The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924: What Changed and What Didn’t
The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, signed by President Calvin Coolidge on June 2 of that year, granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States. It was a significant legal change that Zitkála-Šá and others in the Native rights movement had worked toward for years.
But the Act’s passage did not resolve all of the citizenship and voting rights questions it addressed. Several states — particularly in the West, where large Native populations lived — used various mechanisms to prevent Native citizens from actually exercising the voting rights that the Act nominally granted. Arizona and New Mexico did not allow Native people to vote until 1948, years after the Act’s passage. Other states used poll taxes, literacy tests, and other mechanisms that had been used to disenfranchise Black voters in the South to restrict Native voting.
The gap between formal legal rights and actual political participation was familiar territory for Zitkála-Šá. She had spent her career watching the formal promises of American law fail to be implemented in ways that actually benefited Native people. The Indian Citizenship Act was a victory, but it was a victory that required continued advocacy to make real.
She continued working after 1924, through the National Council of American Indians, on the implementation questions that the Act’s passage left open. The specific voting rights questions, the specific implementation of citizenship protections, the specific ways in which Native people were still being denied the full implications of their formal legal status — these were the issues she continued to press in the years between the Act’s passage and her death in 1938.