Book Displays: Equal Justice Initiative 2024: Apr

Calendar photo caption: Navajo children in Houck, Arizona, 1989. (Bob Riha Jr./Getty Images)

The concept of United States citizenship was based on the assumption that the U.S. had the right to claim the territory that Indigenous people had inhabited for thousands of years and it disregarded Indigenous understandings of belonging and membership.

Beginning in 1790, the first Congress granted citizenship rights - including the right to vote, hold public office, apply for a government job, be tried by a jury, and pursue "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" - only to "free white people."

The Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1866, declared that all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are citizens. The provision granted citizenship to many newly freed Black Americans. But it excluded "Indians not taxed," which meant that 90% of Native Americans were denied citizenship. 

Despite that, 12,000 Native Americans served as snipers, code talkers, and scouts for the U.S. Army during World War I. Shortly after the war ended, Congress passed legislation that granted citizenship to "all noncitizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States."

When the Indian Citizenship Act was signed into law on June 2, 1924, nearly half of all Native Americans were not U.S. citizens. But the new law did not provide full voting rights to Indigenous people, who were barred from voting in Arizona and New Mexico by state laws that remained in effect until 1948. 

States continued to use tactics like poll taxes to prevent voting by both Native Americans and Black Americans until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.