Indigenous North American Citizenship
"A citizen as a matter of course"
28 February 1918
28 February 1918
It is often tricky to interpret a letter when you do not have the matching letter to which it is a reply, but this instance is an exception. "I cannot understand such an attitude", writes ex-president Theodore Roosevelt in 1918. "Of course every Indian who enlists in the army, or buys Liberty Bonds or shows his patriotism in any other way at this time should be made a citizen as a matter of course". It is clear that the recipient, Joseph K. Dixon of Philadelphia, opposes such a course of action and does not mind saying so.
However, that ‘and’ at a stroke excluded another group of people from this grand scheme of inclusivity, namely Indigenous Peoples who lived as members of tribal nations. Organised tribes were recognised by the U.S. government as foreign powers – their members had been born in the United States but were not subject to its jurisdiction and hence were not citizens. Indigenous Peoples could qualify for citizenship as individuals, but only by undertaking a semi-subjective process of assimilation into the norms of wider society; this was generally done by buying land and living apart from the tribe, which owned its land communally. It was not until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 that the 125,000 or so Indigenous Peoples in the United States who were not by that time U.S. citizens finally became them.
The 1924 act was driven at least in part by the recognition that many Indigenous Peoples had served in the U.S. armed forces during World War I and deserved the gratitude of the nation by being granted a full stake in it. But one of the ways an Indigenous Person could qualify individually for citizenship before this was through military service, and it is this process to which Joseph K. Dixon obviously objects. But why? Dixon was not an excitable city-dweller who had come across Indigenous Peoples only in pulp novels and on advertising hoardings. He was a photographer who, between 1908 and 1913, undertook three expeditions across the West, sponsored by the retail magnate Rodman Wanamaker, to document Indigenous life and its practices and traditions. The last of these journeys was actually called the ‘Expedition of Citizenship’, and involved getting Indigenous Peoples to sign declarations of allegiance to the United States. Why, then, the opposition just five years later to the idea that an Indigenous Person might gain his citizenship through soldiering, in many eyes the highest form of service to the nation?
Without Dixon’s letter to Roosevelt it is impossible to know, but one clue might lie in the title of the book that came out of Dixon’s first expedition in 1908: The Vanishing Race. Perhaps Dixon, who was, after all, doing Wanamaker’s bidding, did not want to see the passing of the Indigenous Peoples distinctive way of life and felt that the granting of citizenship could only hasten this process. Perhaps he was a pacifist; perhaps he merely objected, as many did, to U.S. involvement in the war. In any event, six years later not just ex-soldiers but all Indigenous People finally became citizens, though discrimination in such fields as voting rights would persist for decades yet and the submerged socio-economic status of many Indigenous Peoples, particularly in the areas Dixon documented, continues to prick many American consciences up to the present day.