The national push for Indian citizenship developed in the wake of the 1868 Fourteenth Amendment, which mandated birthright citizenship and barred states from limiting civil rights. One issue Congress debated was how this would affect the status of Native peoples. The ultimate compromise was to side-step the question by excluding “Indians not taxed,” following the Constitution’s rule for the national census, the longstanding principle that only states could levy taxes on individuals, and the belief that the authority to tax included other legal powers that would have violated federal authority and tribal autonomy.
In 1871, Congress moved towards ending Native sovereignty by declaring it would no longer authorize treaties, but instead would impose laws on Indians until they became full citizens and subject to the laws of the state where they lived, though all existing treaties would be respected. In 1887, with the end of the Indian Wars, Congress enacted the General Allotment (Dawes) Act, allotting reservations, keeping individual holdings in federal trust for 25 years, and extending U.S. citizenship along with all state or territorial laws to allottees. Political calculations led the bill’s authors to explicitly exempt the most nationally vocal Native nations, including the Senecas in New York and the “civilized” tribes in Indian Territory, soon to become Oklahoma.
Many of the supposed protections built into the Dawes Act were tenuous at best. Every reservation allotment left huge portions of “surplus” land sold to white farmers and ranchers. In 1903, the Supreme Court in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock ruled that Congress had the power to unilaterally ignore Indian treaties (all made before 1871), which opened the door to laws making it simpler for federal agents to sell allotments before the trust period ended despite the opposition of their owners.
These experiences fed Native fears that U.S. citizenship was intended to bludgeon rather than benefit tribes, and that the subsequent state and local property taxes would result in their lands being seized and sold to white men. That was why, after the Civil War, Indian communities in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island had (unsuccessfully) opposed the full citizenship proposed by those states. Elsewhere, Natives who retained allotments with federal trust status were apparently protected from that threat. Congress required territories seeking statehood to include measures in their constitutions prohibiting the taxation of trust lands. Still, the 1906 Burke Act allowed backdoor deals at the national level to end such restrictions. At one point, Congress considered allowing the taxation of allotments whose owners were “drunkards” or refused to surrender their children to boarding schools. While tribes could win protections—in 1912, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress could not annul its 1898 agreement with Choctaws and Chickasaws for a 21-year trust period—taxation remained a potent threat.