100 years later: A congressional act that didn’t ensure equal justice

(Pauly Denetclaw/ICT)

Ronnie Jo Horse is only the second generation in her Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne family to be able to fully participate in elections.

Her grandfather was born in 1910, before Native people were even considered American citizens. Her mother is the first generation who was actually able to cast a ballot.

Horse registered to vote just one month after she turned 18 in 2010. Horse is now 31.

“People think it’s a long time ago when it really wasn’t — it was our grandparents,” Horse, executive director of Western Native Voice in Montana, told ICT . “And (those) my mom’s age, they got to fully participate in the system … We can still see the effects to this day.”

Just 100 years ago, on June 2, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Indian Citizenship Act, also known as the Snyder Act, making Indigenous people citizens of the United States. About half in the country were already considered citizens, but the new law made it official.

The act is often linked to voting rights, but it’s imperfect in its language and the right to vote for Indigenous people was challenged among the states as late as 1962. The act affirmed citizenship but did not provide equal rights to those that White, male, American citizens possessed.

Even today, which marks the 100th anniversary of the Indian Citizenship Act, Indigenous voters are still encountering issues with casting their ballots and fighting off efforts to dilute their votes, although a growing number of Native politicians are being elected to office.

“We know it still took decades for our people to fully have that right to vote,” Larry Wright, executive director for the National Congress of American Indians, told ICT . “We know we still have a long way to go because we still have voting rights issues yet today.”

Indigenous women, including Horse, are at the forefront of defending those rights.

Native Vote Washington, California Native Vote Project, Native Voters Alliance Nevada, Western Native Voice, Arizona Native Vote and New Mexico Native Vote are all led by Indigenous women.

Congressional history

It was a misty day outside the National Archives and Records Administration, with rain so light it could barely be felt. It was May 15, and the Washington, D.C. weather was just starting to heat up. Three security officers and a metal detector were fixed at the researcher’s entrance, but entry into the Central Research Room was swift.

After a 45-minute wait, congressional documents from 1924, some sitting in archival storage boxes, were rolled into the Central Research Room on a metal cart. In a bound book, titled “Original House Bills 6146 – 6499” from the 68th Congress, was the first draft of HR 6355, “A Bill: to authorize the Secretary of the Interior to issue certificates of citizenship to Indians.”

In its final form, the act was brief.

“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.”

Matthew Fletcher, a federal Indian law professor at the University of Michigan, said the law helped standardize the citizenship requirements across the nation.

Before the Indian Citizenship Act, Indigenous people could get American citizenship by becoming Christianized and giving up their individual treaty rights; through acts of Congress such as the Dawes Act; and through military service. Indigenous women could become citizens by marrying White men, and their children would also be granted citizenship.

“Prior to the Civil War, citizenship was done on a state-by-state basis,” said Fletcher, Grand Traverse Band. “For example, in Michigan and Minnesota, in the 1850s, there was a way for Indian people to become citizens of a state. They couldn’t become federal citizens, but they could become state citizens.”

Even after the act passed, however, Native people were still treated differently. In 1868, the 14th amendment granted American citizenship to every person born or naturalized within the bounds of the United States, but the conditions did not apply to Indigenous people.

“Indian people did not, at that time, get automatic birthright citizenship with the federal and state government by virtue of just being born in the U.S.,” Fletcher said.

The right to vote came even later. The Bill of Rights — the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution – went into effect in 1791 but did not include a right to vote, leaving it up to states to run federal elections and to decide who is eligible to vote.

That changed in 1870 with the ratification of the 15th amendment, which granted all male citizens, regardless of race, the right to vote. But that amendment, likewise, did not apply to Indigenous people.

The act of Congress that made Indigenous people citizens came in 1876 after a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that concluded Native people were not citizens of the United States.

The Supreme Court ruling followed the so-called Marshall Trilogy of the 1830s that ruled Indigenous nations were domestic dependent nations , meaning these nations were in the bounds of the United States and subject to the federal government’s power and responsibility.

Decision to act

Nearly 50 years after the Supreme Court rulings, Congress decided to act on citizenship for Indigenous people.

By then, Native people had begun to catch the attention of politicians. In 1907, Charles Curtis, Kaw Nation, became the first Native person to serve in the U.S. Senate when he was appointed to one term.

He was elected by popular vote in 1914 and served two-and-a-half terms as a senator for Kansas. In 1925, Curtis became the first majority party leader in the Senate. He left the Senate in 1929 when he was elected vice president of the United States along with President Herbert Hoover.

He was not a strong advocate for tribal sovereignty, however, said Philip Deloria, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, a history professor at Harvard University.

“You couldn’t be a national politician without fitting fairly well into the mainstream, and that is kind of about where Curtis does seem to me to sit,” Deloria said. “His politics have to be kind of middle of the road, assimilationist, because there was no space for a Native person who was actually a serious advocate for tribal sovereignty, which isn’t to say he wasn’t an advocate for Native people.”

The Indian Citizenship Act was first introduced on Jan. 29, 1924 in the U.S. House by Rep. Homer P. Synder of New York, according to original documents at the National Archives.

One day later, Snyder asked that the Interior Secretary Hubert Work write a report on the bill. Work’s administrative assistant E.K. Burlew sent a letter back to Snyder on Jan. 31, 1924, saying that a report would be submitted to the Committee on Indian Affairs as soon as possible.

The report was submitted to the committee on Feb. 12, 1924, and the act passed the House on March 18. Documents from the Senate Indian Affairs Committee or from the U.S. Senate about the act couldn’t be located in the archives.

The act became law on June 2, 1924. It wasn’t a complete fix. Native people faced many of the same voting restrictions as did formerly enslaved people after the Civil War.

“The Snyder Act just says, ‘Indians are now citizens,’” Fletcher said. “But the 14th Amendment is still lurking out there. So states continue to play games with Indian voting rights. (States) would say things like, ‘You can’t vote in our elections if you don’t pay taxes, or if you don’t speak English as a first language,’ or… they would have citizenship tests that were really hard to pass.”

The act was passed in the aftermath of World War I, in which many Native Americans served in the Armed Forces even though they were not citizens. It was a time of changing immigration demographics in the United States, with discrimination rampant against southern and eastern European immigrants.

The political opposition was codified into law in the Immigration Act of 1924, which curbed the number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, such as Italy, while favoring those from western Europe.

“It’s not a coincidence that the (Indian) Citizenship Act and the Immigration Act both happened in 1924,” Deloria said. “Both Native people and for immigrants, there’s a lot wrapped up around assimilation. There’s a whole set of discourses and practices and institutions that are aimed at immigrants, and getting them to stop speaking their languages and to give up their customs, and to assimilate.”

It was also in 1940 that all Native Americans and Alaska Natives were to finally be counted with the general American population in the decennial census, according to the Census Bureau . Previously, Native people had to renounce their tribal citizenship, or “tribal rule” under state or territorial laws, to become Americans.

Repowering communities

Indigenous people were not all in agreement about American citizenship, however – there were essentially four different positions on it, according to Deloria’s research.

One position favored citizenship for practical reasons. It would lead to voting rights, access to courts, and hopefully, equality. The second position, seated in American nationalism, believed that Indigenous people should be citizens because they had served in the war.

The third position believed American citizenship would lead to assimilation of Indigenous people into mainstream society and away from their Indigenous nations. The final position was Indigenous people who flatly opposed American citizenship and the Indian Citizenship Act.

“Many Native people saw citizenship as the final act of colonization,” said David Silverman, professor of history at George Washington University. “One of the points I make is that the options in front of them were very few. Effectively they had the choice – not of citizenship and sovereignty – but between the abject poverty of reservation communities caused by White legislation and the failures of federal policy, or assimilation into the White mainstream. And that was the range of debate.”

There was extreme poverty on many reservations, according to Kevin Gover, undersecretary of museums and culture at the Smithsonian Institute.

The movement of Native people was restricted and closely monitored. They had little sovereignty over themselves, their children, lands or water. More than 80 percent of school age children were forcibly taken from their families and put into federal Indian boarding schools where they faced strict assimilationist policies as well as violence, neglect and even death.

“Their lives were completely controlled by Indian agents on the reservation,” said Gover, Pawnee. “They needed the agent’s permission to leave the reservation to spend their own money. “So citizenship was a step toward reestablishing both individual Indian agency over their own lives and equally important, the tribal authority… We’ve used our citizenship over the years in ways that repowered our communities.”

‘No one ever asked’

A few years ago, Ronnie Jo Horse was in Fort Peck in northeastern Montana at a community meeting, to update the community on the recent state legislative session. She asked a group of elders if they were registered to vote.

None of the women had ever voted in an election and none was registered to vote.

“I asked why they had never participated before,” Horse recalled. “They said, ‘No one ever asked me to.’”

Horse had always taken voting seriously. As a teenager, she became a member of Western Native Voice, an organization dedicated to building civic engagement and power on the seven sovereign tribal lands in Montana as well as major urban centers for Indigenous people living off tribal lands.

By age 18, she was helping give rides to people who wanted to give public comments at the Montana Legislature.

A friend who worked for Western Native Voice encouraged her to register to vote, and she did. Eventually, she became the organization’s executive director in 2022.

Jaynie Parrish, Diné, the founder and executive director of Arizona Native Vote, cast her first ballot in 2008, when she was nearing her 30s.

Parrish drove with her mother to Lupton Chapter House, located near the Arizona-New Mexico border just off Interstate 40. On election days, Navajo chapter houses are bustling. Campaign workers for Navajo politicians, and sometimes state elections, are posted outside, offering free traditional foods and a time to chat about candidates.

“It’s festive and we get to visit with relatives,” Parrish said.

Parrish said she hadn’t registered to vote or even thought about voting in a meaningful way because no one had talked to her about it.

“I just didn’t have anybody approach me,” Parrish said, “I don’t remember anybody coming to my high school and talking to me about voting.”

Today, she is working to ensure that voters are registered and that Native voices are heard.

“Honestly, I just feel like this is my place to be right now and to help serve in a way to empower our people by voting, showing them that path, that this is just one way to create change,” Parrish said. “It doesn’t mean that it’s the only way, but it’s definitely an important place for us to have a voice. I always go back to people like Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan [in Minnesota], and Denise Juneau, and all these incredible leaders that put it just right. They said, ‘This is our time, and we’re fighting against systems that weren’t built or created for us, but we’re making new paths, and finding a way to make it work.”

Taylor Patterson, Bishop Paiute, never intended to go into the field of civic engagement. She was pulled into it after seeing firsthand how state and federal policy can impact people.

At 19, she was diagnosed with a chronic illness that forced her to learn to advocate for herself. She knows now how a Medicaid For All policy could help people pay for the care they need.

“I’m really just concerned about making sure that people stay engaged and push for the things that they want,” Patterson said.

Especially young voters, 18 to 29, who are often the smallest percentage of voters.

“I don’t want another generation to be disenfranchised because they don’t see a place for them… We’re asking young people, why don’t you vote?” Patterson asked. “And young people will tell us exactly what they want. And they’re like, ‘That’s too pie-in-the-sky. No, that’s crazy. The green New Deal or Medicare For All is never going to be able to pass. So, then why should I vote?’”

Barriers to voting

But there are still many barriers for Native voters today.

In 1962, New Mexico became the last state in the nation to affirm equal voting rights for Native Americans living on sovereign lands in Montoya v. Bolack, went all the way to the New Mexico Supreme Court.

The court affirmed that Native Americans living on reservations were legally allowed to vote in state and local elections. It would be one of the last attempts to use a direct statute to deny Native Americans the right to vote, according to historian Willard Hughes Rollings.

In 2020, the Native American Rights Fund released a report, “ Obstacles at Every Turn: Barriers to Political Participation Faced by Native American Voters ,” that details ways in which Native voters are disenfranchised.

The process of registering to vote is riddled with barriers. There aren’t enough locations to register to vote, which means some people have to drive long distances just to apply in-person. Online voter registration isn’t always an option, as Native communities lag behind others when it comes to internet access, and eight states don’t allow online voter registration at all: Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi and New Hampshire.

In states such as New Mexico, online voter registration requires a New Mexico ID or driver’s license, which can be another barrier. Some states even require a physical address in order to register to vote, which can be a problem for people living in rural areas on sovereign lands.

An estimated 40,000 Native Americans in Arizona don’t have addresses for their homes, so when a proof-of-address requirement proposed in Arizona would have disproportionately impacted Native American voters, according to Jacqueline De León, staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund.

“We were able to successfully beat that back but the legislature knows that statewide races in Arizona are decided by less than 300 votes out of 2.5 million cast, that the margins are so incredibly tight,” De León said. “So we are seeing an attempt to pick off minority voters across the state.”

Casting ballots can also be a problem. There often aren’t enough early voting locations for people who can’t take work off to vote on election days. During the 2016 presidential election, 59 million people voted before election day, according to The Associated Press, and in 2020, seven out of 10 voters used early voting and mail-in ballots. The Republican Party, however, has moved to restrict both, according to PBS NewsHour.

Some states – Mississippi, Alabama, and New Hampshire – don’t offer early voting at all. And early voting in Oklahoma, Louisiana, Maryland and Kentucky lasts less than a week. In Texas, about half the early voting locations are being closed because there’s no funding.

And for those who wait until Election Day to cast their ballot, there aren’t enough polling places, which can force some Indigenous voters to drive long distances. Once there, Native language speakers who need their ballots translated from English are unable to receive those services, even though translations may be required by law if the population meets a certain percentage requirement.

“For many of our communities, English is still not our first language,” said Jordan James Harvill, Cherokee, the national program director for Advance Native Political Leadership. “Section 203 provisions … say that if there’s a certain number of language speakers in a community, that there have to be ballots and information about voting in that language. That is still not respected for a large portion of our communities, particularly when we’re thinking about Alaska Native communities, Navajo, Diné speakers.”

Looking ahead

In the next 100 years, there are many dreams of what could be. It would start with the passage of the Native American Voting Rights Act, an act that would ensure communities like the Catawba Nation in South Carolina have a polling location on their lands, where voter access could meet the unique needs of a community.

“We have to pass the Native American Voting Rights Act,” said De León, Isleta Pueblo. “I’d like to see voter access as an everyday part of Native peoples lives in a way that is organic and true to the community, that’s intuitive for people, that understands their lives, and is responsive to their lives, so that they can make the choice of participating in American political life.”

The act was introduced in the U.S. House in 2021 by Rep. Sharice Davids, and co-sponsored by Rep. Tom Cole, Chickasaw. Davids is Ho-Chunk. There has been little action on the act by Congress, however. It was moved from the Committee on House Administration to the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties in 2022. That was the last action made on the act.

The act would make it mandatory for state’s to provide voter registration and polling locations on sovereign tribal lands, according to the Native American Rights Fund. It would create state-level Native American voting rights task forces, require oral voting translations in Native languages, and allow others to drop off absentee ballots and voter registration to state agencies. It would also require states to get pre-approval from tribal governments, the U.S. attorney general or a D.C. federal district court before making any changes that would impact voter accessibility.

Wright, Ponca, said the act could help eliminate barriers.

“We can ensure that our people, regardless of where they live, what reservation they are, that those laws will be upheld and barriers aren’t put up to prevent our people from voting,” Wright said. “So it’s very important that we get this passed and make sure that voting rights for tribal people are defended.”

The act could restore equity to a system that has never been fully in balance.

“Across the globe, Indigenous peoples are standing up from Central and South America to New Zealand, and saying that we deserve a place at this table,” Harvill said. “We are the original peoples of these lands, and we will not be cast aside in the process of decision-making.”

“It means equity and parity in elected office,” Harvill said. “We have 350 Native elected leaders currently. We need roughly about 17,000 to reach basic representational parity based on population. It looks like closing that gap in everything from state legislatures to Congress to school boards and city councils that there is not a single place in this nation where Native people are not at the table driving decisions for the lands that they call home.”

Success at the ballot box

A growing number of Indigenous politicians have been elected in the past 20 years. The Nov. 5, 2024, election will see more than 140 Indigenous candidates running for everything from local school boards to the U.S. Senate, according to a database by ICT and Advance Native Political Leadership.

“What we’re going to see is the most diverse, the largest class of Native peoples being elected to office in the nation’s history this cycle,” Harvill said.

Current officeholders (and this isn’t an extensive list) include:

● Denise Juneau, who is of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Tribes, Democrat, was the first Native American woman elected to a statewide office when she won election as the state superintendent of public education in Montana.

● Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, Democrat, who was elected to the U.S. Congress in 2018, became the first Native American in a presidential cabinet when President Joe Biden nominated her to be Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, which is tasked with overseeing Indian affairs. Biden has seated more Native American federal judges than any other single administration, with all four being Native women.

● Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, White Earth Nation, DFL, became the first Native American woman in the country elected to lieutenant governor’s position, when she was elected in 2018. She remains the only Native American woman in her position.

● Although no Native woman has yet been elected as a governor, Republican, Kevin Stitt, Cherokee, is governor of Oklahoma, where U.S. Rep Tom Cole, Chickasaw, is the longest-serving Native American member of Congress. U.S. Rep. Josh Brecheen, Choctaw, also represents Oklahoma in Congress, as does U.S. Sen. Markwayne Mullin, Cherokee, who became the first Native member of the Senate since 2005. All three members of Congress are Republicans.

● U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, Yup’ik, Democrat, was the first Alaska Native elected to represent Alaska’s at-large congressional district.

● U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, Ho-Chunk, Democrat, joined Haaland in becoming the first Native American women elected to Congress in 2018. Davids is now the longest serving Native American congresswoman in the history of the country and is seeking reelection to Kansas’ third congressional district this year.

This piece was originally published at ICT.

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