Studies in American Political Development, 18 (Spring 2004), 30 – 43.
Challenging American
Boundaries: Indigenous People
and the “Gift” of U.S. Citizenship
Kevin Bruyneel, Babson College
INTRODUCTION
On June 2, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed
into law the Indian Citizenship Act (ICA), which uni-
laterally made United States citizens of all indigenous
people living in the United States. This new law made
citizens of approximately 125,000 of the 300,000 in-
digenous people in the country (the remainder were
already U.S. citizens).1 Usually, people who have been
excluded from American political life see the codi-
fication of their citizenship status as an unambigu-
ously positive political development. In the case of
indigenous people and U.S. citizenship, however,
one cannot find such clear and certain statements. All
indigenous people certainly did not look at U.S. citi-
zenship in the same light; in fact, very few saw it as un-
ambiguously positive. This study demonstrates that
the indigenous people who engaged the debate over
U.S. citizenship came to define themselves, in various
A previous version of this essay was presented at the 2002 meeting
of the American Political Science Conference in Boston, MA. I
thank my colleague Priscilla Yamin for her work in organizing the
panel, and Victoria Hattam and Ruth O’Brien for their construc-
tive suggestions and encouraging words regarding the paper. I am
also, and always, indebted to the advice and close reading of Ms.
Yamin, Joe Lowndes, Edmund Fong, Ron Krabill, Catherine Cele-
brezze, Marjorie Feld, Michael Fein, and Pagan Kennedy. The
comments of three anonymous SAPD reviewers were extremely
helpful in pointing to sections of the paper that required more
clarity and components of the argument that deserved a finer
edge, especially with regard to the relevance of the study of in-
digenous people’s politics to American politics in general. Finally,
I am ever grateful to the Board of Research of Babson College for
providing funds to support my work and to the staff of Babson Col-
lege’s Horn Library for their consistent and excellent research as-
sistance.
1. The two main ways that indigenous people could become
U.S. citizens prior to the 1924 act were the following: (1) through
the allotment process beginning in 1887, by which indigenous peo-
ple could gain citizenship by becoming American private proper-
ty holders; and (2) by a 1919 act that offered citizenship to
indigenous veterans of World War I. Both avenues will be discussed
below.
30
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ways, as “ambivalent Americans,” neither fully inside
nor fully outside the political, legal, and cultural
boundaries of the United States. This effort to define
a form of ambivalent American-ness reflects a signifi-
cant tradition in indigenous politics, which involves
indigenous political actors working back and forth
across the boundaries of American political life to se-
cure rights, resources, and/or sovereignty for the in-
digenous people they represent.
In this article, I begin with a brief look into the
meaning and context of the ICA itself, and then turn
to its direct concern, which is how indigenous people
of this era viewed the prospect of becoming and be-
ing U.S. citizens. In this regard, I have found that two
distinct and direct indigenous responses to the
prospect of U.S. citizenship prevailed at this time: (1)
support for it as a just measure to secure the long-
standing political identity of indigenous people in
America; and (2) outright rejection of it in the name
of tribal sovereignty and citizenship. These two
stances offer a way to look into the complex question
of the unique status and location of indigenous po-
litical identity in the North American context. I de-
fine political identity as that which binds a group
together through its collective vision of how to gen-
erate, sustain, or expand the group’s capacity to de-
termine its future.2 Evidence of the unique status of
2. For approaches to political identity that have helped shape
how I view this matter, see “Conference Panel: On Political Identi-
ty,” Studies in American Political Development 6 (1992): 140–62. The
three main participants were Mary Ryan, Anne Norton, and
George Shulman. For Ryan, political identities “are more than just
symbolically charged loyalties. . . . They are vehicles for making
very major claims on the public realm” (145). Norton sees “politi-
cal identities as constituted by and constitutive of relations of op-
positions” (147). Finally, Shulman offers that,
politics is cultural because it involves collective iden-
tities, which people build and enact through nar-
ratives that identify the circumstances, interests, dif-
ficulties, and differences that confront and divide
© 2004 Cambridge University Press ISSN 0898–588X/04 $12.00
 CHALLENGING AMERICAN BOUNDARIES: INDIGENOUS PEOPLE AND THE “GIFT” OF U.S. CITIZENSHIP
indigenous people is further reflected in the very lan-
guage of the ICA, which was composed by American
reformers and legislators. However, this ambivalence
does not simply and solely reflect on the political
identity and location of indigenous people, as it also
reveals the impossibility of the American state as a to-
talizing and contouring force upon the political iden-
tities within its purported midst. When indigenous
political expression implicitly and explicitly resist the
definitions imposed by the American state, the ca-
pacity of the United States to govern and define the
relationship between people and space within its de-
clared purview appears to slip.
No single indigenous viewpoint of the early twen-
tieth century better and more consistently personi-
fies the impossibility and slippage of the American
nation-state than that of Tuscarora Chief Clinton
Rickard, who articulated an indigenous political
identity that explicitly stood for defying and crossing
the borders of settler nation-states like the United
States and Canada. While Rickard stands as the best
historical representative of the “reject U.S. citizen-
ship” position, I argue that his perspective also de-
fines the general politics of ambivalent Americans.
This politics, in the dying words of Chief Rickard’s
friend, Cayuga Chief Deskaheh, seeks to “‘fight for
the line,’ meaning the border.”3 The notion of “fight-
ing for the line” signifies the claims and efforts of
those U.S.-based indigenous political actors – be they
reformers or radicals – who assert that indigenous
political identity cannot be fully defined or contained
by the borders of the United States. The political bor-
ders challenged here include those that demarcate
the inside from the outside of the American nation
and state in cultural, historical and geographical
terms. In the views of political actors representing in-
digenous and U.S. interests, such borders are rarely
deemed static or singular; rather, they serve as the
vortex of conflicts over who is and can be a citizen,
and what such citizenship means legally, culturally,
and politically. American political debates and gov-
ernmental policies in the 1920s clearly sought to ad-
dress these very issues, not only in the ICA but also in
the Johnson Act of 1924, which restricted immigra-
tion to the United States, and in so doing raised the
ire of indigenous people such as Chief Rickard. Pri-
or to assessing the different indigenous political
views of this period, I will first look at the Indian Cit-
izenship Act and the political context from which it
emerged.
them, by defining the history, commitments and in-
stitutions that do or should bind them. (153)
3. In his autobiography, Rickard asserts that “fight for the line”
were “the last words Chief Deskaheh had said to me before he died”
(Clinton Rickard, Fighting Tuscarora: The Autobiography of Chief Clin-
ton Rickard, ed. Barbara Graymont. [Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Uni-
versity Press, 1973], 68).
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31
THE INDIAN CITIZENSHIP ACT OF 1924
The Indian Citizenship Act states:
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: Provided, That the granting of
such citizenship shall not in any manner im-
pair or otherwise affect that right of any Indi-
an to tribal or other property.4
It is important to note that the Indian Citizenship Act
conferred U.S. citizenship on indigenous people uni-
laterally. Specifically, this unilateral action meant that,
unlike earlier federal laws such as the 1919 act that of-
fered citizenship to indigenous World War I veterans,
indigenous people did not have to apply for citizen-
ship after the 1924 law.5 More importantly, by first
conferring U.S. citizenship upon indigenous people
en masse and then, in the next sentence, securing in-
digenous rights to tribal property, the Indian Citi-
zenship Act codified what amounted to a form of dual
citizenship for indigenous people who maintained
enrollment – thus citizenship – in a tribe. This is so
because tribal property is held communally by tribes,
not individually as forms of alienable private proper-
ty; therefore, for individual indigenous people to
have any right to tribal property, they had to be citi-
zens of the tribe. In stating that U.S. citizenship does
not “affect [the] right of any Indian to tribal or oth-
er property,” the ICA necessarily secures indigenous
claims to tribal citizenship in the very same act that
confers U.S. citizenship.
Within the very language of this American federal
law, then, we have already located the presence of
“border-crossing” as a vibrant and integral compo-
nent of indigenous/U.S. political relations. This is so,
most particularly, with regards to the dual citizenship
implication of the ICA, which confirmed that indige-
4. “Indian Citizenship Act,” June 2, 1924, United States Statutes
at Large, 43:253.
5. “Citizenship for World War I Veterans,” Nov. 6, 1919. U.S.
Statutes at Large, 41:350. This Act states:
That every American Indian who served in the Mili-
tary or Naval Establishments of the United States
during the war against the Imperial German Gov-
ernment, and who has received or who shall here-
after receive an honorable discharge, if not now a
citizen and if he so desires, shall . . . be granted full cit-
izenship with all the privileges thereto . . . (emphasis
added)
The 1919 act points to an issue not central to this paper,
though still interesting in itself, which is the question of whether
World War I played a causal role in the formation and passage of
the ICA. In dominant political histories of U.S.-indigenous rela-
tions it is often presumed that the ICA was formed and passed as a
reward to indigenous people for their patriotic involvement in and
support for the war effort. The very existence of the 1919 Act
demonstrates that this “reward” of citizenship had already been of-
fered, but not unilaterally conferred, five years before the passage
of the ICA. Thus, there is no direct causal relationship between the
participation of indigenous people in World War I and the passage
of the ICA in 1924.
 32 KEVIN BRUYNEEL
nous people could be legally recognized citizens of
two polities. Following the logic of the ICA, tribal cit-
izenship cannot be contained within American polit-
ical space and identity. While dual citizenship was
implicitly codified through the phrasing of the ICA,
it was not the explicit objective of those most respon-
sible for its passage.
As it was passed through the House and Senate
Committees on Indian Affairs in the Sixty-Eighth
Congress, the Indian Citizenship Bill developed its
precise language as a consequence of being shaped
by two political groups: Progressive legislators and
white American activists. In the 1920s, the Progressive
movement and political party were in decline, but in-
dividual Progressive legislators still maintained some
power, particularly through their roles on congres-
sional committees.6 Three Progressive Senators were
members of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee,7
and “the majority of Senators who worked for reform
of Indian policy in the 1920s were Progressives.”8
With regard to their work on the ICA, Gary Stein ar-
gues that the “Progressives forged an act to strike a
blow at big bureaucracy the way earlier Progressive
legislation had struck at big business.”9 The unilater-
al conferral of U.S. citizenship was supposed to reduce
the corruption and inefficiency of the Department of
Interior and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) by remov-
ing citizenship regulations from these institutions’
purview and empowering indigenous people through
citizenship. For these legislators, as Stein rightly claims,
the ICA was not “a piece of social legislation; instead,
it was regulatory in nature.”10 The claim that Progres-
sive legislators were motivated by regulatory rather
than social concerns matters, because it points to the
fact that the direct concerns and demands of indige-
nous people were not the forces compelling Progres-
sives to act on this matter.
In contrast to the Progressives’ focus on regulatory
matters, a number of white American citizens calling
themselves the “Friends of the Indian” worked to ad-
dress the concerns and conditions of indigenous peo-
ple for many decades prior to the ICA.11 Since the
6. For the active and influential role of individual Progressive
legislators, despite the fact that the Progressive movement and po-
litical party as a whole were in distinct decline, see Arthur Link,
“What Happened to the Progressive Movement in the 1920s?,” The
American Historical Review 64 (1959): 833 – 51.
7. The three were Burton K. Wheeler (Montana), Bob La Fol-
lette, Jr. (Wisconsin), and Lynn Frazier (North Dakota).
8. Margaret Garretson Szasz, “Indian Reform in the Decade of
Prosperity,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 20 (1970): 24.
9. Gary C. Stein, “The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924,” New
Mexico Historical Review 47 (1972): 266.
10. Ibid., 267.
11. As Alexandra Harmon puts it,
The Friends of the Indian were several hundred peo-
ple who, through a network of local and national
organizations, mobilized to influence public opin-
ion and to change policy by grass roots organizing,
lobbying, public speaking, and writing. Their most
powerful group was the Indian Rights Association.
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late nineteenth century, such organizations as the In-
dian Rights Association sought to promote the assim-
ilation of indigenous people into American society, in
particular through ‘elevating’ indigenous people to
U.S. citizen. During an 1892 speech in Boston to the
Society for Promoting Good Citizenship, Herbert
Welsh, Secretary of the Indian Rights Association,
asked: “How shall the Indian be made a citizen?”12
During these years, the answer to this question ran
mostly along the lines articulated by another “friend”
of the Indian, Merrill E. Gates, in 1896: “The dead-
ening sway of tribal custom must be interfered with.
The sad uniformity of savage tribal life must be bro-
ken up! Individuality must be cultivated.”13 This was
to be done through policies such as the General Al-
lotment (Dawes) Act of 1887, legislating the allot-
ment of tribal land to individual citizens of the tribe,
to be held in trust by the U.S. government.14 After the
“allottee” had established “competency” as a private
property holder and member of American society,
“the trust period” would end and “the land became
taxable and the allottee became a citizen.”15 This was
to be the path to full and unqualified U.S. citizenship
for indigenous individuals; however, by the early
twentieth century, both the Friends of the Indian and
government officials came to believe that a more am-
bivalent form of American citizenship was a better
goal.
There were two main views compelling a drift away
from full citizenship: (1) indigenous people were not
“civilizing” rapidly enough to be competent full citi-
zens, and (2) nonindigenous Americans were taking
advantage of indigenous people and the allotment
process to get easy and cheap title over tribal land.
These conclusions led Americans reformers to advo-
cate increased federal guardianship: the “idea that
the government had an obligation to supervise and
protect native citizens.”16 Although U.S. guardian-
ship did not mean the end of the exploitation of in-
digenous people, it signaled that Americans held a
more complex view of citizenship for indigenous peo-
(Alexandra Harmon, “When is an Indian not an In-
dian? The “Friends of the Indian” and the Problem
of Indian Identity,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 18 (1990):
96.
12. Herbert Welsh, “How to Bring the Indian to Citizenship,
and Citizenship to the Indian: A Speech before the Society for Pro-
moting Good Citizenship as printed by the Boston Commonwealth,
April 9, 1892,” Indian Rights Associations Publications, 1st ser., 4
(1892): 2
13. Merrill E. Gates, “Addresses at the Lake Mohonk Confer-
ences,” in Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends
of the Indian” 1880 –1900, ed. Frances Paul Prucha (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 340.
14. U.S. Statutes at Large, 24:388 – 91.
15. Arlene Hirschfelder and Martha Kreipe de Montano, The
Native American Almanac (New York: Prentice Hall, 1993), 21.
16. Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to As-
similate the Indians, 1880 –1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2001), 213.
 CHALLENGING AMERICAN BOUNDARIES: INDIGENOUS PEOPLE AND THE “GIFT” OF U.S. CITIZENSHIP
ple.17 As historian Frederick Hoxie put it, “skepticism
concerning the Indians’ ability to adapt to American
society had produced a new category of partial citi-
zenship.”18 The idea that federal guardianship was a
necessary component of citizenship was promoted by
the Indian Rights Association, which pushed for the
ICA clause regarding “tribal rights and property.” In
its annual report, the Indian Rights Association point-
ed out that the Supreme Court had decided that
“guardianship was not incompatible with citizen-
ship.”19 In this sense, the ICA codified the status of in-
digenous people in the U.S. context as both citizens
and wards.
Not long after passage of the ICA, an editorialist
from the magazine The Survey referred to such a citi-
zen-ward status as “baffling” and “anomalous.”20 This
response is understandable, as the ICA created and
confirmed a form of U.S. citizenship for indigenous
people that neither denied their citizenship in tribes
nor fully incorporated them into the American poli-
ty.21 It affirmed dual citizenship status as well as a cit-
izen-ward status. Taken alone or together, the dual
citizenship and citizen-ward interpretations of the
ICA show that, from the U.S. perspective, indigenous
people were ambivalent Americans, neither fully in-
side nor fully outside the American polity. All this
begs the obvious question of what indigenous people
thought of U.S. citizenship. As noted, I find two such
views in evidence, which I rephrase as: We Are the First
American Citizens and Our Citizenship Is in Our Own Na-
tions.
WE ARE THE FIRST AMERICAN CITIZENS
In 1915, Seneca Arthur C. Parker, an anthropologist,
asked some pointed questions regarding the status of
indigenous people in the U.S. context: “Who is the In-
dian? What is he in the eyes of the law? The legal sta-
tus of the Indian has never been defined. He is not an
alien, he is not a foreigner, he is not a citizen.”22 He
posed these questions in an editorial for the Quarter-
ly Journal, the periodical produced by the Society of
American Indians (SAI), which was an organization
17. The era of allotment (1887–1934) was disastrous for trib-
al land-holdings. During that period, “the national Indian land es-
tate was reduced from 138 million acres in 1887 to 52 million acres
in 1934” (Frank Pommersheim, Braid of Feathers: American Indian
Law and Contemporary Tribal Life [Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995], 20.
18. Hoxie, Final Promise, 230.
19. “Forty-Second Annual Report of the Board of Directors of
the Indian Rights Association,” Dec. 15, 1924 (Philadelphia: Indi-
an Rights Association, 1924), 29.
20. John R. Brown, “Citizens – and Wards Too,” The Survey, 15
Apr. 1925, 95.
21. When referring to the American polity, I mean the dis-
courses, institutions, society, and territory of the United States.
22. Arthur C. Parker. “Certain Important Elements of the In-
dian Problem,” Quarterly Journal 3 (1915). Reprinted in Frederick
E. Hoxie, ed., Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices from the Pro-
gressive Era. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2001), 100.
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33
that Parker and a “small group” of other indigenous
people, predominantly men, formed in 1911. The
SAI sought reforms in U.S. policy that would help to
address and resolve questions such as those posed by
Parker about the status of indigenous people in the
American political system. The men and women who
composed the SAI were professionals, educated in
American colleges, and “for the most part lived their
lives in a non-Indian world.” The overall goal of their
organization was “integration into the larger society
accompanied by the preservation of a more or less ab-
stract native identity and pride.” The SAI had in mind
“specifically an Indian identity they wished to pre-
serve.”23 Although the SAI and their sympathizers
represent the most notable pro-U.S. citizenship and
prointegration indigenous viewpoint of this era, their
notion of the ideal relationship between indigenous
and American political identity did not involve the
simple assimilation or cultural elevation of the for-
mer into the latter. Rather, the more active indige-
nous voices representing this viewpoint advocated a
form of political integration into the U.S. polity that
subtly and carefully challenged the boundaries of
American citizenship.
One of these voices was that of Charles Eastman, a
Santee Sioux and founding member of the SAI, who,
in the early twentieth century, “had been considered
by many early reformers to be a testament to accul-
turation.”24 Eastman, a Boston College graduate who
joined the BIA as an agency physician, did seek to
integrate into American society. However, he also ob-
served up close the troubling treatment of indige-
nous people by the U.S. government. Most notably,
Eastman was the first doctor to reach the field at
Wounded Knee after the 1890 Ghost Dance massacre
of some 300 Sioux by the U.S. military.25 Experiences
such as this led Eastman to adopt a very strong stance
in favor of incorporating indigenous people into
American society, which would include the eventual
elimination of the BIA and the gradual preparation
of indigenous people for U.S. citizenship.
In a 1915 article in Lippencott’s, “The Indian as Cit-
izen,” Eastman observed that the forces of civilization
seem to be winning over – or wearing down – in-
digenous people: “after due protest and resistance,
[the American Indian] has accepted the situation;
and having accepted it, he is found to be easily gov-
erned by civilized law and usages.”26 Eastman goes on
to applaud the “citizen Indian” who “learns and mas-
ters . . . the politics of his county and state,” and cites
with approval “a scheme of progressive advance to-
23. Stephen Cornell, The Return of the Native, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1988), 116.
24. Frederick E. Hoxie, ed., Encyclopedia of North American In-
dians (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996), 176.
25. For more on the Ghost Dance massacre, including a bibli-
ography, see Hoxie, ed., Encyclopedia, 694 – 97.
26. Charles A. Eastman, “The Indian as a citizen,” Lippincott’s,
95 (1915): 70.
 34 KEVIN BRUYNEEL
ward full citizenship . . . 1. Tribal ward; 2. Alloted
ward; 3. Citizen ward; 4. Full Citizen.” While he
strongly advocated the benefits of citizenship, East-
man did not believe that American society should
seek to eliminate indigenous culture or force tribes
and their citizens to be citizens against their will:
we think each race should be allowed to retain
its own religion and racial codes as far as is
compatible with the public good, and should
enter the body politic of its own free will, and
not under compulsion. This has not been the
case with the native American. Everything he
stood for was labeled “heathen,” “savage,” and
the devil’s own; and he was forced to accept
modern civilization in toto against his original
views and wishes.27
Eastman here is mapping out a complicated relation-
ship between, on the one hand, an indigenous polit-
ical identity that is being transformed – in his terms,
“civilized” – through contact with American political
culture and, on the other hand, the need to preserve
and defend the autonomy of indigenous people as
they gradually integrate into the American polity, ul-
timately as full citizens. He did not want this mapping
to be seamless.
While Eastman did want indigenous people to be-
come legal U.S. citizens, he neither wanted them
forced into this status nor compelled to accept and
perform the prevailing American political culture “in
toto against [their] original views and wishes.” Thus,
the border-crossing is along cultural lines, with “na-
tive American” cultural influences – what I take him
to mean when he refers to “religious and racial codes”
– maintaining some distance from the “modern civi-
lization” of American political culture. This was not
an overtly radical position to take, as is evident in the
fact that he qualified his argument for a form of cul-
tural pluralism by stating that it should only extend
“as far as is compatible with the public good.” East-
man was focused on cultural issues rather than ex-
pressly material or political concerns. This emphasis
on cultural over material concerns was again evident
four years later in a commentary he wrote for the
SAI’s newly renamed American Indian Magazine,
where Eastman concluded his “Indian’s plea for free-
dom” by stating: “We do not ask for territorial grant
or separate government. We ask only to enjoy with Eu-
rope’s sons the full privileges of American citizen-
ship.”28 Although they might not present a direct
challenge to the presence and legitimacy of the
American nation and state, Eastman’s views do indi-
cate that even those indigenous voices arguing pas-
sionately for U.S. citizenship did call forth and
challenge the cultural basis upon which meaningful,
and perennially exclusive, participation in the Amer-
27. Ibid., 73.
28. Charles Eastman, “The Indian’s Plea for Freedom,” Amer-
ican Indian Magazine 6, (1919): 165.
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ican polity has been built.29 To develop a more thor-
ough sense of what this cultural challenge entails, I
turn to another founding member of the SAI, whose
words cut a slightly sharper challenge than Eastman.
Yavapai Carlos Montezuma was one of the most po-
litically outspoken indigenous people of the Progres-
sive Era. He held such strong views, in fact, that he
often found himself at odds with his own colleagues
in the SAI – and eventually broke from the organiza-
tion and began to publish his own newsletter, Wassa-
ja – because he felt they were not seriously committed
to one of his primary political objectives, the abolish-
ment of the BIA. In this sense, Montezuma was cer-
tainly more radical than Eastman. In a manner that
might have earned him honorary membership in the
Progressive Party, Montezuma saw the BIA as the crit-
ical roadblock “keep[ing] us from our rights.” He
made this statement in 1917 in Wassaja, in the course
of writing a scathing critique of the American policy
of drafting indigenous men to fight for the United
States in World War I, despite the fact that many of
these men were not U.S. citizens. To Montezuma, the
fault for this life-threatening injustice was the BIA’s,
which “tells the country that we are competent to be
soldiers, but are not competent to be citizens.”30
While he was a more direct critic of U.S. government
institutions than his SAI colleagues, Montezuma saw
the importance of American citizenship for indige-
nous people.
Montezuma’s solution to the problem of nonciti-
zen indigenous men being drafted into military ser-
vice was not to demand that they be exempted from
the draft. Rather, he used this moment as the means
for making an even louder case for the full, legal
recognition of indigenous citizenship in America. I
use the term recognition intentionally, as Montezuma
argued that the draft further revealed that indige-
nous people have been active and competent citizens
for centuries:
We Indians are ready to defend the country of
our forefathers as we have been doing these
five hundred years against all odds, but what
are we now? We are nothing but wards; we are
not citizens and we are without a country in
this wide world.
29. Although it is not my focus here, after the passage of the
ICA, there was still a decades-long political battle to be fought by
some indigenous people and their supporters to gain the enforce-
ment of indigenous people’s civil rights in many states, a struggle
that continued well into the 1970s. For more on the effort to en-
franchise indigenous people across the United States, see Linda
Parker, “The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924,” in Between Two Worlds:
The Survival of Twentieth Century Indians, ed. Arrell Morgan Gibson
(Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Historical Society, 1984), 44–71; and
Helen Peterson. “American Indian Political Participation,” The An-
nals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 311 (1957):
116 –26, esp. 121–22.
30. Carlos Montezuma. “Drafting Indians and Justice,” Wassa-
ja 2, (1917). Reprinted in Hoxie, ed., Talking Back to Civilization, 126.
 CHALLENGING AMERICAN BOUNDARIES: INDIGENOUS PEOPLE AND THE “GIFT” OF U.S. CITIZENSHIP
To his question “what are we now?” Montezuma an-
swers that the indigenous person is “THE FIRST
AMERICAN CITIZEN. Why not? He was here before
Columbus, he was here before Washington, he was
here before Lincoln.” In this sense, citizenship is not
something that must be conferred or granted but
rather is a “just title” that must be “bestow[ed]” before
any demands, such as military service, can be made
upon indigenous people by the U.S. government.
This “bestowal” is the just way to treat indigenous peo-
ple, who he calls the “true Americans.”31 Montezu-
ma’s argument, then, points to another form of
border-crossing critical to the full expression of in-
digenous political identity in the U.S. context. This is
the crossing of the historical border that helps define
and narrate the American nation’s political identity.
Writing in the late nineteenth century, French po-
litical theorist Ernest Renan argued that “forgetting,
I would go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial
factor in the creation of a nation.”32 Specifically, Re-
nan meant the forgetting of the constitutive violence
critical to the founding of a nation as a specific and
often located political identity. Indeed, Montezuma
marked such moments by referring to the time “be-
fore Columbus” – and thus the violence of European
conquest – and “before Washington” – and thus the
violence of the American founding. However, while
he certainly would not want Americans to forget the
violence that helped constitute their nation, Mon-
tezuma’s concern seems to focus more on the forms
of forgetting with regard to what contemporary post-
colonial theorist Homi Bhabha calls “the nation’s
narrative.”33 By asserting that indigenous people are
not only the true Americans but also the first Ameri-
can citizens, Montezuma seeks to challenge the narra-
tive of political identity in and of America.
When he states that indigenous men are willing to
fight under the U.S. flag in World War I to “defend
the country of our forefathers” as they have done for
“five hundred years,” Montezuma writes a narrative of
indigenous political identity as a form of American cit-
izenship that goes back, at least, half a millennium
and continues on actively to the present. In this way,
he traces out an indigenous-American political identi-
ty that crosses the historical boundaries of a U.S.-
American political identity. Montezuma does this by
revealing what Homi Bhabha calls a tension between
“the people as an a priori historical presence, a ped-
agogical object, and the people constructed in the
performance of narrative, its enunciatory ‘present’
marked in the repetition and pulsation of the na-
tional sign.”34 This means that indigenous people as
31. Hoxie, ed., Talking Back to Civilization, 126 –27.
32. Ernest Renan. “What is a Nation?” in Nation and Narration,
ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1991), 11.
33. Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the
Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Bhabha, ed., Nation and Nar-
ration, 310.
34. Ibid., 298 – 99.
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35
first American citizens are not nor do they seek to be part
of the presumed presence of U.S.-American identity
in this land; an object that is taught, say, in U.S. his-
tory classes. Although indigenous-American political
history crosses the boundaries of U.S.-American po-
litical history – neither fully inside nor outside – “first
American citizens” still wanted be part of the con-
temporary performance of the American “national
sign.” According to Montezuma’s argument, these
same indigenous people are and want to continue to
perform their role in the present narrative of Ameri-
can political identity and citizenship – most notably
by fighting in the war – as long as this citizenship is
duly and legally recognized.
In the course of his passionate arguments, Mon-
tezuma, like Eastman, did not present a direct chal-
lenge to the U.S. nation and state – other than
demanding the abolishment of the BIA. Rather, both
men drew upon the ambivalent status of indigenous
political identity in the U.S. context to say that par-
ticipation of indigenous citizens among the people
constructed in the performance of the narrative of
American political identity could not involve simple
assimilation or integration to preexisting and unwa-
vering cultural or historical boundaries. The ambiva-
lence here is the performance of two culturally and
historically overlapping forms of American political
identity, constructed through indigenous- and U.S.-
centered narratives, that will never seamlessly map
onto one another. Reading the claims of Eastman and
Montezuma as articulations of the ambivalent Amer-
ican political identity of indigenous people captures
the manner in which these men sought to argue si-
multaneously for U.S. citizenship and for the persis-
tence of a culturally distinct indigenous identity. This
form of political argument in favor of U.S. citizenship
for indigenous people prevailed beyond the war and
through the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act.
Right after World War I, Yankton Sioux Zitkala Sa
(a.k.a. Gertrude Bonin), secretary of the SAI and the
editor of American Indian Magazine, echoed the am-
bivalent American theme in an editorial addressing
what indigenous people want in return for their par-
ticipation in and support of the U.S. war effort: “The
Red man asks for a simple thing – citizenship in the
land that was once his own – America. . . . There nev-
er was a time more opportune than now for America
to enfranchise the Red man!”35 The two forms of
America here, the one to which indigenous people
claim a long historical and cultural relationship and
the one to which they presently seek political access,
are, respectively, the pedagogical historical object
and the performative enunicatory present noted ear-
lier. The rhetorical strategy here involves proclaiming
that the very American narrative that makes indige-
nous people distinct, the one that articulates a deep-
35. Gertrude Bonin, “Editorial Comment,” American Indian
Magazine, 6 (1919): 162.
 36 KEVIN BRUYNEEL
er historical and cultural relationship to this land
than can be claimed by those included in the U.S. set-
tler-state project, is the basis upon which indigenous
people seek political access and legal inclusion into
the dominant American polity. This form of political
argument prevailed not only in the years leading
up to the passage of the ICA, but also in subsequent
years as indigenous political actors and organizations
sought to compel the federal government to secure
for indigenous people the rights and privileges of cit-
izenship promised in the 1924 act.
To this end, Zitkala Sa and her husband, Yankton
Sioux Raymond Bonin, formed the National Council
of American Indians (NCAI) in 1926, a “pan-Indian
group” with local chapters “on numerous reserva-
tions.”36 As president of the NCAI, Sa took the case
to the federal government for the enforcement of in-
digenous people’s newly codified citizenship rights.37
In 1926, the NCAI petitioned the U.S. Congress with
a statement that included the following:
The council has but one purpose, the organi-
zation of a constructive effort to better the Red
Race and make its members better citizens of
the United States. These objects it cannot at-
tain unless the Indians are accorded the rights
essential to racial self-respect and a spirit of loy-
alty to the United States.38
I take the pairing of the notions of “racial self-respect”
and “loyalty to the United States” as further evidence
of the efforts of mainstream indigenous political ac-
tors to continue to argue for a form of meaningful
U.S. citizenship that does not remove from indige-
nous people their distinctive cultural, and by extension,
political identity. That this argument was articulated
after the passage of the ICA, and thus after legal sta-
tus was secured, indicates that this rhetorical strategy
is aimed at carefully defining and manifesting a form
of substantive political participation for indigenous
people in the United States that does not require sur-
rendering a substantial foothold within indigenous
communities. Frederick Hoxie has referred to this as
the effort to define a “middle position between [the]
two extremes” of, on the one hand, abandoning trib-
al communities for the sake of the “trappings of
36. Hoxie, ed. Encyclopedia, 709.
37. It should be noted that National Council of American In-
dians is not the same organization as the National Congress of Amer-
ican Indians. The latter organization was founded in 1944 and is to
this day still very active as an advocate for indigenous concerns
within U.S. political institutions. The earlier NCAI diminished as
an active political force in the 1930s. Still, the pan-Indian scope and
more integrationist political direction of both groups are very sim-
ilar. The presence of the original organization likely influenced the
shape, composition, and outlook of its successor.
38. “Petition of the National Council of American Indians to
the Senate,” printed in the Congressional Record, Apr. 24, 1926, at
the request of the Hon. Thomas F. Bayard. Reprinted in Jennings
C. Wise, The Red Man in the New World Drama: A Politico-Legal Study
with a Pageantry of American Indian History (Washington, DC: W.F.
Roberts Co., 1931), 571.
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American civilization” and, on the other hand, com-
pletely embracing tribal communities without regard
to the reality of modern political development in
North America.39
It is indicative of indigenous politics generally that
the indigenous political actors of the SAI and the
NCAI, who were rather acculturated to and support-
ive of Euro-American ways, sought to find a way to de-
fine a form of political status that involved being an
active part of, but not fully contained within, the dom-
inant American polity. They did this for the sake of
preserving and supporting the cultural autonomy of
indigenous communities, an effort that conveys its
own type of challenge to the United States. The chal-
lenge is that in crossing boundaries the political
claims and narratives of indigenous people reveal, in
this case, the cultural and historical limits to the pow-
er and purview of U.S. nation and state. As men-
tioned, this is not a direct challenge. Still, the ability
to cross such boundaries in the face of centuries of
overwhelming efforts by the U.S. nation and state to
oppress and eliminate indigenous tribes – as human
beings, collectivities, and cultures – likely con-
tributed to the survival of many tribes to this day. As
such, these cultural and historical forms of border-
crossing must be given their due. Furthermore, the
passage of the ICA, as well as the Johnson Act in 1924,
prompted the development of a form of indigenous
politics that placed border-crossing – of the most di-
rect kind – at the center of a political challenge to the
American nation and state.
OUR CITIZENSHIP IS IN OUR OWN NATIONS
In July 1924, a little over a month after the passage of
the Indian Citizenship Act, the Chippewa Indians of
Minnesota held their annual general council meeting
at Cass Lake, Minnesota. In his opening address to a
council composed of more than seventy delegates
representing ten reservations, Benjamin Caswell,
President of the Chippewa Indians, Incorporated,
stated:
A law has been passed making the Indians full
citizens of the United States and of the States
wherein they reside and it will not be for very
much longer that we will gather together in
this fashion. Therefore the time has come for
the Chippewa Indians “to make hay while the
sun shines.”40
This telling statement represents how some indige-
nous political leaders foresaw the impact that the ICA
could have on their tribal communities and political
39. Hoxie, ed., “Introduction,” in Final Promise, 4.
40. Chippewa Indians of Minnesota, Inc., “Minutes of Annual
Meeting Held at Cass Lake, Minnesota,” July 8 –10, 1924, 1–2, in
Council Meetings of the Major American Indian Tribes, 1907–1971.
(Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1981–1984),
reel 14, at 694.
 CHALLENGING AMERICAN BOUNDARIES: INDIGENOUS PEOPLE AND THE “GIFT” OF U.S. CITIZENSHIP
claims. As discussed earlier, the precise legal lan-
guage of the ICA promised to grant U.S. citizenship
without threatening tribal property rights. Still, this
legal assurance, which Caswell likely knew, did not
dissuade him from seeing the conferral of U.S. citi-
zenship as a significant step on the path toward the
dissolution of indigenous communities as meaning-
ful political entities in the U.S. context.41 Thus, when
he spoke of the Chippewa not “gathering together in
this fashion,” Caswell did not mean gatherings of a
cultural or social sort. Rather, he is referring to ex-
pressly political meetings, where delegates from the
various reservations looked to form collective Chip-
pewa policy and claims to present to the U.S. federal
government. The persistent focus of indigenous
claims, of course, is the sovereignty that tribes seek
over their territory, culture, and socioeconomic lives.
Thus, while he still saw the “sun shining” for the
Chippewa’s political efforts, Caswell worried that the
ICA forecast that the sun would soon set on sover-
eignty for those tribes that did not consolidate their
status.
While some tribes, like the Chippewa, sought to ad-
just to a citizenship status they believed a fait accom-
pli, and still other tribes mostly ignored the ICA
because their people were already U.S. citizens and
they had more pressing concerns, likely the most vocal
indigenous voices on this matter were those that ques-
tioned and challenged what they saw to be the imposi-
tion of U.S. citizenship.42 This more radical viewpoint
was evident in July 1924, when the Los Angeles Examin-
41. The most obvious way indigenous leaders would have
learned about the precise terms of the ICA would have been by
reading it on their own. However, if there was some barrier or hin-
drance, the tribes were not only in communication with BIA and
other government officials about new legislation, especially during
these annual council meetings, but they were also hearing from
nongovernmental organizations such as the Indian Rights Associ-
ation about the implication of new U.S. Indian policy. As such, it is
highly unlikely that Caswell would not have known about the trib-
al rights provision in the ICA.
42. Among the tribes that paid little attention to the passage
of the ICA were those whose people had been declared U.S. citi-
zens prior to 1924. Most notable in this regard during the Pro-
gressive Era were the various Pueblo tribes of the southwestern
United States, whose people were conferred U.S. citizenship, with-
out their consent, as a consequence of the 1848 Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo. In the 1920s, the Pueblos were much more
concerned with Congressional legislation, in particular the Bur-
sum Bill of 1922, which allowed for the legal validation of land
rights of white squatters on Pueblo Territory. Thus, for reasons of
both preexistent citizenship and more pressing concerns, during
their 1924 all-council meeting, there is no mention of the ICA. See
“Meeting of All-Pueblo Council at Santo Domingo,” July 17, 1924,
1–43, in Council Meetings of the Major American Indian Tribes, reel 12,
at 27. For the citizenship status of the Pueblos, see Alexandra
Witkin, “To Silence a Drum: The Imposition of United States Citi-
zenship on Native Peoples,” Historical Reflections/Reflexions His-
toriques, 21 (1995): 368 –70. For Pueblo political activity during the
1920s, see Kenneth Philp, “Albert B. Fall and the Protest from the
Pueblos, 1921–1923,” Arizona and the West 12 (1970): 237– 54. For
an example of the support of white reformers for the Pueblo cause,
see John Collier, “Plundering the Pueblo Indians,” Sunset Magazine
50. (1923): 21–25, 56.
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37
er printed an article by Wyandotte Jane Zane Gordon,
in which she began by warning, “it is not a matter of
definite certainty that the Indian will accept the prof-
fered benevolence or burden – whichever it may be –
for the Indian must decide if ‘the Greeks have come
bearing gifts’.”43 Zane Gordon made it quite clear
that, in her view, U.S. citizenship was no “gift.”
Drawing on the discursive strategy noted above,
Zane Gordon marked out the historical boundary
crossed by the “Indian,” who “prior to . . . the govern-
ment of the white man . . . was here in undisturbed
proprietorship of the entire landed estate of Ameri-
ca, with his organized municipal governments, his so-
cial institutions, his well-defined property laws.” She
then critiqued the ICA’s violation of a basic political
principles: “No government organized . . . can incor-
porate into its citizenship anybody or bodies without
the[ir] formal consent.” The importance of the latter
point stems from a basic political fact: “The Indians
are organized in the form of ‘nations,’ and it has
treaties with [other] nations as such. Congress cannot
embrace them into the citizenship of the Union by a
simple act.” Thus, Zane Gordon sets out a legal, his-
torical and political argument against citizenship to
drive home the basic premise that “the diplomatic sta-
tus of the Indian is established” as a citizen of his or
her indigenous nation.44 Compare this claim to that
of indigenous political actors such as Carlos Mon-
tezuma, who argued that indigenous political identi-
ty could stand as a distinct “historical pedagogical
object” and also take part in performing the contem-
porary narrative of American political identity. Zane
Gordon, by contrast, asserts that indigenous political
identity is and should remain distinct, both as a ped-
agogical object and as performed in its “enunciatory
present.” This argument was not only directed at a
general American readership, but also toward in-
digenous people themselves.
Writing in a newspaper in a major American city to
a distinctly nonindigenous American audience, Zane
Gordon was seeking to make the case for the histori-
cal and legal distinctiveness of an indigenous politi-
cal identity that could not be consumed by the United
States through unilateral legislation. That said, twice
in the article she employs the phrase “if the Indian ac-
cepted citizenship.” The obvious implication here is
that Zane Gordon did not see the ICA as a unilateral
fait accompli by the U.S. federal government. In-
stead, she stated that, whether asked for their consent
or not, it is the political obligation of indigenous peo-
ple to make their own decision about whether they
will accept the “gift” of U.S. citizenship. Should they do
so, she warned that “both the men and women of the
tribes will prove the ready victim of political in-
43. Jane Zane Gordon, “Will Indians Give up Tribal indepen-
dence for Newly Offered American Citizenship?” Los Angeles Ex-
aminer, July 29, 1924, sec. 5, 3.
44. Ibid.
 38 KEVIN BRUYNEEL
trigue.”45 By turning the question of U.S. citizenship
around in this manner, Zane Gordon encouraged in-
digenous people to express and further constitute
their distinctly indigenous political identity in the act
of refusing U.S. citizenship.
During the 1920s, no group of indigenous people
more vocally and consistently refused U.S. citizenship
than did those tribes and citizens of the Iroquois
nations: the Mohawk, Seneca, Onondaga, Oneida,
Cayuga, and Tuscarora. A year before the passage of
the ICA, officials from the Department of the Interi-
or visited and sought out the views of the Iroquois –
or “New York Indians” – on various matters. In an an-
nual report submitted for a fiscal year of June 30,
1924, the following is conveyed:
During July and August of 1923, Commission-
er Moorhead made a survey of the conditions
among the Iroquoian Tribes of New York. . . .
At the time of his visits the question of citizen-
ship for Indians was a subject they were dis-
cussing. He found that the great majority were
opposed to the proposal to make all New York
Indians citizens of the United States at one
time. Since then, however, the enactment of
the Snyder Indian citizenship bill, June 2,
1924, has made all American Indians citizens
without affecting their tribal relations or prop-
erty.46
This offers clear evidence not only that the U.S. gov-
ernment was aware of the Iroquois’ view on U.S. citi-
zenship well before June 1924, but also that it deemed
the concerns of the Iroquois to be addressed and
their protestations quelled by amending the ICA to
include a clause concerning rights to tribal property.
However, the ambivalent American citizenship con-
ferred by the ICA was neither what the Iroquois de-
sired nor did it quiet them. A few weeks after the ICA’s
passage, the political leaders of the Iroquois nations
“promptly sent letters to the president and Congress
of the United States respectfully declining United
States citizenship, rejecting dual citizenship, and stat-
ing that the act was written and passed without their
knowledge or consent.”47 Tuscarora Chief Clinton
Rickard was the most prominent Iroquois leader to
mobilize resistance to the imposition of U.S. citizen-
ship and U.S. political boundaries on indigenous po-
litical identity.
Rickard was born in 1882, raised on the Tuscarora
Reservation in western New York, and, at the turn of
the century, “enlisted in the U.S. Army and fought for
45. Ibid.
46. U.S. Department of Interior, “Fifty-Fifth Annual Report of
the Board of Indian Commissioners to the Secretary of the Interi-
or for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1924” (Washington, DC: Gov-
ernment Printing Office, 1924), 20.
47. Laurence M. Hauptman. “American Indian Influences on
the America of the Founding Fathers,” in Exiled in the Land of the
Free, ed. John Mohawk et al. (Sante Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers,
1992), 324.
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the U.S. government.” His U.S. military service is in-
teresting not only in light of the World War I debate
regarding the drafting of indigenous people, but
even more so because it underscores the fact that,
while he retained strong “anti-assimilation, anti-citi-
zenship, and pro-tribal sovereignty” views throughout
his life, Rickard also “moved easily in the white world
and even became a leader and educator of whites.”48
As such, it is fair to say that Rickard did live across the
cultural boundaries of American society, neither fully
inside nor fully outside. While forms of border-cross-
ing of a cultural and historical nature might have
been sufficient to allow Charles Eastman and Carlos
Montezuma to express their indigenous political
identities, Chief Rickard found that the full expres-
sion of his political identity required the crossing of
expressly political boundaries. Rickard’s border-
crossing politics began to crystallize in response to
the formation and passage of the ICA.
In his autobiography, Fighting Tuscarora, Rickard
describes how the Iroquois viewed the ICA after it
passed, “despite our strong opposition”:
By our ancient treaties, we expected the pro-
tection of the government. The white man had
obtained most of our land and we felt he was
obliged to provide something in return, which
was protection of the land we had left, but we
did not want to be absorbed and assimilated
into his society. United States citizenship was
just another way of absorbing us and destroy-
ing our customs and our government. . . . We
feared citizenship would also put our treaty sta-
tus in jeopardy and bring taxes upon our land.
How can a citizen have a treaty with his own
government. . . . This was a violation of our sov-
ereignty. Our citizenship was in our own na-
tions.49
Rickard’s foremost message here was that the Iro-
quois people did not want U.S. citizenship in any
form, whether it was dual citizenship or citizen-ward
status – it amounted to political integration at the ex-
pense of “citizenship in our own nations.” Rickard
saw political integration, even if it involved qualified
or ambivalent American citizenship, as leading to cul-
tural assimilation within America society and the loss
of the Iroquois nations’ government-to-government
political relationship with the United States. On this
latter point, it is important to note that ratified
treaties between indigenous nations and the U.S. gov-
ernment50 were based upon the dual premises that
“treaties were made between sovereign governments
. . . [and] the United States made treaties with tribes,
48. Barbara Graymont. “Editor’s Introduction,” in Rickard.
(1973), pp. xxiv, xxiii, xvii.
49. Rickard, Fighting Tuscarora, 53.
50. Between 1789 and 1871 more than 800 treaties were ne-
gotiated between indigenous nations and the United States, of
which approximately 370 were ratified by the U.S. Senate (Hirsch-
felder, Native American Almanac, 53).
 CHALLENGING AMERICAN BOUNDARIES: INDIGENOUS PEOPLE AND THE “GIFT” OF U.S. CITIZENSHIP
not individual tribal citizens.”51 Rickard’s assertion
that the imposition of U.S. citizenship places “tribal
status in jeopardy” should be understood to mean
that the primacy of government-to-government rela-
tions will be usurped as the U.S. federal government
gives greater preference to dealing with individual in-
digenous (U.S.) citizens. Rickard strongly advocated
the fundamental importance of sovereignty for the
Iroquois nations, and he did so in a manner that ac-
knowledged the complexities of their colonized po-
litical context.
Rickard twice refers to the “expectation” that the
U.S. government would “protect” the land of the Iro-
quois nations. This expectation of protection evolves
from the very treaties that, for Rickard, secured the
status of the Iroquois nations as distinct sovereign
governments. Rickard’s effort to assert the funda-
mental importance of Iroquois sovereignty while also
demanding that the American state protect Iroquois
land reflects a common indigenous political strategy.
In this approach, political actors directly oppose col-
onization through inter-national assertions of sover-
eignty while also acknowledging the circumstances
and opportunities within the colonizer’s political
realm to advance the cause of indigenous rights and
sovereignty. Political theorist James Tully has referred
to this as the way in which “indigenous peoples strug-
gle for freedom as peoples in resisting the colonial sys-
tem as a whole . . . [while they also] exercise their
freedom of manoeuvre within the system.”52 The key
here is to see these two trajectories, external resis-
tance to the whole system and internal maneuver
within the system, as a linked political strategy. I term
this strategy “politics on the boundaries,” because it
works back and forth across the borders that define
the institutions, discourse, and, at times, territory of
the dominant nation and state.53 For the Iroquois
nations, the “struggle for freedom” in resisting the
American system meant ensuring Iroquois “freedom
of manoeuvre” both within and beyond that system.
While Rickard saw the passage of the ICA in June
1924 as another way that America sought to gain
“greater control” over indigenous people at the ex-
pense of their political identity and “independence,”
he was also encouraged by the fact that “there was no
great rush among my people to go out and vote in
white man’s elections.”54 In other words, while U.S.
citizenship was an unwanted and disdained political
status for many Iroquois, it was a status the practical
51. Hoxie, ed., Encyclopedia, 645.
52. James Tully. “The Struggles of Indigenous People for and
of Freedom,” in Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,
ed. Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton, and Will Sanders (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 42.
53. I lay out my “politics on the boundaries” argument at
greater length in “Politics on the Boundaries: The Post-Colonial
Politics of Indigenous People,” Indigenous Nations Studies Journal 1:2
(2000): 73–94.
54. Rickard, Fighting Tuscarora, 53.
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39
effects of which one could resist in the short term.
However, with the passage and implementation of the
Immigration (Johnson) Act of 1924, U.S. citizenship
status had an immediate impact upon indigenous po-
litical identity, which involved a direct imposition of
colonial political boundaries upon indigenous tribes
and their citizens.
Signed just a week before the ICA, the Johnson Act
imposed significant quotas on immigration to the
United States. While the most notable aspects of this
law were the restrictions on the immigration of East-
ern and Southern Europeans, Rickard observed in
his autobiography that one clause of the legislation,
“Section 13 (c), asserted that ‘No alien ineligible to
citizenship shall be admitted to the United States’.”55
This provision meant that “only people of the white
and black races were therefore permitted into the
United States. Orientals and North American Indians
coming into the United States from Canada were ex-
cluded.” The ramifications of this clause were not ev-
ident until “the middle of June 1925, [when] the
Immigration Service began to apply the act to our
North American Indian people who were coming
into the United States from Canada.”56 Rickard’s con-
cern at the time of the passage of these acts arose
from the realization that both the ICA and the John-
son Act legally and institutionally provoked a conflict
over the definition and practice of political space in
North America. To Rickard, this conflict generally im-
plicated all North American indigenous people, par-
ticularly affected the day-to-day lives of citizens of the
Iroquois nations, and specifically brought great suf-
fering to his ally and friend Cayuga Chief Deskaheh.
The combination of the Johnson Act and ICA
amounted to an effort by the U.S. government to firm
up the boundaries of the American nation and state,
and to declare that all indigenous people residing
within these boundaries were citizen-components of
this solidified American political space. By political
space, I mean the lived and envisioned territory
through which a people defines and expresses the
collective past, present, and future of its political
identity.57 Through Rickard’s perspective, the ICA
55. Of the many excellent works on the shaping forces upon
and implications of the 1924 Immigration Act, the following are es-
pecially valuable: John Higham, Stranger in Land: Patterns of Ameri-
can Nativism, 1865 –1925 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981);
Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins
of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2000); Mae Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in American Immi-
gration Law,” Journal of American History 86 (1999): 67–92; and
Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian
Americans (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1998).
56. Rickard, Fighting Tuscarora, 65.
57. By “envisioned territory,” I mean territory on which a peo-
ple may not presently reside at all or to the extent that they wish,
but of and over which they envision themselves eventually gaining
full or adequate occupancy and control. This relationship of polit-
ical identity to political space is not, of course, unique to indige-
nous people in North America. Currently, the Israeli/Palestinian
conflict in the Middle East is likely the most vibrant example of the
 40 KEVIN BRUYNEEL
and Johnson Acts undermined the meaning and
practice of indigenous people’s claims to their own
forms of political space. Thus, while ambivalent
American status vis à vis U.S. citizenship might have
allowed indigenous people the articulation of cultur-
al and historical identities that transcended Ameri-
can political culture and history, the 1924 acts
indicated that such ambivalence was not to be toler-
ated if it meant transcending American political
space. All indigenous people residing within the de-
clared boundaries of the United States, then, were
legally distinguished and separated from other in-
digenous people in North America. The expression
of their political identities was now contained within,
and, thus, in an important sense redefined by, the
United States. This may not have immediately mat-
tered to those indigenous people residing at a dis-
tance from U.S. boundaries; however, it did affect
how the Iroquois Nations and their citizens could ex-
press their political identity.
The territory of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Con-
federacy spans the boundary between Canada and the
United States, with the largest parts of such territory
sitting within the state of New York and the provinces
of Ontario and Québec.58 Article 3 of the 1794 Treaty
of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation (Jay Treaty) be-
tween the United States and Great Britain guaranteed
to “the Indians dwelling on either side of the bound-
ary line, freely to pass and repass by land, inland navi-
gation, into the respective territories of the two parties
on the Continent of America.”59 As American Indian
studies scholar Eileen M. Luna-Firebaugh recently
noted, these rights were “eroded due to the War of
1812,” and, for this reason, Article 9 of the 1814 Treaty
of Ghent was written to “restore to such tribes and na-
tions, respectively, all the possessions, rights and privi-
leges which they may have enjoyed or been entitled
to . . . previous to such hostilities.”60 As such, in these
two ratified treaties we have the U.S. government’s le-
gal commitment to and recognition that indigenous
people’s political space could not be constrained and
defined by the boundaries of settler-states such as the
United States and Canada. To Rickard, the Johnson
Act not only “deprived us of our treaty rights,” but also
threatened the deep historical, cultural and political
relationship among the Iroquois:
relationship between political identity and political space as ‘lived
and envisioned territory.’ For my definition of political identity, see
n. 2 above.
58. For various maps of the historical and contemporary ter-
ritory of the Six Nations as a whole and for particular nations that
span the U.S./Canada boundary, see Handbook of North American
Indians, Vol. 15: Northeast, ed. Bruce Trigger (Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 450, 471.
59. Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation ( Jay Treaty), 8.
Stat. 116 (1794).
60. Eileen M. Luna-Firebaugh. “The Border Crossed Us: Bor-
der Crossing Issues of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas,”
Wicazo Sa Review: A Journal of Native American Studies 17 (2002): 162;
Treat of Peace and Amity (Treaty of Ghent), 8. Stat. 218 (1814).
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Now since the coming of the Europeans, a bor-
der has been set up separating Canadians and
Americans, but we never believed that it was
meant to separate Indians. This was our coun-
try, our continent, long before the first Euro-
pean set foot on it. Our Six Nations people live
on both sides of this border. We are intermar-
ried and have relatives and friends on both
sides. We go back and forth to each other’s cer-
emonies and festivals. Our people are one. It is
an injustice to separate families and impose re-
strictions upon us, the original North Ameri-
cans, who were once a free people and wish to
remain free.61
Like Carlos Montezuma before him, Chief Rickard
invoked the historical priority of indigenous political
identity in this land. However, where Montezuma re-
ferred to indigenous people as the First Citizens of
America, Rickard concerned himself with the free-
dom of “the original North Americans.” The differ-
ence in the way these two men define the histori-
cally rooted political identity of indigenous people
is not minor – it points to the larger distinction re-
garding what being an ambivalent American means
to them.
For Montezuma, being an ambivalent American
meant wanting to be an American citizen in the U.S.
polity as a continuation of, not at the expense of, his
people’s indigenous citizenship and cultural roots in
this land. Chief Rickard had no such ambivalence
about attaining the status of a legal citizen of the Unit-
ed States – he absolutely did not want it. In stating
that indigenous people are the original North Ameri-
cans, Rickard offered the image of a political space
that historically precedes but does not thereby dele-
gitimate the forms of political space later set down
by settler-states. He granted that the U.S.-Canada
boundary exists as a legitimate marker of political
space, but only for Canadian and U.S. citizens. He also
acknowledged that his people “live on both sides” and
“move back and forth” across the settler-state bound-
ary. It was not the U.S.-Canada boundary as such that
bothered Rickard, but rather how and to whom it was
practically applied. This distinction reveals that his vi-
sion of indigenous political space was one that over-
lapped rather than replaced the political spaces of
the United States and Canada. He tolerated these
overlapping spaces providing that settler-state bound-
aries were not imposed in a way that limited the abil-
ity of indigenous people to express their political
identities. However, when the boundaries of the Unit-
ed States were imposed and thereby threatened
indigenous peoples’ freedom of manoeuvre, he pro-
tested vehemently. This boundary imposition be-
came very evident to Rickard as he observed the fate
of his friend Chief Deskaheh, which would compel
the Fighting Tuscarora to organize political actions
61. Rickard, Fighting Tuscarora, 67.
 CHALLENGING AMERICAN BOUNDARIES: INDIGENOUS PEOPLE AND THE “GIFT” OF U.S. CITIZENSHIP
that placed settler-state boundaries at the center of in-
digenous political struggle.
During the early 1920s, Cayuga Chief Deskaheh
was the official speaker and international spokesman
for the Grand River Council of the Six Nations resid-
ing within Canada.62 In 1925, while Deskaheh was in
Rochester, New York, he became so ill that a doctor
refused to let him leave the house in which he was
staying. Not long afterward, while living at Chief
Rickard’s home, Deskaheh was informed that the
medicine men from the Grand River Council and even
members of his own family “were prohibited from
coming over [the U.S.-Canada border] to visit him.”
They were prohibited entry by the U.S. government
through its implementation of the Johnson Act.
Rickard describes Deskaheh’s reaction to this news:
Up to this point . . . he had been in good spir-
its. . . . Now he got up from the table without
finishing his meal, went in and lay down on his
bed. He never got up again. Several days later,
he took chills. . . . Nothing, not even the white
doctor, could save him. He died at 6:30 p.m.,
June 27, 1925.63
It was then, just before he died, that Deskaheh told
Rickard to “fight for the line.”
While this dramatic exchange between the two
Chiefs symbolized the emerging focus of Rickard’s
political concerns and activities, what compelled him
to form an organization to address the border-cross-
ing issue were his persistent trips to the U.S.-Canada
boundary to persuade border officials to let indige-
nous people into the United States. On December 1,
1926, Rickard formed the Indian Defense League of
America (IDLA) “to guarantee unrestricted passage
on the continent of North America for Indian peo-
ple.”64 In the effort to guarantee indigenous rights to
cross the U.S.-Canada boundary, the IDLA practiced
politics on the boundaries by working within the
American political system to gain further freedom for
indigenous people across and beyond the boundaries
of that very system. They did this by appealing to the
judicial and legislative branches of the U.S. federal
government.
62. Like their brethren below the border, these Six Nations
dealt with ominous settler-state policies, as the Canadian govern-
ment imposed citizenship upon the indigenous people in its midst
and sought to break up the more politically radical indigenous
groups, such as the Grand River Council. In 1920, the Canadian
federal government added an amendment to the Indian Act,
“which forced enfranchisement on Canadian Indians” (Hoxie, ed.,
Encyclopedia, 219). In October 1924, “armed police burst into the
Ohsweken Council House and read a decree dissolving the Six Na-
tions’ parliament.” This was done on the order of the Canadian
government, “to overthrow the [Six Nation’s] assembly that dared
to challenge it” (Richard Wright, Stolen Continents: The “New World”
Through Indian Eyes [Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992]),
324.
63. Rickard, Fighting Tuscarora, 65.
64. Indian Defense League of America (IDLA) website:
http://tuscaroras/IDLA/
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41
The judicial case concerned Caughnawaga Mo-
hawk Paul Diabo, an ironworker who had been trav-
eling from Canada to work in eastern U.S. cities since
1912. In 1925, Diabo was arrested for illegal entry
into the United States. Eventually, Diabo’s fight
against this arrest and for his rights to travel to the
United States ended up before District Court Judge
Oliver Dickinson in 1927. Throughout the ordeal,
the IDLA supported and raised funds for Diabo’s
case. Furthermore, Rickard “wrote to the judge be-
fore he rendered his decision and sent him copies of
treaties and other documents relating to Indian bor-
der-crossing rights.”65 The judge ruled in Diabo’s fa-
vor, stating that
[t]he turning point of the cause is thus to be
sought in the answer to the question of
whether the Indians are included among the
members of alien nations whose admission to
our country is controlled by and regulated by
the existing immigration laws. The answer, it
seems to us, is a negative one. From the Indian
viewpoint, he crosses no boundary line. For
him this does not exist.66
This ruling held up through the appeals process,
which affirmed, “that the right of free passage in tra-
ditional indigenous homelands is an inherent abo-
riginal right, even where an international border has
been created subsequently.”67 This favorable deci-
sion further emboldened the IDLA’s efforts within
the U.S. Congress.
Since the founding of the organization, Rickard
and fellow leaders of the IDLA lobbied Congress to
amend the Johnson Act to recognize the border-
crossing rights of indigenous people. This lobbying
focused on a bill that Rickard had “picked out” as the
best, which was the one written by Senator William
King, a Utah Democrat, stating: “That the Immigra-
tion Act of 1924 shall not be construed to apply to the
right of American Indians born in Canada to cross
the borders of the United States.”68 From the fall of
1927, Rickard and the IDLA pushed for passage of
this bill on the “border question” by sending out over
five hundred letters to Congressman and Senators.69
This lobbying effort paid off on April 2, 1928, when
President Coolidge signed into law Senator King’s
version of the bill amending the 1924 Johnson Act to
guarantee that its border regulations did not apply to
indigenous people.70 To celebrate this legislative vic-
tory, the IDLA organized a parade on July 14, 1928,
that crossed “the bridge from Niagara Falls, Ontario
65. Rickard, Fighting Tuscarora, 84.
66. United States ex rel. Diabo v. McCandless. 18 F.2d. 282; 1927
U.S. Dist. LEXIS 1053, 18 Mar. 1927.
67. Luna-Firebaugh, “The Border Crossed Us,” 163.
68. Rickard, Fighting Tuscarora, 85. The passage from the King
Bill (S. 716), is quoted in Rickard.
69. Ibid., 87.
70. Act of 2 Apr. 1928, chap. 309, 45 Stat. 401; codified in 8.
U.S.C.A. 1359.
 42 KEVIN BRUYNEEL
to Niagara Falls, New York.”71 To Rickard, this border-
crossing celebration did not signal the end of the
boundary politics of indigenous people; rather, it
pointed to the need to continue the struggle against
the presumptive political spaces imposed by North
American settler-states.
The “fight for the line” is annually personified and
enacted by a parade across the bridge at Niagara Falls
every July 14. To contemporary IDLA members,
This event symbolizes the continuous assertion
of our sovereignty as Indian Nations within the
recently formed United States and Canadian
Nations. The IDLA continues to assist the Hau-
denosaunee [Six Nations of the Iroquois] from
“getting their horns caught in the wire,” and
forces the issue of free passage for all North
American Indians.72
The explicit and literal practice of border-crossing
represents the political position of those indigenous
people who do not accept the notion that the pres-
ence of settler-states and nations deprives them of
their rights of citizenship in their own nations. While
Charles Eastman, Carlos Montezuma, Zitkala Sa, and
their colleagues of the SAI were primarily concerned
with indigenous culture and history, Jane Zane Gor-
don and Clinton Rickard saw indigenous national
citizenship as fundamental to the survival and growth
of indigenous people’s political and cultural life in
North America. In challenging U.S.-Canadian boun-
daries while also working within the U.S. judicial
and legislative processes to further manifest this re-
sistance, Rickard and his contemporaries sought to
“resist the colonial system as a whole” by means of “ex-
ercising their freedom of manoeuvre within the sys-
tem,” to recall James Tully’s words. This politics on
the boundaries is most evident when one observes the
efforts and arguments of political actors in organiza-
tions such as the IDLA, who seek to challenge Amer-
ican boundaries and refuse to open the “gift” of U.S.
citizenship. In general, politics on the boundaries
should be seen as an elastic form of indigenous po-
litical practice that not only encompasses a diverse set
of political perspectives but also raises rather radical
questions about how we define and experience polit-
ical identity and political space in North America.
CONCLUSION: THE BOUNDARY POLITICS
OF INDIGENOUS CITIZENSHIP
During the first few decades of the twentieth century,
the political views of indigenous people on the mat-
ter of U.S. citizenship ran the range from the cultur-
al pluralism of such integrationists as Eastman and
Montezuma to the indigenous nationalism of sover-
eigntists like Zane Gordon and Rickard. Neverthe-
71. Rickard, Fighting Tuscarora, 88.
72. IDLA website.
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less, in seeking to resist the American state’s efforts to
impose upon indigenous political identity, political
actors as different as Eastman and Rickard empha-
sized, in their own ways, an ambivalent American sta-
tus that reflected both the unique location of
indigenous people in North America and the fissures
in U.S. colonial/settler-state authority. Ambivalence
is a key concept for discussing colonial relations, as
postcolonial theorist Bill Ashcroft elaborates:
Ambivalence is not merely the sign of the fail-
ure of colonial discourse to make the colonial
subject conform, it is the sign of the agency of
the colonized – the two-way gaze, the dual ori-
entation, the ability to appropriate colonial
technology without being absorbed by it –
which disrupts the monological impetus of the
colonizing process.73
This dual orientation, I believe, can be applied to the
ambivalence expressed by indigenous political actors
as well as by the U.S. nation-state regarding the polit-
ical relationship between indigenous people and the
American polity.
For indigenous political actors, the dual orienta-
tion’s “two-way gaze” takes in, through one lens, the
experience and vision of a specifically indigenous po-
litical life and, through the other, the dominant pres-
ence of the norms and institutions of the American
polity. Given the diversity of indigenous political per-
spectives, the exact meaning of this ambivalence can
take very particular form. Eastman and the SAI
sought to retain a strong connection to indigenous
cultural and social norms while also seeking out the
cultural and institutional benefits of inclusion in U.S.
political society. Rickard and the IDLA saw participa-
tion in the U.S. political system as necessary for ex-
periencing and eventually constituting a form of
independent indigenous existence free from the
colonial domination of North American settler-states.
In both cases, ambivalent American-ness expressed a
form of indigenous political agency that, at a very
meaningful level, refused the overwhelming power of
the American nation and U.S. government for the
sake of maintaining and further manifesting some ex-
pression of indigenous political life in this land. That
such indigenous agency has an impact is evident in
the policies and practices of the United States.
The U.S. nation and state was and still is ambivalent
about whether and how indigenous people should be
included in the American polity. During the early
twentieth century, this ambivalence was apparent in
the legislative language of the Indian Citizenship Act,
which expressed the U.S.’s dual orientation by simul-
taneously drawing indigenous people into the Amer-
ican polity through the conferral of citizenship, and
then in the next sentence placing many of these in-
73. Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation (London: Rout-
ledge, 2001), 23.
 CHALLENGING AMERICAN BOUNDARIES: INDIGENOUS PEOPLE AND THE “GIFT” OF U.S. CITIZENSHIP
digenous people at least somewhat outside the Amer-
ican polity by affirming their rights to citizenship in
their own tribes. Despite decades of efforts to elimi-
nate indigenous existence by literally killing off or
culturally destroying indigenous tribes and their citi-
zens, the ICA example shows that the U.S. had to face
the reality that it could neither fully exclude nor ful-
ly include indigenous people. In this regard, ambiva-
lent American-ness signifies the impossibility of the
U.S. nation-state as an ultimate delineator of political
identity and political space. As such, the notion of the
ambivalent American raises questions about how we
recognize and define the meaning, location, and
practice of citizenship generally in the North Ameri-
can context.
An examination of indigenous people’s political
concerns and claims regarding the prospect of U.S.
citizenship should lead us to shed greater critical
light on the ways in which we draw boundaries
around the recognition and practice of citizenship in
the American context. While I focused on indigenous
political actors in the early twentieth century, the con-
tinued activity of organizations such as the Indian De-
fense League of America is further demonstration
that the effort to resist and negotiate the terms and
boundaries of citizenship continues. The specific les-
son of indigenous people’s politics is that the negoti-
ation of citizenship should not be seen solely as one
in which a marginalized group figures out how to
maneuver its way inside a dominant political com-
munity, such as that of the United States. Rather, the
politics on the boundaries approach pursued by
many indigenous political actors could serve as a
model for witnessing more complicated, even am-
bivalent, forms of citizenship that might be pursued
by, among others, immigrants, especially those that
see themselves as members of transnational commu-
nities. This is not to posit ambivalent American status as
an unqualified ideal; rather, the goal is to set it out as
an option for defining and seeing expressions of
American citizenship that are not confined by domi-
nant political boundaries. This possible challenge to
American political boundaries also raises a challenge
to the field of American political development itself.
As I hope this essay has shown, any serious study of
indigenous people’s politics in the U.S. context nec-
essarily challenges us to be clearer about what we
mean by the American of American political develop-
ment. The plea here is not for the replacement of
American with U.S. Such superficial sleight of hand
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43
does more to displace than address the historical, cul-
tural, and political roots of the dominant identity and
institutions of the U.S. context. Rather, American po-
litical development scholars and readers should see
analyses of indigenous people’s politics as seeking
and setting out viable alternative ways in which an
American political identity can be negotiated and ex-
pressed. For example, a pluralistic reading of the
boundaries of American political identity would like-
ly shed more light on how the political condition,
claims, and aspirations of people in the general
North American context (Canada, the United States,
and Mexico) help shape the purposes and practices
of U.S. political institutions. In particular, a critical in-
sight gained from the study of indigenous political
activity and expression is that the dominant institu-
tions and boundaries of American politics are still
deeply defined by their colonial practices toward the
“First American Citizens” or, alternatively, the “origi-
nal North Americans.”
Every effort of an indigenous political actor to as-
sert that indigenous people’s history, culture, or
space does not seamlessly map within U.S. history,
culture or space is a refusal of the colonial practices
of the American settler-state and nation. Given the
latter’s very evident dominating power in relation to
indigenous people, such refusals, be they deemed
more integrationist or more nationalist, contain with-
in them a radical gesture against colonial political
boundaries imposed and maintained by settler-states.
Thus, it is in relationship to boundaries that we can
observe the active presence, historically and in our
contemporary era, of indigenous citizenship in the
North American political setting. When indigenous
political actors express their constituency’s experi-
ences, claims, and visions, they do so in tension with
and across the boundaries of states such as the Unit-
ed States and Canada. As such, the politics on the
boundaries articulated, variously, by Eastman, Mon-
tezuma, Sa, Zane Gordon, and Rickard represent al-
ternative forms of political identity and political
space in North America that cannot be adequately
understood solely through the political perspectives
of American or Canadian politics. Rather, politics on
the boundaries demands that such settler-state per-
spectives acknowledge that they too are engaged in a
double gaze that reflects back on the incompleteness
and ambivalence of settler-state identity as much as it
reflects forward onto the unique location of indige-
nous political identity.