An illustration from an 1870 issue of Harper’s Weekly shows a police officer barring a Native man from the polling site.
“Like black and Hispanic voters, Indians have faced intense, deep-seated resistance and racism from the majority community while attempting to gain and exercise the franchise. The Indians' struggle to participate in the democratic process has a unique and complex history which mirrors their long, cyclic relationship with the federal government. Indeed, the history of Indian disenfranchisement reflects a panoply of shifting majority attitudes, policies, and laws toward Indians.”
(Jeanette Wolfley. “Jim Crow, Indian Style: The Disenfranchisement of Native Jim Crow, Indian Style: The Disenfranchisement of Native Americans Americans.” University of New Mexico – School of Law. 1991.)
With reference to Jim Crow, we usually think of how the segregation laws, rules, and customs which arose after Reconstruction and continued until the mid-1960s affected the Black population. We should also consider the terrible treatment of Native Americans.
Native Americans who were not granted citizenship by congressional action were barred from the naturalization process open to European immigrants; Indians were regarded as domestic subjects or nationals.
History Of the Struggle
By law and by stereotypical belief – both conscious and unconscious acts – the United States has a long history of implying that everyone has a right to use Indians as they see fit; everyone owns them. “Indian-ness” is a national heritage; it is a fount for commercial enterprise; it is a costume one can put on for a party, a youth activity, or a sporting event.
This sense of entitlement, this expression of white privilege, has a long history, manifesting itself in national narratives, popular entertainments, marketing schemes, sporting worlds, and self-improvement regimes.
(C. Richard King. Redskins: Insult and Brand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016)
This concept of Indian
status was reiterated by United States Attorney General Caleb Cushing
in 1856:
“The fact, therefore, that Indians are born in the country does not make them citizens of the United States. The simple truth is plain, that Indians are subjects of the United States, and therefore are not, in mere right of home-birth, citizens of the United States.
“But they cannot become citizens by naturalization under existing general acts of Congress. Those acts apply to foreigners, subjects of another allegiance. The Indians are not foreigners, and they are in our allegiance, without being citizens of the United States. Moreover, those acts only apply to 'white' men.”
(Dana Hedgpeth ‘Jim Crow, Indian style’: How Native Americans were denied the right to vote for decades.” The Washington Post. November 1, 2020.)
Natives faced stiff opposition to citizenship and to the right to vote. Arlene Hirschfelder and Paulette F. Molin explain …
“Though some Native Americans can trace their ancestral roots back more than 30,000 years on land that is now the United States, they weren’t guaranteed – or given – citizenship, denying them the right to vote …
“And many Native Americans didn’t see the need to push for citizenship or the right to vote in the 18th century. But as settlers and conquerors pushed them from their land, it became clearer to Native Americans that they’d have to become involved in the U.S. political system to save their lands and culture. Still, some were reluctant because they worried that would harm their tribal sovereignty and rights.”
(Arlene Hirschfelder and Paulette F. Molin. “I is for Ignoble: Stereotyping Native Americans.” Ferris State University. February 22, 2018.”
Prior to the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, Native Americans could receive citizenship by one of the following:
Marrying a white man who was a U.S. citizen
Military service
Receipt of land allotments [See Dawes Commission and the 1898 Enrollment of the Five Civilized Tribes]
Through special treaties or statutes
(Amie Bowser Tennant. “Did You Know: Native American Citizenship in the United States.” The Genealogy Reporter. August 12, 2019.)
When Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, the legislation technically gave Native Americans the right to vote, but tribal members were still shut out from voting for decades, so it was really only a partial citizenship.
In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act, also known as the Snyder Act, but Coolidge and his Congress didn’t this enact this law out of their own benevolence. Many saw this as a way to break up Native nations and forcibly assimilate them into American society; to, as Carlisle boarding school founder Richard Henry Pratt said in 1892, “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
(Becky Little. “Native Americans Weren't Guaranteed the Right to Vote in Every State Until 1962.” History.com. https://www.history.com/news/native-american-voting-rights-citizenship. November 06, 2018.)
In any case, Congress didn’t given Native people voting rights at that time either. The Constitution gave states the right to determine voting rights (with the exception of the 15th and 19th Amendments, which many states violated anyway by preventing black people from voting).
Whites continued to use tactics to intimidate Native Americans and prevent them from voting much like efforts used in the South against African Americans. To keep Native Americans from voting, states refused to put polling places near reservations or tribal communities, and required Native Americans to pass literacy or English language tests or pay poll taxes.
Being part of a tribe – important to an Indian – means you’re part of a separate nation, a separate government,” said Dan McCool, a professor of political science at the University of Utah and author of the book Native Vote: American Indians, the Voting Rights Act, and the Right to Vote.
“They wanted to be separate from America from when white people first arrived,” McCool said. But that proved impossible.
In the 19th century, the government dangled citizen like a carrot. And, in some cases, Native Americans were granted citizenship in exchange for their land.
For example:
One 1855 treaty with the Wyandot Indians, who were pushed from the upper Great Lakes area to Oklahoma, demanded all of the tribe’s land and that the “tribe shall be dissolved and terminated” in exchange for becoming “citizens of the United States.”
Natives were considered “subjects” or “wards” of the government. Although by the early 1900s more than half of Native Americans in the U.S. had become citizens, they’d done so at a huge sacrifice, having given up at least 90 million acres through treaties, allotments or forced statutes.
In many instances, they were offered citizenship if they assimilated. They had to learn to read and speak English to be granted citizenship.
Native Americans are the “only ethnic group in America that had to give up their culture to get the right to vote,” according to McCool. Even with the 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which granted citizenship and the right to vote to African Americans, the government interpreted those laws so they excluded Native Americans.
Native Americans were only able to win the right to vote by fighting for it state by state. The last state to fully guarantee voting rights for Native people was Utah in 1962. Despite these victories, Native people were still prevented from voting with poll taxes, literacy tests and intimidation—the same tactics used against black voters.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 helped strengthen the voting rights that Native people had won in every state. However, the act is no longer fully intact.
In 2013, the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder dismantled one of its key provisions, which required that states with a history of racial bias in voting get permission before passing new voting laws.
Just before the 2018 midterm elections, North Dakota’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of a new voting requirement that may prevent hundreds of Native residents from voting.
(Becky Little. “Native Americans Weren't Guaranteed the Right to Vote in Every State Until 1962.” History.com. https://www.history.com/news/native-american-voting-rights-citizenship. November 06, 2018.)
Native Americans registering to vote circa 1948. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Unbelievable Discrimination
Imagine how Native American service members who fought for the country felt. During World War II, thousands of Native Americans served overseas, then faced discrimination at home. When some of the famous Navajo Code Talkers were denied the right to vote, it helped focus more attention on the racial disparities Native Americans faced in voting.
Pvt. Ralph W. Anderson, a Navajo who had served in the U.S. Army in World War II, had a question about the U.S. policies that kept him and other Native Americans from voting.
In his May 4, 1943, letter from Fort Knox, Ky., he wrote:
“We all know Congress granted the Indian citizenship in 1924, but we still have no privilege to vote. We do not understand what kind of citizenship you would call that.”
He went on:
“We feel that we should be recognized as a full citizen of the United States of America. … Every [Navajo] that can read and write should have privileges to vote in all elections. That is the way it should be according to the Constitution of [the] United States of America.”
“Hundreds of young [Navajo] boys beside us took the oath of allegiance to the flag and the country whom they are now in the armed forces and [scattered] all over the world fighting for their country just like anybody else.”
Anderson signed the letter, “Very truly yours, From the Navajo Soldier Boys.”
(Arlene Hirschfelder and Paulette F. Molin. “I is for Ignoble: Stereotyping Native Americans.” Ferris State University. February 22, 2018.”
Anderson's letter offers a window into the decades-long, complicated fight to vote for American Indians involving Jim Crow-style tactics and racist efforts to deny them the ballot.
The Future
While overt prohibitions on voting by Native Americans are a thing of the past, Native American voters, especially if they live on reservations, may still face challenges distinct from those faced by others.
Thus, the legacy of being disenfranchised persists. Native Americans face barriers to voting due to a host of issues, including not having the required voter identification, homelessness, lack of traditional mailing addresses, and unequal access to in-person voting, according to Jacqueline De León, a staff attorney for the Native American Rights Fund.
Experts estimate there are roughly 1 million American Indians who are not registered to vote, making them what one voting rights advocate calls a “potent but untapped political force.”
(Dana Hedgpeth ‘Jim Crow, Indian style’: How Native Americans were denied the right to vote for decades.” The Washington Post. November 1, 2020.)
In August 2021, members of Congress introduced the Native American Voting Rights Act amid an ongoing wave of voter suppression bills in Republican-run states that make it harder for Native people to vote.
The bill was introduced in the House on August 13 by Reps. Sharice Davids (D-Kan.) and Tom Cole (R-Okla.), who are both Native American, and in the Senate on Aug. 10 by Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), whose state is home to a large Native population. It would provide equal access to voting on reservations while countering the explicit discrimination Native people routinely face from hostile state and local governments.
The bill would require states to provide voter registration and polling locations and drop boxes for mail-in ballots on all reservations. It would allow Native voters to list a general reservation mailing address on their voter registration and identification while mandating states that require voter identification to accept tribal identification. And it would require election officials to justify any reduction or disparity in election access in Native communities.
(Paul Blumenthal. “Native American Voting Rights Act Introduced In Congress As Native Voter Suppression Rises.” HuffPost. August 20, 2021.)
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