Native American Sovereignty and U.S. Citizenship

What is the relationship between Native American sovereignty and U.S. citizenship? McDonald’s American Indians and The Fight for Equal Rights, Warren’s The Quest For Citizenship, and Work’s The Seminole Nation of Oklahoma offer analyses that examine the nature and origins of this relationship, as discernible from legal, historical, and narrative records. These works encourage the reader to consider potential answers to this question from Native American struggles for civil rights as both citizens of sovereign tribal nations and U.S. citizens. A common assertion made by all authors is that this relationship must be understood as a direct precipitate of the struggles for civil rights, voting equality, educational opportunities, and government-to-government relationships that have shaped Native American lived realities from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries.

This perennial question may seem to have been exhausted; however, it is only because American studies of this relationship have historically centered on what the United States did to Native Americans, rather than the agency demonstrated by the people both individually and collectively. Contrary to this approach, McDonald, Warren, and Work focus on what Native Americans did in the face of assimilation, cultural change, discrimination in voting, and legislative efforts to influence tribal sovereignty. Their research illustrates, on the one hand, that to understand this relationship, the experiences and interactions between Native Americans (e.g., Crow, Gros Ventre, Seminole, Sioux, etc.) and the legislators, missionaries, stakeholders, and teachers must be chronicled; however, on the other hand, the active negotiation—not passive reception—Native Americans participated in during these interactions and the formulation of their civil rights and identities as citizens of both sovereign tribal nations and the United States must also be examined. Knowing that Native Americans have experienced discrimination as U.S. citizens is only the beginning. There remains that challenge of examining when, where, and in which contexts this suppression of civil rights has occurred and how Native self-deterministic resistance facilitated their struggles for equality.

This approach taken by the authors is particularly timely, as comparative American studies of Native American civil rights struggles with those of other ethnic minorities (e.g., African Americans) in the U.S. are expanding. No longer is the federal government the sole central focus in analyses of discrimination against Native Americans. Instead, as discussed in all three books, the differences, similarities, and elusive complexities of federal policy towards Native Americans are now being analyzed in tandem with the discrimination that some social and political interactions between Native Americans and non-Natives have produced (e.g., racial polarization in voting, contempt for non-taxation of Native Americans, etc.). Such analyses illuminate the duality of Native American civic existence through an emphasis on the uniqueness of contradictory federal and state policies—as well as social customs—towards Native American sovereignty, while illuminating the struggles for civil rights Native Americans share in common with other U.S. citizens that continue to fight for social equality.

This discourse, premised on the review of primary documentation, offers irrefutable data supporting the notion that federal and state policies were not dictators of the parameters of Native American civic engagement, resistance to discrimination in educational opportunities, and expressions of tribal sovereignty. Collectively, McDonald, Warren, and Work’s books remind the reader that federal and state laws on Native American voting, education, and nations building were very specific and followed; however, there were enough communities and individuals who found these laws insufficient, challenged their implementation, and sought reform.

McDonald’s American Indians and the Fight for Equal Voting Rights engages the significance of these points by examining how citizens of the Crow, Northern Cheyenne, Omaha, Salish—Kootenai, Utes, and other nations have been disentitled...