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Native Acts, Immigrant Acts: Citizenship, Naturalization, and the Performance of Civic Identity during the Progressive Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2020

Cristina Stanciu
Cristina Stanciu*
Affiliation:
Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA.
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article reveals the complicity of immigration restriction laws and federal Indian policy with organized Americanization in legislating an imagined, desirable “new American” at the beginning of the twentieth century, when resurgent nationalism threatened to restrict undesirable immigrants as it also sought to assimilate Indigenous people into a mass of Americanism. While the immigrant has figured in the U.S. national imaginary as someone who desires America, the American Indian was not desired to enter into political membership—although Native land was desired, and subsequently taken by settlers through strategies of dispossession written into federal Indian law. This essay argues that the Indian—read as an imagined category with little connection to the lives of Native people—occupies an anomalous position in the legal history of naturalization, finalized with the passing of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, at the same time that racist immigration restriction quotas also limited the entrance of new immigrants into the United States through the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. For Native people, Americanization and the imposition of citizenship were extensions of colonialism, adding one civic status over another—domestic dependent, ward, or U.S. citizen. For new immigrants hailing from southern and eastern Europe, forced by economic and cultural constraints to relocate to the United States, in contrast to their Anglo-Saxon or Nordic settler predecessors, Americanization meant a renunciation of political allegiance to other sovereigns, the acquisition of English, and civic education for citizenship. This essay challenges the myth of America as a “nation of immigrants,” and the settler colonial nation-state's ongoing infatuation with its colonial project as it continues to erase Indigenous presence and sovereignty.

Keywords

Native citizenshipthe Indian Citizenship Act (1924)the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act (1924)the “nation of immigrants” mythIndigenous sovereigntyIndigenous dispossessionnaturalization law and naturalization ceremoniespatriotic pageantsAmericanization
Type
Article
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , April 2021 , pp. 252 - 276
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)

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References

Notes

1 Handlin, Oscar, The Uprooted (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1952), 3Google Scholar. Although this is an older study, I invoke it here for the forcefulness of its erasure of Indigenous history, given its longevity and influence in the field of immigration history and other fields, such as U.S. multiethnic literatures.

2 A recent book by Martin, Susan F., A Nation of Immigrants (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, also perpetuates the myth of America as “a nation of immigrants.” President Barak Obama also used this phrase in a naturalization ceremony in 2012: “For just as we remain a nation of laws, we have to remain a nation of immigrants.” “Remarks by the President at Naturalization Ceremony, The White House Office of the Press Secretary, July 4, 2012” (https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2012/07/04/remarks-president-naturalization-ceremony, accessed Mar. 28, 2020).

3 See also Behdad, Ali, A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 In Jewish American Studies, that work is well under way. See Koffman, David S., The Jews’ Indian: Colonialism, Pluralism, and Belonging in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Piatote, Beth H., Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 176CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Byrd, Jodi A., The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xxxviiiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 10Google Scholar.

8 Veracini, Lorenzo, The Settler Colonial Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 9, 32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although it is beyond the purview of this article to intervene in contemporary debates over the framework offered by settler colonial studies, I find Veracini's distinction between “settlers” and “migrants” useful to my intervention. See also a recent study rethinking settler colonial studies: Snelgrove, Corey, Dhamoon, Rita, and Corntassel, Jeff, “Unsettling Settler Colonialism: The Discourse and Politics of Settlers, and Solidarity with Indigenous Nations,” in Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 2 (2014): 1–32 Google Scholar.

9 Kennedy, John F., A Nation of Immigrants (New York: Harper & Row, 1964)Google Scholar; Susan F. Martin, A Nation of Immigrants; Immigration Act of 1924 (or the Johnson-Reed Act), H.R. 7995, 68th Congress, Sess. I, Ch. 190 (May 26, 1924), Sec. 11 (a), 159. In Impossible Subjects, Mae Ngai calls the 1924 Immigration Act “the first comprehensive restriction law.” Ngai, Mae, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 3Google Scholar. See also Roediger, David R., Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White—The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 147Google Scholar.

10 Spiro, Peter J., Beyond Citizenship: American Identity After Globalization (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1–8 Google Scholar.

11 Jill Doerfler also reveals the United States’ attempts to conflate “biological” constructions of race with the political status of Native nations in dealings with Indigenous people. Doerfler, Jill, Those Who Belong: Identity, Family, Blood, and Citizenship among the White Earth Anishinaabeg (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014), xxxiii–xxxivGoogle Scholar.

12 Barker, Joanne, Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lowe, Lisa, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

13 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Inventing the Modern Citizen in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions,” Gender and Sexuality Seminar, Dr. William M. Scholl Center for American History and Culture Programs, Newberry Institute for Research and Education, Chicago, IL, Apr. 5, 2014.

14 See Zeidel, Robert F., Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politics: The Dillingham Commission, 1900–1927 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

15 Jennings, Francis, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 15Google Scholar.

16 The European notion of a “doctrine of discovery” gave the discovering European nation legal title to “discovered” lands in what would become the United States. Wilkins and Lomawaima call this doctrine “preemptive” in that it gave “exclusive, preemptive rights” to European nations. Wilkins, David E. and Lomawaima, K. Tsianina, Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 19–97 Google Scholar.

17 Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, 200.

18 Mexico and other countries in the Western Hemisphere did not fall under the purview of this act; for naturalization purposes, Mexicans were considered white under the law. At the same time, the law excluded all immigrants from the nations of East and South Asia, who were also ineligible for citizenship. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 37–54.

19 Cohen, Felix S., Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law (Charlottesville, VA: Michie Co., 1982), 151–53Google Scholar. “National citizenship” is a term used by Lee, R. Alton in “Indian Citizenship and the Fourteenth Amendment,” South Dakota History 4 (Spring 1974): 198–21, 207Google Scholar.

20 “Indian Citizenship,” Office of Indian Affairs Bulletin 20 (1926, reprint), Edward E. Ayer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL; Indian Citizenship Act, H.R. 6355, 68th Congress, Sess. I, Ch. 233 (June 2, 1924). See also Stanciu, Cristina, “Indian Citizenship Act (1924),” in Cortés, Carlos E., ed., Multicultural America: A Multimedia Encyclopedia (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2013), 1, 170–71Google Scholar.

21 “Indian Citizenship,” Office of Indian Affairs Bulletin 20 (1926, reprint), Ayer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL; Indian Citizenship Act (also called the Snyder Act), H.R. 6355. See also Stanciu, “The Indian Citizenship Act,” 1,170–71.

22 I use the term “qualifying foreigner” to point to the inherent restrictions in U.S. naturalization laws, beginning with the Naturalization Act of 1790 (which included the “whiteness” proviso); Naturalization Act of 1790, 1st Congress, Sess. II, Ch. 3 (Mar. 26, 1790).

23 Cooper, Tova, The Autobiography of Citizenship: Assimilation and Resistance in U.S. Education (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 13–14 Google Scholar.

24 For a recent analysis of Native people as “domestic subjects,” a category envisioned in opposition to U.S. citizenship, see also Piatote, Domestic Subjects.

25 See also Lee, “Indian Citizenship and the Fourteenth Amendment.”

26 Japanese American veterans of World War I were retroactively granted U.S. citizenship in the 1930s as a corrective to the provisions of the military naturalization law passed in 1918. Takao Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178 (1922); United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923). See also Schneider, Dorothee, Crossing Borders: Migration and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 225CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Omi, Michael and Winant, Howard, Racial Formation in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 75Google Scholar.

28 Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 225Google Scholar.

29 Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness, 59.

30 The Page Act of 1875 was the first federal legislation that enumerated specific types of people who were excluded from entering the United States (immigrants under contract for “lewd or immoral purposes” or “prostitution”; or persons guilty of felony); Page Act, 43rd Congress, Sess. II., Ch. 141 (Mar. 3, 1875). The Naturalization Act of 1870 naturalized persons of African nativity or descent; Naturalization Act of 1870, 41st Congress, Sess. II, Ch. 254 (July 14, 1870). Citizens of Hawaii became U.S. citizens in 1900; Hawaiian Organic Act, 56th Congress, Sess. I, Ch. 339 (April 30, 1900). In 1882, Congress passed a law excluding convicts, lunatics, idiots, and paupers, making disability (physical and mental) a category or exclusion on par with crime and poverty; Immigration Act of 1882, 47th Congress, Sess. I, Ch. 376 (Aug. 3, 1882). In 1885, the Alien Contract Labor Law passed as a response to lobbyists of organized labor, prohibiting employers from recruiting labor in Europe and from paying laborers’ passage across the Atlantic; Alien Contract Labor Law, 48th Congress, Sess. II, Ch. 164 (Feb. 26, 1885). See also Divine, Robert A., American Immigration Policy, 1924–1952 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 2Google Scholar.

31 In addition, the children of naturalized persons, under the age of twenty-one and residing in the United States at the time of naturalization, “shall also be considered citizens of the United States”; Naturalization Act of 1790.

32 The Immigration and Nationality Act (also known as the McCarran-Walter Act) passed in 1952, doing away with the racial requirement for naturalization; Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, H.R. 5678, 82nd Congress, Sess. II, Ch. 477 (June 27, 1952). See also López, Ian Haney, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, 227n2.

33 The first U.S. census in 1790 recorded over three million U.S. residents, 64 percent of British origin, 7 percent German, 18 percent enslaved black, and 2 percent free black.

34 Naturalization Act, 5th Congress, Sess. II, Ch. 54 (June 18, 1798); Aliens Act, 5th Congress, Sess. II, Ch. 58 (June 25, 1798); Alien Enemy Act, 5th Congress, Sess. II, Ch. 66 (July 6, 1798). See also Hutchinson, E. P., Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 1798–1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 45–46 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) mandated that “no state or court of the United States shall admit Chinese to citizenship.” The Chinese Exclusion Act was not repealed until 1943. Chinese Exclusion Act, 47th Congress, Sess. I, Ch. 126, Sec. 14 (May 6, 1882).

36 The Burke Act of 1906 (also known as the Forced Fee Patenting Act) amended the provisions of the Dawes Act (the General Allotment Act of 1887), stipulating that Native people who had received allotments under the Dawes Act would not become citizens until they became competent to manage their affairs; Forced Fee Patenting Act, H.R. 11946, 59th Congress, Sess. I, Ch. 2348 (May 8, 1906). The scholarship and historiography on the Allotment era is vast. See esp. McDonnell, Janet A., The Dispossession of the American Indian, 1887–1934 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Hoxie, Frederick E., A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Genetin-Pilawa, C. Joseph, Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

37 Newman, John J., American Naturalization Processes and Procedures, 1790–1985 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1985), 1Google Scholar; McDonnell, The Dispossession of the American Indian, 89–102.

38 The “patent” refers to the title deed given by the federal government to a person to transfer land. “In fee” refers to the ownership of land “in fee simple.” The term “patent-in-fee” refers to the title document the federal government issues to terminate the trust previously created by a trust patent issued to an allottee. See the Indian Land Tenure Foundation's Land Tenure Glossary (www.iltf.org/glossary, accessed Mar. 29, 2020).

39 Immigration Restriction Act of 1891, 51st Congress, Sess. II, Ch. 551 (Mar. 3, 1891); Higham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 68–105 Google Scholar. Ellis Island opened its doors officially on Jan. 1, 1892.

40 The Immigration Restriction League (IRL) gathered a distinguished membership, including Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and eugenicist Madison Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race—a plea for “Nordic superiority” and an infamous example of “scientific racism.” Grant, Madison, The Passing of the Great Race, Or, The Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1918)Google Scholar.

41 U.S Immigration Commission, Vol. 1, 1910. Quoted in King, Desmond, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, 314n47 [emphasis added]; Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politics, 86–100.

42 The report is from 1876, reprinted on the title page in Pancoast, Henry S., The Indian Before the Law (Philadelphia: Indian Rights Association, 1884)Google Scholar [emphasis added].

43 Schneider, Crossing Borders, 153, 205–06, quote on 207. Schneider provides ample evidence about the ways in which “the law of 1906 had greatly raised the threshold for the immigrants who might consider naturalization” (209–41).

44 Naturalization Act of 1906, H.R. 15442, 59th Congress, Sess. I, Ch. 3592 (June 29, 1906); Newman, American Naturalization Processes and Procedures, 5–6; Schneider, Crossing Borders, 195.

45 Special provisions for aliens of foreign birth to acquire U.S. citizenship were made through the Act of July 19, 1919 (H. J. Res. 120, 66th Congress, Sess. I, Ch. 25); Native men who enlisted to fight in the war (and were not U.S. citizens) were naturalized four months later, through the Act of Nov. 6, 1919 (H.R. 5007, 66th Congress, Sess. I, Ch. 95). See Cohen, Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law, 154.

46 My reading of the “gift” of citizenship to Native American people in the early twentieth century has been informed by political theorist Kevin Bruyneel's astute interpretations in The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), esp. 97–121.

47 Quoted in Wan, Amy J., Producing Good Citizens: Literacy Training in Anxious Times (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Prucha, Francis Paul, ed., Americanizing the American Indian: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian,”1880–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 Wilkins and Lomawaima, Uneven Ground, 20, 41, 51; 19–63.

50 According to Kenneth Johnson, they lived “outside the framework of the Constitution.” See Johnson, Kenneth, “Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the Indian.” Arizona Law Review 15 (1973): 973–1,003Google Scholar, esp. 984–85.

51 Congress was authorized to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.” Quoted in Cohen, Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law, 207.

52 Wilkins and Lomawaima, Uneven Ground, 103. Felix Cohen also calls attention to the Treaty Clause as a source of federal authority over Indian affairs; Cohen, Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law, 207–08.

53 U.S. Const. amend. XIV, art. I, sec. 2; Johnson, “Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the Indian,” 985–86; Deloria, Vine Jr. and Wilkins, David E.. Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 25–26 Google Scholar.

54 Deloria and Wilkins, Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations, 28; Cohen, Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law, 208; Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty, 92.

55 Indian Removal Act, 21st Congress, Sess. I, Ch. 148 (May 28, 1830); Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. 1 (1831); Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. 515 (1832). See also Prucha, Francis Paul, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), 1990, 52–53 Google Scholar.

56 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. See also Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy, 58–60, quote on 59. See also Lomawaima, K. Tsianina, “The Mutuality of Citizenship and Sovereignty: The Society of American Indians and the Battle to Inherit America,” American Indian Quarterly 37 (Summer 2013): 331–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wolfe, Patrick, “Against Intentional Fallacy: Logocentrism and Continuity in the Rhetoric of Indian Dispossession,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 36, no. 1 (2012): 3–45 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote on 7.

57 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857).

58 Cohen, Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law, 641–42.

59 Ex parte Crow Dog, 109 U.S. 556 (1883). See also Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy, 162–63, quote on 163. To prevent a case like this from reoccurring, Congress passed the Major Crimes Act (1885), which held that seven crimes committed by Indians on reservations would fall under the jurisdiction of U.S. courts. This legislation was a major attack on tribal sovereignty. Major Crimes Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1 153 (1885). See Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy, 167–68.

60 Elk vs. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94 (1884). See also Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy, 166–67.

61 State voting privileges were granted to men who intended to become citizens. See Deloria and Wilkins, Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations, 145–46; Hoxie, A Final Promise, 75; Cohen, Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law, 86, 283–84, 642–43.

62 Cohen, Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law, 283. Elk would have needed a specific act of the United States to become a U.S. citizen. Deloria and Wilkins, Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations, 146.

63 United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898).

64 Prucha, Americanizing the American Indian, 6.

65 Hoxie, A Final Promise, 73–74; General Allotment Act of 1887 (Dawes Act), 49th Congress, Sess. II, Ch. 119 (Feb. 8, 1887), sec. 6, 390.

66 The Curtis Act of 1898 accomplished through legislation what the Dawes commission could not through negotiation—it destroyed tribal governments in Indian territory by abolishing the tribal courts. Curtis Act, 55th Congress, Sess. III, Ch. 517 (June 28, 1898); Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy, 197–98.

67 Twenty-Fourth Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the Indian Rights Association, for the Year Ending December 13, 1906 (Philadelphia: Office of the Indian Rights Association, 1907), 45–48. See also Holm, Tom, The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs: Native Americans & Whites in the Progressive Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 164–66Google Scholar. By 1906, 166,000 Indians had already become citizens—65,000 through the allotment process, and the rest as members of the Five Nations. See also Dippie, Brian W., The Vanishing American: White Attitudes & U.S. Indian Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1982), 193Google Scholar.

68 Surveys taken in 1908 showed that more than 60 percent of the Indians who received fee patents quickly lost their land. McDonnell, The Dispossession of the American Indian, 89, 93.

69 Citizenship was also granted through certain treaty provisions, in which the federal government and certain tribes agreed that “Indians desiring to become citizens might become such by complying with certain prescribed formalities somewhat similar to those required of aliens.” The Office of Indian Affairs cites Articles 13, 17, and 2 of the treaty of Feb. 23, 1867, with various bands or tribes of Indians (15 Stat. L., 513). See Office of Indian Affairs Bulletin 20 (1922), 1, Ayer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL.

70 Dippie, The Vanishing American, 193; Cohen, Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law, 153–56.

71 Cohen shows how Congress’ authority to naturalize Indians has been constantly sustained by the courts. Cohen, Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law, 643, 643n33–39. Indian veterans who fought in World War I were granted U.S. citizenship by the Act of Nov. 6, 1919 (H.R. 5007). Historian Tom Holms argues that by 1918, more than 10,000 Native Americans had enrolled in the U.S. Army, 85 percent as volunteers. Holm, The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs, 178.

72 As legal historians have shown, the Indian Citizenship Act also passed in order to prevent the Interior Department from extending its authority over Indian affairs even further. Porter, Robert B., “The Demise of the Ongwehoweh and the Rise of Native Americans: Redressing the Genocidal Act of Forcing American Citizenship upon Indigenous Peoples,” Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal 15 (Sep. 1, 1999): 124 Google Scholar. According to Porter, Ongwehoweh is a Seneca word that means “real people” (n3107).

73 McDonnell, The Dispossession of the American Indian, 102; quoted in Cohen, Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law, 155. See also Deloria and Wilkins, Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations, 148, 186–87n33.

74 In Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law (154), regarding “noncitizen Indians,” Cohen documents that the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act referred only to “Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States”; it did not refer to Native people living in the United States who were born in Canada or Mexico or other foreign countries. Under the Nationality Act of 1940, citizenship was bestowed on all persons born in the United States, including members of “an Indian, Eskimo, Aleutian, or other aboriginal tribe,” in the first congressional attempt to include most racial minorities in the category of “citizen.” Nationality Act of 1940, H.R. 9980, 76th Congress, Sess. III, Ch. 876 (Oct. 14, 1940), chapter II, sec. 201(b). Indians born outside the United States also became eligible for naturalization in 1940. See Nationality Act of 1940, chapter III.

75 Bethany Berger's study of these two federal landmark cases is the first of its kind to examine the stakes of citizenship and naturalization in both Native American and immigrant contexts. The article persuasively shows the unconstitutionality of the efforts to limit birthright citizenship. Bethany Berger, “Birthright Citizenship on Trial: Elk v. Wilkins and United States v. Wong Kim Ark,” Cardozo Law Review 37 (Apr. 2016): 1,185–1,258, 1,248.

76 Jake Culps to Montezuma, Carlos, “This Indian Filed a Unique Claim for Exemption from the Draft,” Wassaja: Freedom's Signal for the Indians 3 (June 1918): 3Google Scholar.

77 Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1933; 1978 reprint), 229.

78 Bruyneel documents that Jane Zane Gordon “set out a legal, historical, and political argument against citizenship based on the premise that ‘the diplomatic status of the Indian is established’ as a citizen of his or her Indigenous nation.” Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty, 109–10.

79 Laurence Hauptman, quoted in Porter, Joy, To Be Indian: The Life of Iroquois-Seneca Arthur Caswell Parker (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 127Google Scholar.

80 Rickard, Clinton, Fighting Tuscarora: The Autobiography of Chief Clinton Rickard, ed. Graymont, Barbara (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1973), 53Google Scholar [emphasis added].

81 Ibid., 52.

82 Hauptman, Laurence M., “American Indian Influences on the America of the Founding Fathers,” in Lyons, Oren R. and Mohawk, John, eds., Exiled in the Land of the Free: Democracy, Indian Nations, and the U.S. Constitution (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers, 1992)Google Scholar; quoted in Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty, 112.

83 Bruyneel provides one of the most insightful interpretations to date of the intersections of the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act with the Immigration Act of 1924, drawing from Rickard's Fighting Tuscarora, showing how the Immigration Act of 1924 affected Native people across the U.S-Canadian border. Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty, 115, 119.

84 Porter, To Be Indian, 124.

85 Stanciu, Cristina, “Americanization on Native Terms: The Society of American Indians, Citizenship Debates, and Tropes of ‘Racial Difference,’” Native American and Indian Studies 6, no. 1 (2019): 11–48 Google Scholar.

86 Troutman, John, Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879–1934 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), 20–21 Google Scholar.

87 On the political and cultural work of Native American dances, see Ellis, Clyde, A Dancing People: Powwow Culture on the Southern Plains (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003)Google Scholar; Ellis et al., Powwow; and Adriana Greci-Green, “Performances and Celebrations: Displaying Lakota Identity, 1880–1915” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2001).

88 Ellis, Clyde, “The Sound of the Drum Will Revive Them,” in Ellis, Clyde, Lassiter, Luke Eric, and Dunham, Gary H., eds., Powwow (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 3–25 Google Scholar. According to anthropologist Carolyn K. Rachlin, “even at the worst period of federal suppression, no ceremony was interrupted for more than two years,” allowing for “Indians [to] remain Indians” (quoted in Ellis 18–19).

89 Troutman, Indian Blues, 5; “Investigation into the Practices of the Sioux Indians on the Dakota Reservations with Particular Reference to the Indian Dance,” transcript of proceedings, conducted by Charles H. Burke, commissioner, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Pierre, SD, Oct. 24, 1922, file 10429-1922-063, classified central files of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Archives, Washington, DC, 11; quoted in Troutman, 52.

90 Ellis, A Dancing People, 15, 13. See also Ellis, , “We Don't Want Your Rations, We Want this Dance,” Western Historical Quarterly 30 (Summer 1992): 133–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 153–54.

91 Green, Rayna and Troutman, John, “By the Waters of the Minnehaha: Music and Dance, Pageants and Princesses,” in Archuleta, Margaret L., Child, Brenda J., and Lomawaima, K. Tsianina, eds., Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1879–2000. (Phoenix, AZ: The Heard Museum, 2000), 60–83 Google Scholar, esp. 75. Clyde Ellis uses the adjective “prurient” on several occasions to depict missionary and federal disgust with putatively “savage” rituals. Ellis, A Dancing People, 15.

92 Ellis, “The Sound of the Drum Will Revive Them,” 11–18. On how tribes modified their dances to adjust to agents, see Ellis, “We Don't Want Your Rations,” 144.

93 The Romance of a Vanishing Race: The Rodman Wanamaker Expedition of Citizenship to the North American Indian, directed by Chip Richie (Dallas, TX: Rich-Heape Films, 2009), 26 minutes (see min. 10:30). On the genealogy and work toward the failed memorial to the North American Indian, see Maddox, , Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race, and Reform (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 34–49 Google Scholar.

94 The seventy-three reservations were mapped by the Mathers Museum of World Cultures at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN; the map (available online at https://mathersmuseum.indiana.edu/doc/1913_map.pdf, accessed Mar. 29, 2020) is part of the museum's Rodman Wanamaker Documents and Photographs Collection, which includes the documents and photographs from Dixon's, Joseph Kossuth The Purpose and Achievements of the Rodman Wanamaker Expedition of Citizenship to the North American Indian (Washington, DC, 1913)Google Scholar.

95 Barsh, Russel Lawrence, “An American Heart of Darkness: The 1913 Expedition for American Indian Citizenship,” Great Plains Quarterly 13 (Spring 1993)Google Scholar. Arthur C. Parker's reference to the theatricality of the affair appears on p. 108; the reference to the southwest tribes’ resistance is on p. 106.

96 Maddox, Citizen Indians, 38–39, 46–47. Dippie, The Vanishing American, 214.

97 On Dixon's expeditions, see Barsh, “An American Heart of Darkness.”

98 As a result, 75 percent of the Indians with fee patents on the Yankton Reservation sold their land; on the Winnebago reservation, 93 percent of Indians lost their land. McDonnell, The Dispossession of the American Indian, 92.

99 See Witkin, Alexandra, “To Silence a Drum: The Imposition of United States Citizenship on Native Peoples,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 21 (Spring 1995): 353–83Google Scholar.

100 McDonnell, The Dispossession of the American Indian, 93–95.

101 Ibid., 95.

102 Milton Thorne witnessed the “induction to citizenship” ceremony at the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho in Oct. 1916, when eleven women and fifteen men were sworn in as American citizens. Thorne, Milton M., “Citizenizing the Indians,” The Southern Workman 46 (June 1917): 350Google Scholar. According to Frederick Hoxie, in the following year, the press covered similar ceremonies at the following Native American agencies: Crow, Shoshone, Coeur d'Alene, Fort Berthold, and Devil's Lake. Hoxie, A Final Promise, 180. The Southern Workman covered the ceremony in its June 1917 issue.

103 “Citizenship for Indians,” The Immigrants in America Review 2 (July 1916): 4.

104 “Naturalization in the United States, 1910–Present,” Migration Policy Institute, Washington, DC (www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/number-immigrants-who-became-us-citizens, accessed Mar. 29, 2020).

105 Heintze, James R., The Fourth of July Encyclopedia (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2007), 201Google Scholar.

106 Meyer, Stephen, “Adapting the Immigrant to the Line: Americanization in the Ford Factory, 1914–1921,” Journal of Social History 14 (Fall 1980): 67–82 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 69.

107 Higham, Strangers in the Land, 247–48.

108 Meyer, “Adapting the Immigrant to the Line,” 69.

109 “Detroit, MI: The system in vogue at the school of the Ford Motor Company in teaching English to aliens in its employ has been so successful that a national organization is being formed to extend the methods throughout the country. The plan includes a uniform series of lessons, a monthly paper, and state associations.” Excerpt titled “To Spread Ford Teaching Plan” in The Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 23, 1915, 7.

110 Clinton C. DeWitt, “Industrial Teachers,” in U.S. Bureau of Education, Proceedings, Americanization Conference, 1919, Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 119.

111 “512 Ford School Pupils Graduate,” Detroit Free Press, Feb. 28, 1916, 6. See also Sollors, Werner, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 91Google Scholar.

112 Other schools for immigrants employed the Roberts method of English teaching, which asked the students to act out the meaning of the words they used. Gregory Mason, “‘Americans First’: How the People of Detroit Are Making Americans of Their Foreigners in their City,” Outlook, Sept. 17, 1916, 193.

113 “Original Americans,” reprint from Ford Times, Red Lake Nation News, Apr. 1916, 3.

114 Byrd, The Transit of Empire, xxxiv; The Marshall Court's wording of Johnson v. M'Intosh (1823) supports the idea of the inevitability of settler acquisition and later governance of an otherwise “inhabited country”—albeit inhabited by “fierce savages”: “However extravagant the pretension of converting the discovery of inhabited country into conquest may appear, if the principle has been asserted in the first instance, and afterwards sustained; if a country has acquired and held under it; if the property of the great mass of the community originates in it, it becomes the law of the land, and cannot be questioned.” Johnson v. M'Intosh, 21 U.S. 543 (1823).