Editor’s note: In 2014 Montana celebrates 150 years as a territory and 125 years as a state. We’re marking both landmark birthdays each Sunday with a Montana Moment, a chronological look at key events in Montana’s history.
The moment: Native Americans become American citizens, June 2, 1924.
The story: “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.”
After Montana women became voters in 1914, a significant part of Montana society still didn’t have suffrage.
After 12,000 Indians served in the military in World War I (as, indeed, Native Americans had since the American Revolution), the call for citizenship became more resounding.
In 1924, the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act. Previously, American citizenship came through military service or marriage, and Natives were considered citizens only of their tribe. Citizenship also fit in with a policy of assimilation, as did boarding schools (1880-1934) and land allotments.
However, American citizenship was “thrust upon them without their consent,” noted David E. Wilkins, a professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, recently in “Indian Country Today.”
“Interestingly, many states were long reluctant to act in kind and only when Utah allowed the native vote in 1962 were Indians finally considered citizens by every state,” Wilkins wrote. “So, incredible as it may seem, Natives have only been recognized as having citizenship in all three policies — their tribal nation, state of residence, and the U.S — for a mere 52 years.”
Wilkins said that the layers of citizenship made Natives “‘citizens’ of and ‘subjects’ to U.S. law,” with “extraordinary federal power over their rights and property.”
Montana responded to the new citizenship law by amending the state constitution to disenfranchise as many Indian voters as possible, limiting voting rights to taxpayers in 1932 — knowing those who lived on reservations were exempt from some taxes. Later laws aimed to make voter registration and polling difficult to impossible on reservations.
Reach Tribune Staff Writer Kristen Inbody at 791-1490 or by email at firstname.lastname@example.org.