June 1924 – American Indians Became U.S. Citizens

The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, also known as the Snyder Act, was proposed by Representative Homer P. Snyder (R) of New York and granted full U.S. citizenship to America’s indigenous peoples, called “Indians” in this Act. (The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to persons born in the U.S., but only if “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”; this latter clause excludes certain indigenous peoples.) The act was signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge on June 2.

The text of the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act (43 U.S. Stats. At Large, Ch. 233, p. 253 (1924)) reads as follows:

BE IT ENACTED by the Senate and house of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all non citizen 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.” Approved, June 2, 1924. June 2, 1924. [H. R. 6355.] [Public, No. 175.] SIXTY-EIGHTH CONGRESS. Sess. I. CHS. 233. 1924. See House Report No. 222, Certificates of Citizenship to Indians, 68th Congress, 1st Session, Feb. 22, 1924. Note: This statute has been codified in the United States Code at Title 8, Sec. 1401(a)(2).



President Calvin Coolidge stands with members of the Osage tribe at the White House Ceremony





The Act granted citizenship to about 125,000 of 300,000 indigenous people in the United States (Those indigenous people that were not included in citizenship numbers had already become citizens by other means; entering the armed forces, giving up tribal affiliations, and assimilating into mainstream American life were ways this was done (Peterson 121). Citizenship was granted in a piecemeal fashion before the Act, which was the first more inclusive method of granting Native American citizenship. The Act did not include citizens born before the effective date of the 1924 act, or outside of the United States as an indigenous person, however, and it wasn’t until the Nationality Act of 1940 that all born on U.S. soil were citizens (Haas 16, Haney 29).

Even Native Americans who were granted citizenship rights under the 1924 Act, may not have had full citizenship and suffrage rights until 1948. According to a survey by the Department of Interior, seven states still refused to grant Indians voting rights in 1938. Discrepancies between federal and state control provided loopholes in the Act’s enforcement. States justified discrimination based on state statutes and constitutions. Three main arguments for Indian voting exclusion were Indian exemption form real estate taxes, maintenance of tribal affiliation and the mistaken notion that Indians were under guardianship, or lived on lands controlled by federal trusteeship (Peterson 121). By 1947 all states with large Indian populations, but Arizona and New Mexico, had extended voting rights to Native Americans that qualified under the 1924 Act. Finally, in 1948 these states withdrew their prohibition on Indian voting because of a judicial decision (Bruyneel).

Under the 1924 Act indigenous people did not have to apply for citizenship, nor did they have to give up their tribal citizenship to become a U.S. citizen. Most tribes had communal property and in order to have a right to the land, Indians must belong to the tribe. Thus, dual citizenship was allowed. Earlier views on the way Indian citizenship should be granted, suggested allocating land to individuals. Of these land treaties, the Dawes Act, was the most prominent. The Act would allocate land to individual Native Americans, and because they were landowners and eventually would pay taxes on the land and become “proficient members of society” they would be granted citizenship. This idea was presented by a group of white American citizens, called “Friends of the Indian” who lobbied for the assimilation of indigenous people into American society, which they specifically hoped to do by elevating indigenous people to the status of US citizens. Though the Dawes Act did allocate land, the notion that these should be directly tied to citizenship was abandoned in the early 20th century in favor of a more ambivalent form of American citizenship (Bruyneel). WIKIPEDIA

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