Native Americans are granted U.S. citizenship - June 2nd, 1924

On this day in 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Indian Citizenship Act, granting citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that proves it's never too late to make history.
I'm Gay Bluesiery, and today we're reflecting on the grim
irony of the Indian Citizenship Act, a US policy that

(00:23):
conferred citizen status from the people who had lived there
longer than anyone else. The day was June two, nineteen
twenty four. President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Indian
Citizenship Act, granting citizenship to all Native Americans born in

(00:47):
the United States. Although the Fourteenth Amendment had declared that
any person born in the US was a citizen, it
defined the term as anyone quote subject to the jurisdiction thereof.
Interpretations of that clause consistently excluded indigenous peoples, arguing that
since many of them lived in separate nations within the

(01:10):
US on designated reservation land, they were not subject to
US jurisdiction and therefore not citizens. That view informed the
nation's policy for the better part of fifty years, but
was finally done away with through the passage of the
Indian Citizenship Act. Prior to the American Civil War, the

(01:31):
federal government used what's known as a blood quantum to
evaluate whether or not a Native American could become a U.
S citizen. The highly controversial system limited citizenship based on ancestry,
or the amount of Indian blood that a person had.
Only those of one half or less Indian blood were

(01:52):
eligible to become US citizens. The rules on that front
began to loosen ever so slightly during the reconstruc Duction era,
as progressive Republican lawmakers began pushing for more paths to
citizenship for members of friendly tribes. Those new avenues included
serving in the military, marrying a US citizen, or accepting

(02:15):
a land allotment offered by the DAWs Act, enacted in
eighteen eighty seven. The DAWs Act was meant to encourage
the assimilation of Native Americans by offering full citizenship to
those who agreed to leave their tribal lands and become farmers.
The heads of families who accepted the terms were given
free one hundred and sixty acre allotments to live and

(02:38):
work on parcels of land which at once belonged to
their tribes in the first place. In addition, the government
established Indian schools where Native American children were taught to
abandon their cultural traditions in order to better fit in
with white Americans. By the late eighteen hundreds, roughly eight

(02:58):
per cent of Native people had qualified for US citizenship,
either through marriage, military service, or most commonly, through the
DAWs Act. The vast majority remained ineligible, but even for
those who qualified, citizenship came at a high cost. In
the late nineteen twenties, the Institute for Government Research assessed

(03:20):
the impact of the DAWs Act, and its conclusion, as
summarized in the Merriam Report, was decidedly negative. It was
determined that government policy had oppressed Native American families and
wreaked havoc on their culture and society. Many lived in
abject poverty, as the redistribution of tribal lands through allotments

(03:41):
had left the Native population with only about a third
of the acreage it had held prior to the DAWs Act.
The failures of the policy eventually led to the passage
of the nineteen thirty four Indian Reorganization Act, which promoted
Native American autonomy and self government. In between the DAWs

(04:01):
Act and the Reorganization Act was the Indian Citizenship Act
of nineteen twenty four. The catalyst for its enactment was
the First World War. More than twelve thousand Native Americans
had served in the U. S. Army during World War One,
and all of them were later offered citizenship in nineteen nineteen,
but Congress and President Coolidge felt that the high rate

(04:24):
of enlistment deserved a more inclusive reward, the extension of U.
S citizenship to all Native Americans who had not already
claimed it by other means. Of course, the government's aim
may not have been entirely altruistic. Roughly sixty percent of
the three hundred thousand or so Native Americans in the

(04:45):
country were already US citizens by nineteen twenty four. Granting
citizenship to the rest of them may have been a
way to break up the remaining Native nations and hurry
along the assimilation process. Whatever the true mode of aim,
on June second, nineteen twenty four, the federal government granted
US citizenship to all Native Americans born within the territorial

(05:08):
limits of the country. The number of people affected by
the law was about one hundred and twenty five thousand,
or zero point one percent of the total US population
at the time. Well intentioned or not The law was
deeply divisive among tribes. Some were in favor of the Act,
believing it would grant them more protections and better opportunities.

(05:32):
Others argued it would only lead to the further erosion
of Native American identity and land rights. After all, the
government behind it was the same one that had stolen
their land and left their communities in disarray. What reason
did they have to think the new law would result
in anything different. Part of the problem was that no
one had asked for tribal input when crafting the law.

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Progressive senators and activists, the majority of whom were white,
had shaped the policy all on their own. That made
many Native Americans feel as if citizenship was being forced
on them whether they wanted it or not, and in
some cases, at the expense of previous treaties. For example,
Iroquois leaders argued that the US government had already recognized

(06:18):
them as a separate and sovereign nation, meaning that the
decision to become US citizens should have been theirs to make,
not the federal government. The Act also met with mixed
reception because it failed to secure the full privileges of
citizenship for Native Americans. Most notably, it didn't guarantee them
the right to vote. In the early twentieth century, voting

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rights were still mostly governed by state law, and as
a result, Native Americans and states like Arizona, New Mexico,
and South Dakota were refused access to the polls. Most
states relented in the following decades, but the final holdouts
didn't withdraw their bans on Native American voting until the
nineteen fifties. In that way, the US government proved all

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too consistent in its treatment of Native Americans. They were
the first peoples of this country, but the last to
be recognized as its citizens. I'm Gabe Lucier and hopefully
you now know a little more about history today than
you did yesterday. You can learn even more about history

(07:27):
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HC Show, and if you have any comments or suggestions,
feel free to pass them along by writing to this
Day at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to Chandler Mays and
Ben Hackett for producing the show, and thanks to you
for listening. I'll see you back here again soon for

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another Day in History class.