Indian Citizenship Act

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US President Calvin Coolidge with four Osage Indians after signing the Citizenship Act.

The Indian Citizenship Act ( english : Indian Citizenship Act ), also known as Snyder Act , was Homer P. Snyder , a congressman from New York introduced, saying the American Indians the full citizenship of the United States to. The law was signed by US President Calvin Coolidge on June 2, 1924.

history

Many Indians had already obtained citizenship through marriage, military service, contracts or other laws. From 1888 onwards, many Indian women married to whites had received citizenship, and from 1919 onwards they were able to apply for veterans of the First World War in a (laborious) procedure. Around a third of the registered Indians, i.e. around 125,000 people, had not been naturalized through any of these routes.

The law gave states the ability to give Indians the right to vote on their territory, but many states denied them the right to vote.

On the part of the Indians, too, there was resistance to this attempt, as it appeared in their eyes, to assimilate and individualize the natives instead of recognizing them as members of their respective Indian nation. As early as 1877, the Ingalls Bill was the first attempt to grant citizenship to the Indians in the United States, but many of them feared forfeiting older treaty rights, the dissolution of the tribes and the loss of their land. This was the opinion of members of the Choctaw and Chickasaw , but also of the Seminoles and Creek . In 1887, this fear was confirmed, because with the General Allotment Act , also called Dawes Act , the land belonging to all members of the respective tribe was divided into parcels, which also reduced the total size of the reservations by two thirds. The division into parcels was a prerequisite for obtaining citizenship.

Nevertheless, Indians also fought for the recognition of their civil rights, such as in 1884 John Elk , who sued the state of Nebraska . He demanded that the 14th amendment to the constitution, which had granted citizenship to former slaves and their descendants from Africa since 1868, must also apply to Indians. However, the Supreme Court ruled Nebraska was right when the state denied the Indian civil rights. The Indians, according to the court, were of their nation, not of the United States. In fact, until then, civil rights had only been granted if the rights of the respective Indian nation had been given up, as was the case with the Ottawa , who had dissolved their entire tribal land in individual plots in 1862.

In 1901 the residents of the Indian Territory in Oklahoma received citizenship without being asked. Of the 19.5 million acres of tribal land, 16 million had been privatized by 1907, which, due to the oil discoveries, encouraged the immigration of non-Indians to such an extent that in 1907 around 1.3 million non-Indians lived in the area.

Above all, the Six Nations Grand Council , the Great Council of the six Iroquois nations , opposed the legal changes of 1919, i.e. the transfer of citizenship to the former soldiers of the First World War, which had been decided benevolently without asking them. They viewed U.S. citizenship as a mere means of assimilation and saw the law as part of the policy of land allocation to individuals that persecuted the U.S. from 1887 to 1933. In doing so, the government tried to assign the land that had traditionally belonged to the tribes to individual owners. As a consequence, the Iroquois declared war on the Axis powers independently of the USA , maintain their own diplomatic relations, issue their own license plates and do not go to the elections.

literature

  • Vine Deloria: American Indian policy in the twentieth century , University of Oklahoma Press 1992

Web links

See also

Remarks

  1. ^ On this day in History. June 2, 1924: Indians become US citizens today, Native News online ( Memento from June 5, 2009 in the Internet Archive ).
  2. ↑ Bruce Elliott Johansen: The encyclopedia of Native American legal tradition , Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998, pp. 137f.
  3. ^ Sharon O'Brien: American Indian Tribal Governments , University of Oklahoma Press, 1993, pp. 79ff.
  4. ↑ Thomas A. Britten: American Indians in World War I: at home and at war , UNM Press, 1999, pp. 179f.
  5. ^ Bruce Elliott Johansen: The encyclopedia of Native American legal tradition , Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998, p. 138.