Jurisdiction, Civilization, and the Ends of Native American Citizenship: The View from 1866

Abstract

Abstract Most nineteenth-century political debates over U.S. citizenship revolved around the claims of people, often African Americans or immigrants, who aspired to that status. But Native American citizenship’s genealogy began instead with the United States assertion of the right to purchase or conquer the territory of its Indigenous neighbors, to replace them as its sole or primary inhabitants, and to make policy for the people thereby dispossessed. These very different histories of citizenship collided in 1866, when the U.S. Senate considered how to codify that status in the Civil Rights Act and Fourteenth Amendment. This article interprets these debates as the collision of an array of distinct and divergent settler colonial processes and experiences. It argues that the ultimate resolution—a half-articulated commitment to let local settler communities decide—both contradicted the ostensible purposes of the Civil Rights Act and accurately reflected how the era’s settler colonial society understood the purposes and functions of Native citizenship.