Throughout much of American history, the concept of Indigenous citizenship was, frankly, muddled and often contradictory. From the earliest days of the Republic, U.S. leaders grappled with how to define the status of Native Americans, who were often recognized as belonging to distinct, sovereign nations, even while U.S. expansion aggressively encroached upon their lands.
Consider, for instance, the foundational document of the U.S. Constitution itself. When determining representation and taxation, it explicitly accounted for enslaved individuals (as three-fifths of a person) but completely excluded “untaxed Indians” from the count. This “untaxed” designation effectively meant that many Native Americans were not considered part of the U.S. body politic and thus were not citizens by birthright, setting them apart from other residents.
Early U.S. policy often promoted the idea of “civilizing” Native Americans, with figures like George Washington outlining principles such as “impartial” justice and “rational experiments” for “imparting to them the blessings of civilization”. Treaties were signed, sometimes with the promise of permanent land, but these agreements were frequently broken, leading to forced removals and the continuous reduction of Native American territories. Andrew Jackson, for example, openly advocated for the expulsion of Native peoples, suggesting it would replace “a few savage hunters” with a “dense and civilized population” and help Native Americans “cast off their savage habits”. This push for “civilization” often implied an eventual assimilation into American society, yet full citizenship was not automatically granted as a result.
Even after the Civil War, when monumental steps were taken to define citizenship more broadly, Native Americans remained in a peculiar legal status. The Civil Rights Act of 1866, a landmark piece of legislation, declared that “All persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States”. This reiterated the distinction based on taxation and recognized that many Native peoples were considered citizens of their own sovereign nations rather than the U.S.. When President Andrew Johnson vetoed this act, one of his objections was precisely that it would grant citizenship to “Indians subject to taxation” and other non-white groups. However, Congress overrode his veto, solidifying this limited scope of Native American citizenship.
Similarly, the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, established the principle of birthright citizenship: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside”. This became a foundational principle for many, but its application to Native Americans who maintained tribal affiliations and lived on reservations, effectively as citizens of “sovereign nations within sovereign nations,” remained ambiguous and contested. Some sources discuss the broad power Congress held to “regulate Commerce…with the Indian Tribes”, which further complicated the legal framework.
Given this historical backdrop—where Native Americans were continuously dispossessed of land, subjected to assimilationist policies, and often excluded from the definition of U.S. citizenship based on criteria like “taxed” status or tribal sovereignty—the passage of an act in 1924 that granted citizenship to all Indigenous people would have been a significant shift. It would have represented a move towards universal recognition, irrespective of tribal affiliations or individual “civilized” status, and a departure from piecemeal approaches to granting citizenship that had occurred before. Such an act would signify, at least on paper, a fundamental redefinition of who belonged to the American body politic, extending a right long denied to a significant portion of the continent’s original inhabitants.