The Landmark Decision of Harrison v. Laveen: Arizona Indians and the Right to Vote

On a clear Saturday afternoon in 1947, two Yavapai members of Arizona's Fort McDowell Reservation walked into the Maricopa County registrar's office fully intent on registering to vote as Democrats for the upcoming election. World War II veteran Frank Harrison and tribal chairman Harry Austin, like so many other Americans, looked to the ballot box not only as a chance to participate in the political process but also as an opportunity to influence meaningful change in their everyday lives and the lives of fellow Indians on the reservation. Yet, Harrison and Austin's hopes were quickly dashed as the county recorder, Roger G. Laveen, rejected their application citing section 2, article 7, of the Arizona State Constitution, which stipulated American Indians were clearly "persons under guardianship" of the United States and therefore ineligible to vote.¹

Unsatisfied, both men entered into a long legal battle in an effort to appeal such discriminatory legislation and rectify the disenfranchisement of American Indians in Arizona. The lawsuit eventually reached the Arizona Supreme Court where the plaintiffs won a substantial victory in favor of Indigenous civil rights. The case garnered national attention and support from myriad organizations. The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the U.S. assistant attorney general all offered amicus curiae both in defense of Indians' right to vote and in opposition to the County's biased law. The significance of Harrison v. Laveen cannot be overemphasized as it reflects the prisms of race, status, and citizenship occurring during the late 1940s, and showcases the pivotal steps American Indians took in shaping their destiny through legal means.

Harrison and Austin's lawsuit emerged almost a quarter century after the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which granted all Indigenous peoples across the continental United States full citizenship—including the right to vote. The act stated that "all non-citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States" were 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 to tribal or other property."² Its seemingly contradictory stipulations not only imparted American Indians with U.S. citizenship but also recognized the fact that Indigenous groups held a unique citizenship status. Unfortunately, the ambiguity of such legislation failed to specify which rights were granted to American Indians and thus allowed states to control whether they had the right to vote. As a result, the state of Arizona determined that because American Indians living on reservations resided outside state boundaries, and due to the fact that they were recognized as wards of the state, they possessed no right to engage as electorates at the local, state, and federal level.

The fact that Indigenous peoples faced such considerable state-level opposition to their right to vote is perhaps not all that surprising given how many American Indians lived in Arizona at the time. By the time Arizona reached statehood in 1912, Indigenous communities constituted a considerable segment of the state's population in specific counties. According to the 1910 Census, Indigenous people made up large portions of Pinal County (3,139 out of 9,045), Apache County (6,131 out of 9,196), Navajo County (5,752 out of 11,471), and Coconino County (2,788 out of 8,130), and 14.3% of Arizona's entire population.³ Considering these population ratios, the Indigenous vote could significantly influence the course of an election. For Arizona officials, the opportunity for American Indians to secure equal voting rights severely threatened the continuity of a white homogeneous society. Indigenous peoples' experience with suffrage in Arizona represents a microcosm for the larger patterns of racialization and exclusion toward marginalized groups living in the United States during the twentieth century.

By the 1940s, Arizona was home to approximately one-sixth of all American Indians in the United States—24,317 over twenty-one years of age and 11.5% of the state's total population.⁴ Such voter numbers...