan, 1890.

This set the stage for the passage by Congress of the General Allotment Act (the Dawes Severalty Act) of 1887. 

Congressman Henry Dawes had great faith in the civilizing power of private property. He said that to be civilized was to "wear civilized clothes ... cultivate the ground, live in houses, ride in Studebaker wagons, send children to school, drink whiskey [and] own property." This act was designed to turn Indians into farmers, in the hopes they would become more like mainstream America. 

The federal government divided communal tribal lands into 160-acre parcels — known as allotments — and gave them to individual tribal members. The U.S. Government would then hold the land allotted to individual Indians in trust for a period of 25 years, so that the Indian would not sell the land and return to the reservation and/or be swindled out of it by scheming white men. The Act went on to offer Indians the benefits of U.S. citizenship — if they took an allotment, lived separate from the tribe and became "civilized." 

"And every Indian born within the territorial limits of the United States to whom allotments shall have been made under the provisions of this act, or under any law or treaty, and every Indian born within the territorial limits of the United States who has voluntarily taken up, within said limits, his residence separate and apart from any tribe of Indians therein, and has adopted the habits of civilized life, is hereby declared to be a citizen of the United States, and is entitled to all the rights, privileges and immunities of such citizens..."

   — Language from the Dawes Act.

The Dawes Act would be the most important method of acquiring citizenship for the Indians prior to 1924. The Dawes Act tied Indian citizenship to the ultimate proof of civilization — individual ownership of property. The American Indian became an American citizen as soon as he received his allotment. The Act also declared that Indians could become citizens if they had separated from their tribes and adopted the ways of civilized life, without ending their rights to tribal or other property. In a sense, the American Indian could maintain dual citizenship tribal and American. 

President Theodore Roosevelt described this important law in his message to Congress of December 3, 1901 as "a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass." 

The supporters of the Dawes Act not only wanted to destroy the Indian tribal loyalties and the reservation system but also to open up the reservation lands to white settlement. Hundreds of thousands of acres of land remained after the individual 160-acre allotments had been made. These parcels were then sold at bargain prices to land-hungry whites. 

Funds from the sale of so-called surplus land were used to establish Indian schools. The idea was that Indian children could be educated and taught the social habits of white Americans, thus completing the process of assimilation. 

The allotment system turned out to be a monumental disaster for the Indians. In addition to losing their "surplus" tribal land, many Native American families also lost their allotted land despite the government's 24-year period of trusteeship. The poorest of the poor were landless and the majority of Indians still resisted assimilation. Native Americans reached their lowest population numbers shortly after the turn of the 20th Century. 

By 1932, the sale of unclaimed land and allotted land resulted in the loss of two-thirds of the more than 100-million acres Native Americans had held prior to the Dawes Act. 

Because special treaties guaranteed them self-government, the tribes in the Indian Territory had been excluded from the Dawes Act. But, the pressures of white settlers and railroads wanting to acquire Indian land soon resulted in President Harrison declaring in 1889 that lands in the Oklahoma area were open to settlement. The various tribes in the Indian Territory were pressured into signing agreements to allot their lands. By 1901, the Native Americans of the Indian Territory were declared U.S. citizens. In 1907, Oklahoma became a State in the Union, and the tribes of Oklahoma had lost their sovereignty and their lands. 

 Native American Citizenship 

 The Reservation System: American Indian Schools

As the Dawes Act was allocating tribal lands to individuals and selling other land to whites, Sen. Dawes was also instrumental in a system of Indian schools that were consciously designed to take the Indian out of Native American children. Richard H. Pratt was a cavalry officer who spent eight years in Indian Territory commanding a unit of African-American Buffalo Soldiers. He was involved with the campaign to keep Indians on their reservations and would track down hunting parties and return them to the reservation. He was appalled by the desperate conditions he saw.