Citizenship for American Indians
When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” including recently enslaved persons, were guaranteed the rights of citizenship. However, the amendment did not extend suffrage or grant citizenship to American Indians. The Dawes Act of 1887 was meant to prompt assimilation by establishing American Indian schools and distributing tribal land, but aspects of traditional American Indian culture were destroyed in the process. Things changed in 1924 when the Indian Citizenship Act, or Snyder Act, granted full citizenship to American Indians. However, because voting rights were left to individual states, decades passed before American Indians’ rights were fully protected throughout the nation.
