The Indian Citizenship Act, 1924

2 June 2027

On 2 June 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act. Its operative sentence declared “that all non-citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States.” It is also known as the Snyder Act, after Representative Homer P. Snyder of New York, who introduced it as H.R. 6355 in February 1924.

Citizenship had been arriving in pieces for decades, through military service, marriage, treaties and land allotment; the Dawes Act of 1887 made allottees citizens. The U.S. Capitol Visitor Center puts the number still outside at about 125,000 of an estimated 300,000 American Indians in 1924. Two rulings had blocked a general rule: a Senate Judiciary committee decision in 1870 and the Supreme Court’s Elk v. Wilkins in 1884, both holding that tribal members born in the country were not citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment, because tribes were treated as separate sovereignties. Thousands of Native men had served in the First World War, and that service was one of the arguments used for the act.

The law did not settle everything. The right to vote was left to the states; the Library of Congress notes that some states barred Native Americans from voting until 1957, while other reference works put the last barriers in the 1960s. And the act was not wanted by everyone it covered. The Onondaga Nation objected that citizenship was being imposed on Indians without their consent, in breach of treaties that recognised the Iroquois as separate and sovereign, and called acceptance of it treason.

Two citizenships were meant to sit together. The proviso in the act states that granting citizenship must not “in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.”

Sources

• National Archives, “Indian Citizenship Act of 1924” (the enrolled act)
• U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, “An Act to Authorize the Secretary of the Interior to issue certificates of citizenship to Indians, June 2, 1924”
• Library of Congress, “Today in History — June 2”
• Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, “Looking Back on the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act”, 2024

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