On 2 June 1924 President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Indian Citizenship Act, also known as the Snyder Act, granting citizenship to all Indigenous peoples in the United States. The Act stated:

That all non-citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States 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.

This law made citizens of approximately 125,000 of the 300,000 Indigenous people in the country, with the remainder having secured US citizenship before this through other means, such as the Dawes Act or service in the First World War.

There was, however, much confusion over what US citizenship meant for members of Indigenous tribes. By granting citizenship but stating that it would not affect tribal rights, the Act essentially conferred a form of dual citizenship upon those who were members of a particular tribe or nation. Indigenous people occupied an ambiguous place in American society, neither wholly inside nor wholly outside its political, legal and cultural boundaries. Conferral of citizenship did not suddenly entitle Indigenous people to full civic rights as there were still restrictions on their lands, and it did not guarantee the right to vote: that decision was left up to each individual state, some of which, such as Arkansas and New Mexico, did not enact voting legislation until 1948. Peggy Flanagan, Minnesota’s 50th lieutenant governor and an enrolled member of the Ojibwe tribe, stated in 2023:

For far too long, Native people had no say in the government that dictated nearly every aspect of our lives, and gaining citizenship required giving up tribal citizenship and assimilating into American culture.

This confusing, quasi-citizenship did little to improve the condition of Native Americans in the early 20th century. While the granting of citizenship to marginalised groups would usually be seen as a progressive development, this was not the case for many Indigenous people. Some tribal members, such as archaeologist and historian Arthur Caswell Parker and physician and social reformer Charles Eastman, believed that the Act was an essential component in allowing Native Americans to integrate fully into US society. Many, however, viewed the Act as an attempted enforcement of collective naturalisation that sought to extinguish Indigenous sovereignty. Benjamin Caswell, President of the Chippewa Indians at the time, saw the conferral of US citizenship as a significant step on the path towards the eventual dissolution of Indigenous communities as meaningful political entities in the US.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, also known as the Iroquois or the Six Nations, was the most vocal of any tribes in their outright refusal of US citizenship. Following the passage of the Act, Haudenosaunee political leaders rejected US citizenship and affirmed their position that it had passed without their knowledge (or consent) in letters addressed to the president and Congress, as the historian Laurence M. Hauptman has described. Chief Clinton Rickard, in his autobiography Fighting Tuscarora (1984), said that the Act was passed ‘despite our strong opposition’ and that:

By our ancient treaties, we expected the protection of the government … United States citizenship was just another way of absorbing us and destroying our customs and our government ... We feared citizenship would also put our treaty status in jeopardy and bring taxes upon our land. How can a citizen have a treaty with his own government ... This was a violation of our sovereignty. Our citizenship was in our own nations.

On 30 December 1924 another letter of protest was sent to President Coolidge from the Grand Council – the governing body of the Six Nations, made up of 50 chiefs from all nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy – which recommended the abandonment and repeal of the Act. The following year, in 1925, Onondaga Chief Jesse Lyons was sent to Washington with wampum belts, carried in diplomatic meetings to convey the Confederacy’s message of peace, to deliver the same message. Lyons also reminded the United States of the treaties it had signed with the Haudenosaunee in the late 1700s, which acknowledged that the Haudenosaunee were separate, sovereign nations, and that their citizens were not US citizens: the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the 1789 Treaty of Fort Harmar and the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua. Yet, while Lyons’ trip was well received and covered by newspapers such as the New York Times, it did little to change the course of the Act.

Contention surrounding the Act remains heated today. Joseph Heath, General Counsel of the Onondaga Nation, wrote in 2018 that the Onondaga and the Haudenosaunee ‘have never accepted the authority of the United States to make Six Nations citizens become citizens of the United States, as claimed in the Citizenship Act of 1924’, and that accepting US citizenship would be ‘treason to their own Nations, a violation of the treaties and a violation of international law, as recognized in the 2007 United Nation Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’.

Heath argues that:

In spite of the European and American efforts to the contrary, the Haudenosaunee have remained in sovereign control of some of their land, and all of their language and culture. They are still here; they are a people, not a problem.

Despite this, many tribes did accept citizenship and today the majority of Native Americans consider themselves to be American citizens. Few would identify solely as citizens of their own Indigenous nations, mainly for political reasons. In this way at least, the Indigenous Citizenship Act of 1924 was successful in its intended assimilation of American Indians.

Laura Gillespie is Postdoctoral Research Assistant in the Treatied Spaces Research Group at the University of Hull.