Utah in the Twentieth Century

10. Utah’s Denial of the Vote to Reservation Indians, 1956–57

245 10 Utah’s Denial of the Vote to Reservation Indians, 1956–57 Brian Q. Cannon Following World War II, the denial of voting rights to racial minorities galvanized activists across the nation to fight for civil rights. In Utah voting rights for racial minorities were a particularly volatile issue in San Juan, Uintah, and Duchesne Counties, where large numbers of Ute and Navajo residents created potentially significant political blocs. Many Anglos and Native Americans in these counties eyed one another with apprehension. In the following chapter, Brian Q. Cannon discusses Utah’s decision in 1956 to uphold a nineteenth-century statute by denying Indians on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation the right to vote. The legal battle that ensued reveals the indifference of Utah’s governor and general populace to racial injustice, the conservatism of Utah’s Supreme Court and attorney general, and the importance of old-stock legal talent and nationally based Pan-Indian organizations in the campaign for Indian voting rights in Utah. Although voting rights were restored, interracial suspicion and misunderstanding persisted and resurfaced many times during the rest of the century. In 1956 Utah’s attorney general barred Indians living on reservations from voting. Utah’s enforcement of this prohibition developed relatively late, but it grew out of legal strategies and reasoning that many states had used to disfranchise Native Americans. As political scientist Glenn Phelps has observed, “Indian reservations and the Indians who live on them introduce unique ingredients into the political mix surrounding voting rights.” State and federal officials employed four main arguments rooted in constitutional or legal requirements to deny Indians the right to vote. Some argued that unassimilated Indians were unqualified to vote. Using this rationale, the state constitutions of North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Idaho originally barred Indians who 246 Brian Q. Cannon did not speak English from voting. Similarly Arizona’s constitution stipulated that citizens must be able to read the United States Constitution to exercise their franchise. States also disfranchised Indians because they were wards of the federal government. In Porter v. Hall (1928), for instance, the Arizona Supreme Court embraced this reasoning.1 Indians were also denied the right to vote because the U.S. Constitution, the Fourteenth Amendment, and many state constitutions exclude “Indians not taxed” from consideration in determining legislative representation. As late as 1940, Idaho, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Washington all used this rationale to bar Indians from voting. Over the next seven years, all of these states, except for New Mexico, retreated from that stance. In 1948 Miguel Trujillo, a resident of Isleta Pueblo, New Mexico, sued in federal court after he tried unsuccessfully to vote. A panel of three judges ruled in Trujillo’s favor, overturning New Mexico’s ban on Indian voting. More than two decades later, a group of New Mexicans attempted unsuccessfully to prevent nontaxpaying Indians from voting in a school-bond election. Similarly Arizonans in 1973 contested an Indian’s right to run for office because he did not pay property taxes. One final legal rationale for denying Indians the right to vote derived from the Supreme Court’s finding in the 1886 case United States v. Kagama that Indians were subject to federal law, but “Indians owe no allegiance to a state within which their reservation may be established, and the state gives them no protection.” In the 1920s, New York and Arizona cited this rationale , pointing out that some state laws did not apply on Indian reservations. In 1948 New Mexico officials attempted to block Indians from voting on the same grounds.2 Although many states prohibited Indians from voting early in the twentieth century, Utah has “the distinction of being the last state in the Union to permit Indians to vote,” as political scientist Daniel McCool has observed. The state’s ban on voting by reservation Indians drew upon each of the legal arguments already cited. Utah thus provides historians with a model, albeit a regressive one, of American Indian policy.3 Despite the importance of voting rights, Utah’s denial of the vote to Indians has received only fleeting scholarly attention. The state’s dubious distinction is mentioned by Jere Franco (Utah was “the last state to grant the franchise to Native Americans”) and Vine Deloria Jr. and Cliff Lytle (“Utah was the last state to permit Indians to exercise their voting franchise”). Thomas Alexander notes in his centennial history of the state that “Utah repealed the restriction on Native American voting” in...