Addressing the crowd at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation that summer day, Coolidge spoke of his “satisfaction” at having signed an “epoch-making law,” one that “symbolized the consummation of what for many years had been the purpose of the federal government—to merge the Indians into the general citizenry and body politic of the nation.”
The law that Coolidge praised was the Indian Citizenship Act, which he’d enacted three years earlier, on June 2, 1924. A century old this week, the legislation stated that “all noncitizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States” were now citizens.
Coolidge’s South Dakota speech revealed the extent to which he viewed this legislation as purely beneficial for the estimated 40 percent of Native people who had not yet become American citizens by 1924. Political support for Native citizenship had increased after World War I, when 12,000 Native men “proved to be courageous and rendered distinguished service” for the U.S., as Coolidge later reflected.
Congress granted these veterans citizenship in 1919; the president later spoke fondly of the Native dignitaries who attended the burial of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery in 1921, saying their presence “symbolized the outstanding fact that the red men and their neighbors had been brought together as one people.”
Coolidge’s comments alluded to a broader trend in the early 20th-century U.S. At the time, many white Americans believed “that the best way forward for Native people would be through having them speak English, having them be taught in a different school, having them dress a certain way, having them worship a certain way. And the final completion of that [process] was full citizenship,” says Stacy Leeds, dean of the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. A member of the Cherokee Nation, Leeds is the first Indigenous woman to serve as a law school dean.
But universal—and unilateral—citizenship for Native Americans was not welcomed by all. Members of the Onondaga Nation protested the act as “a destructive and … injurious weapon” that abrogated their existing treaty with the federal government. “We, the Indians, have not as yet tired of the free use and enjoyment of our rights as Indians living on reservations,” they wrote in a December 1924 letter to the president.