The Citizenship Question
One of the most significant political issues affecting Native people in Zitkála-Šá’s era was the question of citizenship.
Native Americans were not citizens of the United States under the terms of the Constitution as originally written. The Fourteenth Amendment, which granted birthright citizenship to formerly enslaved people after the Civil War, explicitly excluded “Indians not taxed” from its provisions. The question of when, how, and on what terms Native people would acquire citizenship was one of the most contested political questions in the relationship between the federal government and Indigenous nations.
The allotment system — established by the Dawes Act of 1887 — was one of the mechanisms through which citizenship was offered. The Dawes Act divided reservation lands into individual allotments and offered citizenship to Native people who accepted their allotments and adopted the “habits of civilized life.” This formulation was deeply problematic: it tied citizenship to the abandonment of collective land ownership and cultural practices that the government classified as uncivilized, and it was also a mechanism for the transfer of “surplus” reservation lands to non-Native ownership.
The allotment system dramatically reduced the total land held by Native nations. Approximately 90 million acres of Indigenous land — nearly two-thirds of the land held under reservation systems before the Dawes Act — passed into non-Native ownership between 1887 and 1934 through the allotment process and the sale of “surplus” lands.
Zitkála-Šá engaged with these issues not as an abstract political question but as the specific material reality affecting the communities she was connected to. The questions of citizenship, land, and political rights were questions about what kind of future was possible for Native people in the United States.
The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 eventually granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States, ending the patchwork system of conditional citizenship that had existed before. Zitkála-Šá’s advocacy work contributed to the political pressure that produced this change.