Native Acts, Immigrant Acts

On May 26, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Immigration Act, popularly known as the “Quota Act,” which reduced drastically the number of new immigrants originating from southern and eastern Europe; their difference from the old, northern and western European immigrants made them less desirable to their adoptive country.Footnote ¹⁴ Among its many provisions, the act introduced a quota system based on national origins and spelled out the new contours of American citizenship. Relying on quotas based on the 1890 census, not the 1910 census—which would have allowed for a larger pool of southern and eastern European immigrants rather than one dominated by “Nordic” Anglo-Saxon immigrants—the Immigration Act of 1924 closed the door on several decades of high immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Before this drastic shift in immigration policy, immigration to the United States was desirable and sought after; immigrants performed various forms of agricultural and industrial labor and settled/occupied conquered territories recently repossessed from Native American nations. The new immigrants at the end of the nineteenth century—the industrial empire's new laborers—were different from the original settlers and descendants of English pilgrims, Scots, Scots-Irish, and the French Huguenots (all Calvinists) who did not just settle a putatively “savage” or “virgin land”—as settler discourse went—but displaced an entire network of Native nations.Footnote ¹⁵ The settlers’ belief in the sacred, God-given covenant—the origin myth at the basis of American exceptionalism—justified their claims to land through the infamous “Doctrine of Discovery.”Footnote ¹⁶ As historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has put it, “European and Euro-American ‘discoverers’ had gained real-property rights in the lands of Indigenous peoples by merely planting a flag.”Footnote ¹⁷ Planting a flag on stolen lands defined the basis of patriotism of the “nation of immigrants.” To be accepted into this exclusive settler club, the new immigrants had to prove their loyalty to the covenant, as well as their patriotism; otherwise, they were suspect and subject to various forms of exclusion. By limiting the number of new immigrants from undesirable nations—the “backward” European countries—the Immigration Act of 1924 also legislated the racial and ethnic makeup of the country for the next decades and instituted new hierarchies of difference and (racial) desirability.Footnote ¹⁸

On June 2, 1924, President Coolidge signed into law the Snyder Act, or the Indian Citizenship Act (ICA). At the time, there were close to 300,000 Native people in the United States, two-thirds of whom had already become citizens through various congressional acts. Before the ICA, the General Allotment Act of 1887 (also known as the Dawes Act) was the most common method of naturalizing Native allottees, provided they received an allotment or left the tribe and “adopted the habits of civilized life.” Their reward was national citizenship. Footnote ¹⁹ The 1924 ICA held 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: Provided, That the granting of such citizenship shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.” Unlike previous statutes or treaties, the ICA did not mandate that Native people relinquish their allegiance to their tribe in order to become American citizens.Footnote ²⁰ Most importantly, although the emphasis of the law was on the event of American citizenship, and the political moment converged toward an effervescence of American patriotism, Native people could retain their tribal citizenship status. And although race and ethnicity informed and justified immigration restriction policy historically, making some immigrant groups more desirable and others less so, the dispossession of Indigenous people of their territories and their near wiping out brings other categories of analysis to the forefront of understanding national belonging and citizenship. Concepts such as colonization, genocide, and dispossession (rather than race) are especially relevant to understanding Indigenous definitions of belonging and citizenship beyond those codified in the Indian Citizenship Act.Footnote ²¹

This renewed interest in the citizen Indian at a time when the “vanishing Indian” trope dominated both popular and scientific venues was symptomatic of (White) anxieties about national identity more so than concerns with Native people's political status. Whereas the acquisition of U.S. citizenship ended immigrant second-class citizenship status—although many immigrants chose not to apply for naturalization—for American Indians, the gift of U.S. citizenship in 1924 did not end their status as wards of the federal government. As domestic subjects by law, Native Americans were legal wards of the federal government, living within the borders of the nation-state but lacking full rights as individuals. Both the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act and the Indian Citizenship Act passed in 1924 at the tail end of an aggressive national (and nationalist) campaign to make new immigrants and Native Americans into “good Americans” and law-abiding citizens. American citizenship was also the ultimate goal of the Progressive Era Americanization campaigns, supported by both the federal government and state and private organizations. This essay argues, therefore, that whereas the blanket naturalization offered by the ICA in 1924 may be read as a corrective to earlier exclusionary legal history, immigrant naturalization is part of the pseudo-inclusionary legal history aimed at blending the qualifying foreigner into the homogenous mass of Americanism.Footnote ²²

By the late nineteenth century in the United States, the category of citizenship was increasingly understood in assimilationist terms. This understanding was compounded by the influence of civic republican ideology, calling for complete absorption into a homogenous national culture, patriotism, consensus, unity, and loyalty to national symbols and icons.Footnote ²³ For Native people, the forced assimilation and Americanization was an extension of the colonial practices, a replacement of one civic status with another—domestic dependent, ward, or U.S. citizen—and a reflection of the American colonial ambivalence vis-à-vis Native subjects. For new immigrants, different from their Anglo-Saxon or Nordic predecessors (the “old immigrants”), Americanization meant renouncing political allegiance to other sovereigns, acquiring the English language, and participating in civic education for naturalization. Native Americans were slowly coerced into citizenship while new immigrants were gradually barred from it through a series of immigration restriction acts and increasingly intricate naturalization procedures aimed at controlling American citizenry even further.

Like other modern nation-states, the United States has reproduced its citizenry in two ways—through birthright (the ascriptive model) and through naturalization (the consensual model). Whereas immigrants could consent to become naturalized American citizens, American Indians were excluded from birthright citizenship. Although born on U.S. territory, the Indian was not born a U.S. citizen, but was a “domestic subject,” a ward of the federal government.Footnote ²⁴ Before the Civil War, African Americans also inhabited a liminal position: neither foreigner not citizen.Footnote ²⁵ After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and a series of subsequent landmark cases in the 1920s (such as the Takao Ozawa v. United States and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind cases), for the next three decades Asian Americans could not naturalize, except in small groups.Footnote ²⁶

The United States’ racial policy also determined the contours of U.S. citizenship—premised on whiteness or constant redefinitions of the original U.S. naturalization law's “free white persons” requirement. The Naturalization Act of 1790 made a naturalization provision for male, white citizens, an exclusionary act that marked what Michael Omi and Howard Winant call the U.S. “racial policy.” According to Omi and Winant, historically, the main objective of U.S. racial policy has been repression and exclusion.Footnote ²⁷ Nevertheless, whereas Indigenous people were offered the gift of U.S. citizenship and allotments of land in fee simple (through the Dawes Act of 1887) in hopes that they would become “good Americans,” new immigrants had to become American cultural citizens first and then demonstrate their worthiness of American legal citizenship second. In some cases, they could decline to ever naturalize, choosing instead permanent residency. Because federal control of naturalization was minimal in the nineteenth century, politicians often sought the immigrants’ franchise and facilitated their naturalization, especially during election years. For immigrants, citizenship was meaningful insofar as it offered access to better jobs, but otherwise there was no immediate incentive to naturalize. At the same time, the worthiness of American citizenship was premised on the future citizen's whiteness. Between the 1870s and 1920s, U.S. courts also consolidated the idea of “the Caucasian,” just as popular and congressional debates produced the notion of Anglo-Saxon supremacy, pitted against the “Celtic, Hebrew, Slavic, and Mediterranean degeneracy.”Footnote ²⁸ In the 1920s, as David Roediger has argued, “immigrant greasers, guineas, and hunkies”—popular slurs at the time—were “racialized as less than white in common speech” at the same time that Congress was “flooded with appeals for racially based restrictions on the immigration of southern and eastern Europeans to the United States.”Footnote ²⁹ Under these pressures, the restriction of immigration was imminent.

Unnatural Naturalizations: Immigration Restriction

Although Article I of the U.S. Constitution adopted in 1789 granted Congress the power “to establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization,” no clear naturalization policy was in place in the United States before 1906.Footnote ³⁰ The Naturalization Act of 1790 established a contractual relation between the immigrant and the state, holding that “any alien, being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits of and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become citizen thereof.”Footnote ³¹ This was the first federally enacted law to refer to race explicitly, making whiteness a prerequisite to citizenship (until 1952).Footnote ³² It established that naturalizable aliens must be both “white” and “free,” thus making whiteness the racial prerequisite for citizenship. By restricting naturalization to “free white persons,” the Naturalization Act of 1790 also established that African Americans, Asian Americans, and American Indians were not naturalizable.Footnote ³³ By the time of the Civil War, several terms of future immigration restriction laws had been defined, especially the thorny issue of state vs. federal jurisdiction over immigration. In the 1790s, three pieces of anti-alien legislation set the tone for direct anti-alien sentiment and vigilance in the next century—the Naturalization Act (June 1798), the Aliens Act (June 1798), and the Alien Enemy Act (July 1798).Footnote ³⁴ Subsequent exclusionary logic was based on race, and continued to inform nineteenth-century immigration legislation.Footnote ³⁵

If the naturalization of Native Americans was enforced and enacted by various congressional acts responding to specific socioeconomic and political circumstances (as Native tribes were held under the jurisdiction of the War Department, the Department of the Interior, and later the Bureau of Indian Affairs), immigrant naturalization became more centralized between 1883—when record numbers of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants from southern and eastern Europe arrived in the United States, supplying the cheap labor no longer available after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—and the first severe immigration restriction steps taken in 1913. New immigrants could live in the United States and own land without being required to naturalize, whereas Native people could receive a land allotment and gain citizenship only if they proved their competence and industriousness.Footnote ³⁶ Native Americans were also made citizens against their will, at the recommendation of a Competency Commission; in some cases, although Native allottees either did not apply or did not consent to citizenship, they were made into citizens.Footnote ³⁷ Just as some American Indians declined to become U.S. citizens, many new immigrants never applied for U.S. citizenship and remained “unnaturalized aliens.” Census data from 1890 to 1930 reveals that unnaturalized aliens (or those who had only filed first papers) represented about 25 percent of the people of foreign birth. To begin the naturalization process, a Native person first applied to the local superintendent, filling out a questionnaire that demonstrated his “competency”; if competent, he completed applications for fee patents. In some cases, “recalcitrant Indians” refused to sign applications, expressing direct dissent to naturalization; in others, federal commissioners forced patents in fee simple on unqualified Native people.Footnote ³⁸

Unlike federal Indian policy, which overlooked Native people's desire or willingness to naturalize (consent being a key element of naturalization), immigration policy was organized around the concept of “desirable” vs. “undesirable” aliens. A desirable alien may not be an idiot, an epileptic, or a lunatic; for a country imagining its own homogeneity of identity despite a growing racial and ethnic diversity, the new American must also be a WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant). Under the Immigration Restriction Act of 1891, immigration was placed under federal authority and Ellis Island became the legitimate port of entry in the United States.Footnote ³⁹ Besides racial determination of whiteness as the prerequisite for naturalization, the Immigration Restriction League (IRL) also contributed to a growing repertoire of “excludable” categories.Footnote ⁴⁰ The reports of the Dillingham Commission (produced between 1907 and 1911)—which ultimately recommended that Congress enact restrictions on immigration based on what it found to be the “unassimilable character of recent immigrants”—also offered analogies between the perceived intellectual differences of new immigrants compared to the old: “[T]he new immigration as a class is far less intelligent than the old.”Footnote ⁴¹ Through a similar racist logic, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs had commented on Native Americans’ intelligence just a few decades earlier: “we have within our midst two hundred and seventy-five thousand [Native American] people, the least intelligent portion of our population, for whom we provide no law, either for protection or for the punishment of crime committed among themselves.”Footnote ⁴²

When the Naturalization Act passed in 1906, it brought the concerns of Americanizers to bear on those shaping naturalization, posing more procedural obstacles to undesirable immigrants who wanted to naturalize. All immigrants interested in becoming naturalized had to file a “Declaration of Intention” two to seven years before applying for citizenship; to receive their first papers, immigrants were required to present a “certificate of arrival” issued by the Bureau of Immigration. Under the new law, naturalization was no longer performed by state and local institutions, but by the federal government. Gradually, the overarching control of the federal government made immigrant agency in the naturalization process minimal. This act, therefore, tightened federal control over naturalization.Footnote ⁴³ Although the new naturalization law did not define the minimum standards of linguistic or constitutional knowledge, immigration restrictionists read the 1906 Naturalization Act and its provisions as a way to make formal Americanization part and parcel of preparations for U.S. citizenship. In 1906, the Department of Commerce and Labor established the U.S. Bureau of Naturalization, the first institution under the jurisdiction of federal courts regulating immigration and naturalization. After June 1906, the naturalization courts had to be federal courts, but at the time there were fewer courts doing naturalization work than were necessary. Competency in English and knowledge of the U.S. Constitution were added as legal requirements to the existing racial requirements for naturalization.Footnote ⁴⁴

Americanization became the arc framing the imagined national identities of both Native Americans and new immigrants in the first decades of the twentieth century. As the United States entered World War I in 1917, a new brand of patriotic Americanism shaped new formulations of national identity and brought the reward of citizenship to the Native and immigrant soldiers who fought in World War I. Yet, just as the Indian Citizenship Act passed after the Immigration Act in 1924, the Native soldiers who fought in the war were naturalized months after their immigrant peers, as an afterthought.Footnote ⁴⁵ Granting American citizenship to Native Americans was yet another colonial gesture, framed as a “gift” from the federal government to the Indian wards of the state, as an inclusion into the national body, yet signifying dispossession and further exclusion under the façade of American citizenship.Footnote ⁴⁶

Nativism was at the heart of immigration restriction sentiment and legislation, informing definitions of citizenship and national identity as normative and exclusionary. With the Immigration Act of 1924, the shift to “national origins” was rooted in issues of race and difference. As new immigrants were increasingly different from the previous generations of immigrants, concerns over the assimilability of old immigrants turned into claims about new immigrants’ racial inferiority. The perceived threats to American institutions and the failure of the Americanization campaigns to “melt” the new immigrants into good Americans also motivated the move toward restriction. President Coolidge, who had just accepted the 1924 Republican Party nomination, summed up his defense of immigration restriction: “Restrictive immigration is not an offensive but a purely defensive action. […] We must remember that every object of our institutions of society and Government will fail unless America be kept American.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Determined to keep America American, President Coolidge signed into law both the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 and the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, within days of each other. These acts restricted the immigrants’ access to the United States and their eventual chance to naturalize, at the same time that they extended the gift of citizenship to Native people.

Out By Law: The American Indian, Foreigner At Home

One of the many goals of Progressive Era reformers was to make Native people feel more “at home” in America—a paradoxical goal that came at the cost of eroding Native sovereignty and dispossessing Native nations.Footnote ⁴⁸ While this typical progressive gesture signals inclusion, it also gestures toward Native exclusion from the American polity and, more tellingly, American land. Throughout the nineteenth century, many Native nations had been removed from their ancestral homes and land bases, so the Progressive Era idea of “home” was an abstract construct at best, often contradicting material realities. For White America, Indian removal was not just a forced relocation from one geographic space to another, but also a removal from white America's mind. White America has historically perceived Native people as “essentially foreign.” During the colonial period, the Indian nations’ title of self-government was recognized under the law of nations and treaties signed between Great Britain and the colonies. Native nations established a relation of imperium in imperio, or a sovereign within a sovereign nation. The Doctrine of Discovery perpetuated “a second-class national status for tribal nations and relegat[ed] individual Indians to second-class citizenship,” stripping “tribes and individuals of their complete property rights.” The relations of the United States with Native nations were subsequently carried out through the treaty process. Many of these treaties transferred land titles from Native nations to the United States, and the federal government recognized tribal ownership of Indian land in the trade and intercourse acts. The use of legal documents, inherited from European colonial governments, provided the legal façade to deny rights to Native people.Footnote ⁴⁹

The U.S. Constitution is an early illustration of Indigenous exclusion. The Federalist and the 1787 Constitutional Convention made it clear that Indian tribes and their members were considered nonparticipating inhabitants of the United States.Footnote ⁵⁰ The only constitutional provision mentioning Indian tribes was the Commerce Clause, which treated tribes as entities distinct from the states.Footnote ⁵¹ Besides the Commerce Clause, the Treaty Clause was also considered a basis for federal authority over tribes, granting exclusive authority to the federal government to enter into treaties with Indigenous nations.Footnote ⁵² Furthermore, “Indians not taxed” were excluded by Article I and the Fourteenth Amendment from representation and taxation, had no participatory rights (as they did not “consent to be governed”), but were considered nonetheless “free persons”—to be distinguished from slaves, who were subject to the internal laws of the United States without their consent or participation.Footnote ⁵³ Although politically and legally “foreign” to the United States, tribes became a matter of domestic concern when Congress discontinued the practice of treaty-making in 1871 and prohibited the recognition of Indigenous tribes as sovereign political entities. Indigenous people inhabited an in-between political status characterized by domestic dependence on the United States in a foreign sense.Footnote ⁵⁴ Therefore, while the designation of Native nations as “foreign nations” acknowledged their political sovereignty, Native sovereignty remained, at best, nominal.

Two landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases following the 1830 Indian Removal Act—Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832)—provide evidence of the Supreme Court's reinterpretation of the status of Indian nations as foreign states, and for understanding wardship, the opposite status of full citizenship, and one that Native Americans have been forced into for many years. The Indian Removal Act authorized the president to exchange land west of the Mississippi River for land tribes held in any state or territory.Footnote ⁵⁵ Following The Removal Act, in 1831, after Georgia extended its state laws over Cherokee lands, the Cherokee Nation sued the state of Georgia in the Supreme Court, using its prerogative as a “foreign state” to challenge the enforcement of Georgia's jurisdiction within the Cherokee Nation. Chief Justice John Marshall, who delivered the opinion of the court in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, declined the Cherokee Nation's wish to sue, as a “foreign nation,” under the court's doctrine of original jurisdiction. Asking—“Is the Cherokee nation a foreign nation in the sense in which that term is used in the constitution?”—Marshall declared that it was not a foreign nation, but a domestic dependent nation, and therefore could not challenge state laws. The Cherokees, and by extension, all Native nations, were thus granted a new designation—domestic dependent nations. Marshall analogized their relation to the United States as “like that of a ward to his guardian” and emphasized the idea of dependence: “They look to our government for protection; rely upon its kindness and its power; appeal to it for relief to their wants; and address the president as their great father.” Marshall erased, with a stroke of his pen, the idea of Native sovereignty by claiming that both foreign nations and the United States considered Native tribes to be “so completely under the sovereignty and dominion of the United States.” The Marshall court imposed of the term “domestic dependent nations” to erase—rhetorically and legally—the sovereign status of Native nations.Footnote ⁵⁶

The provisions for the naturalization of immigrants in the United States were established as early as 1790 (by the Naturalization Act); however, the only Native people considered citizens by birth under the Constitution before the Allotment Act of 1887 were “those not born into membership in a tribe or whose tribe no longer existed as a distinct entity.” In the infamous case Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), the Supreme Court declared that both free blacks and slaves were not citizens of the United States, a decision overruled in 1868.Footnote ⁵⁷ This court case brought debates over citizenship to the forefront of national debates over slavery. In its discussion of citizenship, the court said that Native Americans were not originally citizens in the constitutional sense, but that unlike African Americans, Congress had the power to naturalize them because they were aliens for that purpose.Footnote ⁵⁸ In 1883, another case brought before the Supreme Court reinforced the idea that federal courts had no jurisdiction on reservation land. Crow Dog (Brulé Sioux) was sentenced to death by a Dakota district court for the murder of Spotted Tail (of the same band and tribe). From prison, Crow Dog brought his case to the Supreme Court and asked to be released, claiming that federal courts had no jurisdiction over crimes committed on reservations by one Indian against another, declaring that “the conviction and sentence are void, and that his imprisonment is illegal.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Crow Dog was subsequently freed, and the landmark case Ex parte Crow Dog (1883) reinforced the idea that federal courts did not have jurisdiction on reservation land and tribal citizens.

In another landmark case, Elk v. Wilkins (1884), the Supreme Court declared that section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment did not include an Indian born under tribal authority.Footnote ⁶⁰ After he was denied the right to vote in Omaha, Nebraska, John Elk of the Winnebago/Ho-Chunk tribe, “a civilized Indian,” brought his case to the Supreme Court and asked for recognition of his American citizenship. Elk, born in Oklahoma, had moved to Omaha, purchased a home, became a member of the state militia, and paid taxes. His deliberate removal from his tribe and his willingness to cast his vote in state elections were encouraged by Nebraska laws.Footnote ⁶¹ The court declined his application for citizenship, holding that, because Indians owed allegiance to their tribe, they did not acquire citizenship at birth.Footnote ⁶² As a counterpoint to Elk v. Wilkins, which decided that an Indian born in the United States was not a citizen according to the Fourteenth Amendment, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) the Supreme Court decided that a Chinese man born in the United States (whose parents were born in China) was a U.S. citizen according to the Fourteenth Amendment.Footnote ⁶³ This case offers a particular exception to naturalization practices after 1882, in the context of the contentious debates over fitness for citizenship, race, and increased federal control. Although the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made it explicit that the Chinese were ineligible for naturalization, the search for citizenship in a Chinese American context at the end of the nineteenth century continued. Unlike John Elk, Wong Kim Ark sought (and ultimately obtained) American citizenship so he could maintain a transnational relationship with his family in China, at a time when exclusionary laws against Asian Americans threatened to isolate him even further. Wong Kim Ark was eventually naturalized in 1898, and his citizenship made it possible for his sons to become American citizens. After an undistinguished career as a cook, Wong retired to China in the 1930s and never returned to the United States. After Elk v. Wilkins, the United States gave citizenship to Native allottees and took their land, children, and sense of sovereignty. At the same time, after Wong Kim Ark, the United States extended exclusion beyond the Chinese immigrants to include other less desirable immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, based on race and national origin. In the aftermath of these legal decisions, both Native Americans and new immigrants continued to contest the limitations of these acts in their respective communities, fighting to reshape the meaning of citizenship for each group. The racially exclusionary immigration acts controlled both the country's perpetuation of a putatively racial superiority and its naturalization practices.

The Elk v. Wilkins decision, however, precipitated the inclusion of a citizenship clause in the Dawes Act of 1887. By this time, the overarching goal of Indian policy reform was the complete assimilation and Americanization of Native people.Footnote ⁶⁴ The promise of citizenship permeated the rhetoric of the “total assimilation” policy used by reformers and legislators in the late nineteenth century. The reformers were united by three key concerns—breaking up tribal relations, the reservation land base, and individualizing Native people; transforming them into U.S. citizens; and providing a universal government school. The Dawes Act (the General Allotment Act) of 1887 called for allotting all Indian reservations (except the so-called Five Civilized Tribes) in severalty to individual Indians, thus breaking up tribal land and relations. It included a citizenship proviso for Native allottees: the land would be “held in trust” for twenty-five years by the federal government.Footnote ⁶⁵ Tribal lands were to be broken up and assimilation was to be performed gradually; if, like John Elk, they left their reservation homes and “adopted the habits of civilized life,” allotted Indians would become citizens of the United States and of the state in which they resided right away, and would receive title to their allotments in twenty-five years.Footnote ⁶⁶ The “promise of citizenship” offered by the Dawes Act was, however, only temporary. The 1906 Burke Act amended the 1887 Dawes Act and deferred citizenship for twenty-five more years, a time during which the federal government held the land in trust.Footnote ⁶⁷ The Burke Act had harmful consequences for tribes, as the government removed them from its care before Native people could support themselves and take care of their land allotments. As a result, many Indigenous people lost their lands and livelihoods.Footnote ⁶⁸ Besides the naturalization provisions of the Dawes Act, Native people could become citizens in several ways: through treaty provisions and special statutes; through receipt of patents in fee simple (starting in 1906); by “adopting the habits of civilized life”; through marriage (starting in 1888, Native women who married U.S. citizens became American citizens); through parentage (minor children whose Native parents became citizens also became American citizens); by birth (a Native child born in the United States of citizen Native parents or legitimate children of a Native woman and a white father was an American citizen); and by special acts of Congress.Footnote ⁶⁹ In 1901, citizenship was granted to all members of the Five Civilized Nations in Indian Territory (the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole).Footnote ⁷⁰ Congress made World War I Native veterans into American citizens in November 1918.Footnote ⁷¹

With little debate and discussion in Congress, as well as dismal public attention, President Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act into law on June 2, 1924. It extended citizenship to all Native people, allowing for the retention of tribal citizenship and rights, including property rights. Unlike previous drafts, the final draft of the ICA provided that tribal rights would not be affected. This law no longer made citizenship dependent on place of residence or land tenure.Footnote ⁷² U.S. citizenship offered the façade of a uniform membership and a civic identity that contradicted many tribal values and political allegiances. Nevertheless, the ICA did not put an end to wardship; at best, it extended federal dependence under the umbrella term of universal citizenship. The power to vote in state and federal elections remained, for a long time, the only direct benefit of citizenship. Many states denied Native people the right to vote until the 1950s.Footnote ⁷³ Until 1924, Native people who had not become citizens (through allotment, marriage, military service, or special treaties or statutes) had a rather unusual status under federal law: they were noncitizens, yet they could not naturalize under the naturalization processes offered to foreigners.Footnote ⁷⁴ Whereas citizenship was at the heart of policies of both Native assimilation and immigrant Americanization, granting citizenship to Native people was, ultimately, disastrous, with few benefits for them. As legal historian Bethany Berger has pointed out, “In the name of citizenship, Indians had lost their land, their children, and their legal independence and got almost nothing in return.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Despite the colonial imposition of the “American citizen” status, many Indigenous people continued to maintain tribal citizenship and a sense of community, often at odds with the white, capitalist citizenship envisioned for them through federal acts.

Although the Indian Citizenship Act was the official naturalization law for Indigenous people in the United States, not all Native people consented to it. Whereas politicians, legislators, and Progressive Era reform organizations such as the Friends of the Indian conceived of legal citizenship as the Native people's only way to enter modernity, the response to this “gift” of citizenship was not unanimous acceptance, and Native communities had their reservations about it (pun intended). Despite the limited venues to express dissent to the American political system (through speeches before the American public, congressional hearings, media, or the courts), many Native people living on reservations challenged the meaning of American citizenship. These challenges included letters, delegations, petitions, religious movements, and traditional dance and musical performances. Writing to Dr. Carlos Montezuma, the Yavapai Native intellectual and medical doctor, in June 1918 from the Warren Springs Reservation in Oregon, Jake Culps asserted his position as a citizen of his tribe, who was uninterested in American citizenship, which would have potentially drafted him to fight in World War I: “I never asked no time for citizenship. There for [sic] I do not know myself as a citizen.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Benjamin Caswell, president of the Chippewa Indians, Inc., saw the granting of U.S. citizenship to Native people as an imposition on tribal property rights, which could lead to a disintegration of Indigenous communities as political entities. In one of his memoirs, Carlisle Indian Industrial School graduate and Sioux writer, actor, and activist Luther Standing Bear called the imposition of American citizenship “the greatest hoax perpetuated on Indians.”Footnote ⁷⁷ One of the loudest voices of dissent to the ICA was Jane Zane Gordon, a member of the Wyandotte nation, who took to the Los Angeles Examiner to express her views, arguing that the ICA violated the basic political principle of consent.Footnote ⁷⁸

For students of Native and Indigenous history, a better-known example of Indigenous rejection of U.S. citizenship is that of the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy, whose Grand Council sent letters to the U.S. President and Congress declining U.S. citizenship, rejecting dual citizenship, and emphasizing that the ICA was passed without their consent.Footnote ⁷⁹ Tuscarora Chief Clinton Rickard described the Iroquois resistance to the ICA, which he called a “violation” of Native sovereignty: “The Indian Citizenship Act did pass in 1924 despite our strong opposition. […] This was a violation of our sovereignty. Our citizenship was in our own nations. We had a great attachment to our style of government. We wished to remain treaty Indians and preserve our ancient rights.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Rickard expressed what other Native people were voicing at the time: that the imposition of U.S. citizenship was a threat to tribal status and to Indigenous sovereignty. The Six (Iroquois) Nations, which included Chief Rickard's nation, the Tuscarora, protested the federal pressure to make Native people into U.S. citizens.Footnote ⁸¹ Not only did the Iroquois leaders protest the ICA's passage, but they also sent letters to Congress and President Coolidge asking him to decline American citizenship, arguing that the ICA was passed without their knowledge and consent.Footnote ⁸²

One of the overlooked effects of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act is that it also regulated the travel of American Indians across the U.S.-Canadian border for religious ceremonies. Because the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy lived on both sides of the border, the Immigration Act of 1924 threatened the cultural and political relations among the Iroquois as they could not cross the border freely to attend ceremonies. Chief Rickard lobbied Congress to amend the Johnson-Reed Act and, in 1928, President Coolidge signed into law a bill amending the 1924 Immigration Act, “guaranteeing that its border regulations did not apply to Indigenous people.”Footnote ⁸³ This amendment acknowledged the sovereignty of Indigenous people to travel freely across the border and helped maintain cultural and political connections between Indigenous communities.

The ICA was the culmination of decades of work by progressive organizations, government officials, and federal employees. The overarching question still remains: what did U.S. citizenship ultimately mean for Native people? Granted, the law acknowledged the Native triple citizenship still recognized today—federal, state, and tribal; yet, an undeniable tenet of naturalization law is the consent of the governed. Unlike previous naturalization statutes, the ICA did not require the consent of Native people, nor did it have any other precondition. However, most Indigenous people did not consent to American citizenship, and many expressed dissent to the imposition of American citizenship.Footnote ⁸⁴ Although there was significant Native support for citizenship and tribal claims, as scholars have recently shown, the push toward Americanization and its surrounding discourses simplified the complex status of Native citizenship.Footnote ⁸⁵ The cultural and political work of Americanizers, at the same time that it continued to romanticize Indigenous people, also seized the opportunity to include Native Americans in the national project as American citizens, so that this inclusion could also fuel their argument for immigrant exclusion.

Rites and Rights: Citizenship and Performance

Besides direct dissent to the gift of American citizenship before the ICA's passage in 1924, Native communities used the privileges offered by American citizenship to assert their Indigeneity. In the early 1920s, the Lakotas established what historian John Troutman calls “a citizenship of dance”—an occasion allowing the Lakotas to assert their right to dance as a right of their newly-granted U.S. citizenship.Footnote ⁸⁶ Despite the federal government's attempts to suppress or erase Indigenous dance—a great threat to Americanization and assimilation, and a “savage” practice in the eyes of the reformers—dance remained a powerful act of community expression. After the 1870s, the Office of Indian Affairs considered Indian ceremonial dances pagan, uncivilized rituals and attempted to eradicate them, targeting especially “the old Indian dances,” which purportedly slowed Native communities’ Americanization. Despite these federal attempts to control Native American expressive culture and to impose a uniform (American) political identity, Native Americans continued to remain citizens of their tribes or nations and to perform their traditional dances on their land allotments.Footnote ⁸⁷ Not only did tribes take control of their dances by the 1910s, but they also did so despite continued federal regulation.Footnote ⁸⁸ Forbidden to dance traditional dances, Native people used American holidays to justify the practice of tribal ceremonies, swaying Indian agents, often under the aegis of the American flag. In the process, “citizen Indians” found that they could remain Indian only by becoming American. Preserving a sense of Indigeneity often came at the cost of public declarations of American patriotism, even though such declarations were often pro forma.

Music and dance allowed Native people to use their new American citizenship for their cultural agendas, especially when these celebrations coincided with Fourth of July celebrations. A missionary at the Cheyenne River Reservation reported to the Office of Indian Affairs in 1922: “The 4^th of July celebration in Indian country and the 4^th of July celebration by the whites are two different things. […] The Indians celebrate the 4^th of July with a regular Powwow with all its frills and fixings that go with it.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Although Progressive Era reformers and federal agents worked together to prevent the spectacle of what reformers called “prurient ritual,” government officials ultimately failed to end Native dancing during the reservation era. Although Indian agents threatened the many disobedient Native communities, the opportunity to dance prevailed over the agents’ threats. Historian Clyde Ellis recounts the story of an elderly Kiowa man who resisted an agent who had denigrated the community's dance in the 1910s as “a heathen ritual,” and threatened to continue withholding government rations if the Kiowas continued to dance their traditional dances. The Kiowa man responded defiantly: “We don't want your rations. We want this dance.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Dancing on the Fourth of July, therefore, proved to be a safer form of expressing Native culture because it assumed a celebration of things “American.” Native dances on such occasions became celebrations of entire communities, at the same time that they appeased federal anxieties about the dangers of such “prurient” rites. As Rayna Green and John Troutman have shown, “Having learned in the schools that publicly displaying Indianness while promoting citizenship was acceptable to the ever-anxious white man, reservation Indians began to schedule feast days and ceremonials during ‘American’ and ‘patriotic’ holidays and celebrations.” Draping themselves in the American flag, both figuratively and sometimes literally, Native communities used patriotic holidays like the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, and Arbor Day to convince federal agents that they had a reason to dance.Footnote ⁹¹ If, in the early 1880s, Native dances constituted the greatest threat to assimilation and Americanization, by the 1910s tribes regained control of traditional dances, sometimes modifying the role and use of dancing, despite the Office of Indian Affairs’ continued attempts to suppress their performances.Footnote ⁹²

While Native ceremonies were suppressed, patriotic Indian ceremonies organized and funded by white Indian enthusiasts flourished throughout the American West in the 1910s. Two relevant cases in point are the Rodman Wanamaker Expedition of Citizenship in 1913 and the citizenship ceremonies organized by the federal Competency Commissions in 1916. The Wanamaker 1913 Expedition of Citizenship to the North American Indian exemplifies an elaborate didactic exercise on American patriotism, a long parade organized by self-proclaimed Indian enthusiast Joseph Kossuth Dixon and sponsored by wealthy Philadelphia capitalist Rodman Wanamaker. One of the central intertitle pages in the documentary resulting from this expedition carried Rodman Wanamaker's message of patriotism to the American Indian: “Rodman Wanamaker said, A New Ideal is Imposed: All the tribes must feel the same thrill of patriotism—the stars and the stripes must be lifted by Indian hands upon every reservation, thus linking all the tribes to the Memorial.” The “Memorial” refers to a planned monument to the vanishing Indian, a failed project that captured both Wanamaker's and Dixon's interest. Footnote ⁹³ The third expedition to the American West for Dixon, it carried President Woodrow Wilson's message of patriotism, recorded on gramophone, to seventy-three reservations. The expedition also included parading the American flag on Native lands—sometimes accompanied by the sound of Native drums—and having Native people sign a made-up “Declaration of Allegiance of the North American Indian to the United States.” In the footage of this parade, preserved on film, the first intertitle declares, “Carrying the flag—a message of hope to a vanishing race.” Each ceremony followed a similar pattern, with local variations: first, Dixon explained the symbolism of the flag; then followed the dedications to the flag; third came the raising of the flag; and lastly, a Native man signed or x-marked the “Declaration of Allegiance” to the U.S. government. The audiences of the Wanamaker Expedition of Citizenship varied in size and sometimes included Native women and children, in both citizens’ clothes and Native regalia. A Native interpreter was typically present to translate the message of patriotism to the Native people in the audience. The Wanamaker Expedition reached an estimated nine hundred tribal leaders.Footnote ⁹⁴

The preserved film footage of the Wanamaker Expedition of Citizenship to the American Indian expands the range of Native resistance to instances of coercive Americanization. In the segment filmed at Fort Belknap, Montana, a Native man in traditional regalia spits near the American flag, and the viewer never sees him sign the Declaration of Allegiance. This is a fleeting moment, barely noticeable in the footage, before the film cuts hastily to the next scene. Yet it speaks volumes about the footage we can no longer access and other forms of direct dissent not preserved on camera or in the national newspapers. Although major national newspapers reported on the success of the Wanamaker Expedition, there was also opposition to this fake ceremony (more of a publicity stunt for Dixon); occasionally, tribal members refused to sign any papers. The strongest resistance to this type of ceremony was recoded among the Pueblos, Hopis, and Navajos who, according to historian Russel Barsh, “did not want to acknowledge the flag until their land rights were secured.” Pablo Abeita, governor of the Isleta Pueblos in New Mexico, refused to sign the allegiance because his people had been mistreated, and he saw the occasion as another trick played on his people by the federal government. Native intellectuals of the era also called the expedition “a theatrical affair”; according to Arthur C. Parker, one of the leaders of the Society of American Indians, “the very name [of the expedition] smacks of Jingoism and impresses one with the expressions of a circus manager.”Footnote ⁹⁵ The whole expedition was marked by sensationalism, and was invested less in Indigenous people's lives and political rights—what the granting of citizenship would really mean for the tribes—and more on Dixon's fleeting fame as an Americanizer, as well as President Wilson's message to his Indian “brothers.” Dixon seized the opportunity to advance his own fame rather than Indigenous rights.

In 1913, Joseph Dixon's passionate work brought Native Americans and new immigrants to the American public's attention. Dixon had worked tirelessly on the plan for an Indian monument in New York Harbor, a sixty-foot-tall bronze statue of a Native man, extending his hand to welcome the immigrants. President Wilson expressed excitement at memorializing Native people in such a monumental way in New York Harbor, where, at the time, new immigrants hailed in larger numbers than ever before. This type of memorialization, as literary historian Lucy Maddox has pointed out, had “a funereal significance: it bid farewell to Native people and buried contemporary Indigenous issues under a blanket of sentimental discourse and tons of metal and stone.” Despite Dixon's grand plan to memorialize what he considered to be a “vanishing race”—and although the memorial was designed and the official groundbreaking took place in February 1913—the memorial never was never built.Footnote ⁹⁶ Despite his failure to build a memorial to the North American Indian, Dixon took the same flag used at the groundbreaking of the memorial on his next (third and final) expedition, bringing the stars and stripes to Native reservations in the West.Footnote ⁹⁷

The American fascination with outdoor, highly publicized ceremonies continued throughout the 1910s. The citizenship ceremonies orchestrated by the Competency Commissions offer another bizarre case of imposed patriotic performance, where the solemnity of the patriotic moment meets the elaborate imposed ritual. After the 1906 Burke Act allowed the Secretary of the Interior to grant “certificates of citizenship” to individual allottees found “competent,” in April 1915 Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane established the first Competency Commission on reservations to determine if American Indians were “competent” to receive American citizenship. The idea of evaluating Native people in their surroundings by a federal commission was problematic, but not unique to the Progressive Era. The goal of the Competency Commissions was to determine if Native people were industrious, thrifty, and worthy of American citizenship. Many were declared “competent” for citizenship based on commissioners’ subjective assessments of their self-sufficiency and knowledge of English. If they were found competent, Native men received patents in fee simple for their land.

In 1916, the Competency Commissions spiced things up by adding an outdoor, public ceremony to dramatize the changes in the life of the potential Indian citizen.Footnote ⁹⁸ The outdoor ceremonies were performed with some alterations on several reservations in 1916. Under Secretary Lane, the so-called citizenship ceremony became an outdoor spectacle.Footnote ⁹⁹ As imagined by Lane and his entourage, during the ritual, the Native person would emerge from a teepee, shoot an arrow (to signify the end of his way of life), place his hands on a plough, and receive a purse (to save his income). The ceremony was imagined to be almost identical for women, but instead of a purse, women would receive workbags. The Native person would declare allegiance to the flag, deferring the duration of his new status to the president's decision, thus acquiescing the complete dependence on “the Great Father”: “Forasmuch as the President has said that I am worthy to be a citizen of the United States, I now promise this flag that I will give my hands, my head, and my heart to the doing of all that will make me a true American citizen.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ At the end, Secretary Lane would pin a badge decorated with the American eagle and the national colors on the citizen's clothes, thus concluding the citizenship ceremony on a high patriotic note. A close look at this artificial pledge to citizenship reveals the insidious ways patriotic cooptation worked to reveal the absurdity of this citizenship ritual—different from the immigrant naturalization ceremonies, as discussed below—a farcical attempt catering to the Office of Indian Affairs’ need for public patriotic spectacles. The officials’ imagined performance of this ceremony contrasted sharply with the reluctance to or disinterest in American citizenship that they encountered on reservations. In some instances, the Native patentees had already arranged to sell their land, in which case the goal of the ceremony was moot. This citizenship ceremony was also referred to as a flag ceremony, which points yet again to the need for public spectacle more so than the solemnity of Native induction to American citizenship.

One particular flag ceremony gathered a large crowd of more than 2,000 people on the Yankton Reservation in South Dakota in May 1916. Besides governmental officials, several reporters and motion picture crews were also present, along with local officials and white neighbors. So pleased was Secretary Lane with the public naturalization of more than 150 “competent Indians” at Yankton that he suggested that a similar public ceremony be used in granting citizenship to new immigrants. “‘Surely,’ he remarked, it tends to instill patriotism and presents the duties of citizenship in a manner that leaves a lasting impression.’”Footnote ¹⁰¹ This episode received considerable popular attention, especially as Secretary Lane made an appearance and distributed the certificates of competency to the citizens-to-be in person rather than by mail. Although Native women were also part of this ceremony, one reporter was especially taken with the end of the ceremony, when Native men “gathered about a big American flag, each laying his hands on it and pledging allegiance to the country that had given him citizenship.”Footnote ¹⁰²

In 1916, the short-lived pro-Americanization magazine, The Immigrants in America Review, featured the editorial, “Citizenship for Indians,” which chronicled the same citizenship ceremony on the Yankton reservation in South Dakota. While admiring the ceremony—where Indian men “shot their last arrow” and grabbed a plow to signify their transition to an agrarian economy—the editor of The Immigrants in America Review found the ceremony “impressive and thrilling,” calling for a similar “ritual” to recognize publicly the transformation of the immigrant into a new American citizen: “why would not a corresponding ritual adapted to the immigrant's situation and to his needs be a good thing to mark the entry of immigrants into the body of American citizens?”Footnote ¹⁰³ At the time, most immigrants were sworn in by judges in small ceremonies, which lacked the pomp of the Indian outdoor ceremonies, publicized by both local and national newspapers.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Other Americanizers shared in this view; Secretary Franklin Lane, who had presided over the flag ceremonies on the Yankton Reservation, agreed to lead one of the first public naturalization ceremonies of immigrants. On July 4, 1919, in Washington, DC, Lane gave the oath of citizenship to fifty-one women and fifty-one men—representing the U.S. states and territories at the time. This was one of the first group citizenship oaths of large proportions on the Fourth of July in the early twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ After the public naturalization ceremonies of foreign soldiers in 1918, naturalization ceremonies such as the July 4, 1919 ceremony received increasing national attention.

A public pageant also marked the symbolic transformation of immigrant laborers into new Americans at the Ford Motor Company's Americanization program in the early twentieth century. The most intriguing—and spectacular—aspect of the Ford Americanization program was the mass graduation ceremony, popularly known as “The Melting Pot” ceremony, which was a public display of immigrant bodies meant to affirm their conversion to Americanism. In 1914, when the Americanization program started at Ford, most of the workers were new immigrants.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ One of the first lessons immigrants learned at the Ford English School was how to say “I am a good American.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ By 1914, Ford employed 12,880 workers; 9,109 of these were foreign-born, mainly from these five immigrant groups—Poles, Russians, Romanians, Italians, and Austro-Hungarians.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ So popular was the Ford English “teaching plan” among new immigrants that it generated a national following.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Although no footage of these elaborate ceremonies is available, articles in both the Ford-owned newspapers and other local and national newspapers fill in some of the gaps about these ceremonies. In particular, the pageants on the Fourth of July—also known as Americanization Day—brought large crowds to witness the staged rapid transformation of the immigrant worker into a good American as he emerged from a large melting pot wearing a suit and waving a little American flag. After men of dozens of nationalities descended into a large pot (representing the Ford English School), six teachers stirred them with ladles to turn them into Americans.Footnote ¹¹⁰ As the new graduates emerged from the melting pot, they received their diplomas and then took their places in the audience.Footnote ¹¹¹ The diplomas guaranteed that they could read, write, and speak good English, which allowed the new immigrants to draw their first naturalization papers without other examinations. Over time, “The Melting Pot Exercises” became larger, more dramatic, more elaborate, and more intolerant performances. The Ford English classes, organized under the auspices of the Ford Sociological Department, were subsequently widely criticized for their “grotesquely exaggerated patriotism”Footnote ¹¹² Ford's Americanization program soon became a model in other states. The “Melting Pot” ceremonies at Ford Motors in 1916 showed the nation how the disciplined immigrant laborer could become a good American citizen. Ford's Americanization program orchestrated the large graduation “melting pot” spectacle, showcasing the adult students’ complete transformation from immigrants into Americans.

The public display of immigrant bodies parading on stage under the gaze of the Ford Sociological Department staff points to the incongruities between citizenship as an act of consent and the dramatic, elaborate, intransigent, and coercive ceremonies of patriotic citizenship. Native and new immigrant subjects who were subjected to these pageants of Americanization—public displays of noncitizen bodies with potential for citizenship—had very little say in how these public performances were orchestrated. Yet their presence both documents the coercive process of “civilization” both groups were subjected to and offers occasional glimpses of dissent. These ceremonies also masked, on the one hand, the theft of Native land—through the glorification of the “vanishing Indian”—and on the other, the growing need for compliant industrial laborers who would keep the industrial assembly lines moving at Ford and other corporations. Although competition put a dent in Ford's profits in the 1920s (at the same time that immigration restriction was legislated), Native Americans would become de jure citizens. Besides employing new immigrants, Ford Motor Company also employed Native men who had attended Indian boarding schools, and whom the corporation perceived to embody the lessons of Americanization they learned in these government institutions. Of Ford's more than 25,000 employees in 1916, twenty-five were Native men. They were former students at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, representing fourteen tribes and thirteen states, three of them holding diplomas from Carlisle: “These Indian students are splendid types of the Ford workman, and have proved themselves worthy representatives of their alma mater and the principles which the United States government has inculcated through its courses.”Footnote ¹¹³ To Ford and its Americanization program, the Native students represented American models to be emulated by the new immigrant laborers. To the Native workers, Ford represented a labor opportunity and a way to make a living.