The author would like to thank Lucy E. Salyer, Maurice Crandall, and the members of the 2019 American Society for Legal History’s Student Research Colloquium for their feedback on early drafts of this manuscript.

1 Charles Carter, Congressional Record, 66th Cong., 2nd sess. (Jan. 14, 1920), 1541, 1544. For biographical information on Carter, see: Todd J. Kosmerick, “Carter, Charles David (1868-1929),” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=CA066 (accessed Sept. 10, 2020).

2 Carter, Charles, Congressional Record, 66th Cong., 2nd sess. (Jan. 14, 1920), 1544–45Google Scholar.

3 Subcommittee of the House Committee on Indian Affairs, Indians of the United States: Investigation of the Field Service, vol. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920), 692–93Google Scholar. For a full rendering of his speech, see “Indian Reads Remarkable Address on Attitude of Pueblos to Legislation,” Albuquerque Morning Journal, May 18, 1920, 4. Note that in Congressional documents, “Abeita” is often spelled as “Abeyta.”

4 For similar debates over Native American citizenship, see Bruyneel, Kevin, The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), ch. 4Google Scholar.

5 U.S., Statutes at Large, 24 Stat 388; U.S., Statutes at Large, 34 Stat 182.

6 An example includes the Curtis Bill (S 1554) introduced by Republican Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas, in April 1917. Curtis, who would later serve as vice president under Herbert Hoover, was a member of the Kaw nation. “Charles Curtis: A Featured Biography,” United States Senate, www.senate.gov/senators/FeaturedBios/Featured_Bio_Curtis.htm (accessed Jan. 15, 2022). See also the Hayden Bill (HR 5526), introduced by Democratic Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona, in July 1917, and its first incarnation (HR 20906) in 1916. Carter had introduced various incarnations of his bill, including HR 9253, in January 1918.

7 U.S., Statutes at Large 43 Stat 253. The most exhaustive history of the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act is Gary C. Stein, “The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924,” New Mexico History 47 (July 1972): 257–74. For long views of Native American citizenship in the United States, see: Smith, Michael T., “The History of Indian Citizenship,” Great Plains Journal 10 (Fall 1970): 25–35 Google Scholar; Witkin, Alexandra, “To Silence a Drum: The Imposition of United States Citizenship on Native Peoples,” Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 21 (Spring 1995): 353–83Google Scholar.

8 Congressional Record, 66th Cong., 2nd sess. (Jan. 14, 1920): 1541. The determination of competency by blood quantum and by commission reflected the practice of the Indian Bureau under the direction of Cato Sells. On April 17, 1917, Sells issued the “Declaration of Policy in the Administration of Indian Affairs,” which sought to expedite the issuance of patents in fee. This was a major departure from prior policy, and Sells sold the program as “the dawn of a new era in Indian administration.” “It means the ultimate absorption of the Indian race into the body politic of the Nation,” wrote Sells, continuing, “It means, in short, the beginning of the end of the Indian problem.” Sells, Cato, Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year ended June 30, 1917 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1917), 3–4 Google Scholar.

9 In addition to the Carter Bill, see: U.S. Congress, Reorganizing the Indian Service, HR 15663, 66th Congress, 3rd sess.; U.S. Congress, Reorganizing the Indian Service, HR 15876, 66th Congress, 3rd sess.; U.S. Congress, Reorganizing the Indian Service, HR 15955, 66th Congress, 3rd sess.; U.S. Congress, A Bill for Making All Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States citizens, HR 3936, 68th Congress, 1st sess.; U.S. Congress, A Bill for Making All Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States citizens, HR 3937, 68th Congress, 1st sess. See also newspaper reports of testimony before the House Committee on Military Affairs that would, in addition to creating an Indian division of the army, confer citizenship onto all Native Americans: “Whole Division of Yank Indians in Army, Plan,” Alaska Daily Empire, Feb. 19, 1920; “North American Indian Division,” Barre Daily Times (Vermont), Feb. 2, 1920; “Army Officers Back Move for Indian Division,” New York Tribune, Feb. 12, 1920. This is only a small sampling of wide coverage.

10 Historians have turned their attention to recapturing the history of Native activism in the Progressive Era. See, for example: Hoxie, Frederick E., Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices from the Progressive Era (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2001)Google Scholar; Iverson, Peter, ed., “For Our Navajo People”: Diné Letters, Speeches, and Petitions, 1900-1960 (Santa Fe: University of New Mexico Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Holm, Tom, The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs: Native Americans & Whites in the Progressive Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cobb, Daniel M. and Fowler, Loretta, eds., Beyond Red Power: American Indian Politics and Activism Since 1900 (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Cobb, Daniel M., ed., Say We are Nations: Documents of Politics and Protest in Indigenous America since 1887 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

11 The general historical consensus is that Indigenous individuals’ service during World War I was the watershed moment leading to Indian citizenship, but historians have struggled to explain why the five-year gap exists. In these renderings, a general citizenship bill was secured with armistice and was only a matter of legislative timing. See: Holm, The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs, 178–80; Britten, Thomas A., American Indians in World War I: At Home and at War (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1997), 179–81Google Scholar; Prucha, Francis Paul, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, vol. 2 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 793Google Scholar; Stein, “The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.” The image of legislative malaise and predetermined acceptance is deepened by emphasis on the lack of Congressional debate before the passage of the 1924 bill. Stanciu, Cristina, “Native Acts, Immigrant Acts: Citizenship, Naturalization, and the Performance of Civic Identity during the Progressive Era,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 20 (April 2021): 262 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Witkin, “To Silence a Drum,” 379; Wunder, John R., “Retained by the People”: A History of American Indians and the Bill of Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 51 Google Scholar; Parker, Linda S., “The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924,” in Between Two Worlds: The Survival of Twentieth Century Indians, ed. Gibson, Arrell Morgan (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Historical Society, 1986), 48–52Google Scholar; Prucha, The Great Father, 2:793; Stein, “The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924”; Hertzberg, Hazel W., The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian Movements (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1971), 205 Google Scholar. My work suggests that most debate over the shape of the general citizenship bill was actually fiercely contested between 1919 and 1924.

12 Smith, Rogers, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Gerstle, Gary, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Parker, Kunal, Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600-2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The literature on this point is extensive. For a selection of recent “long view” studies, see: Rana, Aziz, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2010)Google Scholar; Welke, Barbara, Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Keyssar, Alexander, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2009)Google Scholar.

13 Here I draw on Sam Erman’s definition of the Reconstruction Constitution, which “introduced near-universal citizenship, expanded rights, and eventual statehood.” Erman argues that the power of these promises began to erode quickly in 1898. While Erman is focused on actors in Puerto Rico and is particularly interested in how the Reconstruction Constitution impeded imperialism, its applicability to forms of citizenship can be taken much more broadly. Erman, Sam, Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 2–3 Google Scholar.

14 Recently, scholars have begun to look for alternatives to this model. For an example and suggestion of this method, see Barbara Welke’s “Coda” in Law and the Borders of Belonging, 153–57.

15 See, particularly: Capozzola, Christopher, “Legacies for Citizenship: Pinpointing American during and after World War I,” Diplomatic History 38 (Sept. 2014): 713–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Bredbenner, Candice, A Nationality of Her Own: Women, Marriage, and the Law of Citizenship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Capozzola, Christopher, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dumenil, Lynn, The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; James, Jennifer C., A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature from the Civil War to World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Lentz-Smith, Adriane, Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; O’Leary, Cecilia, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Salyer, Lucy, “Baptism by Fire: Race, Military Service and U.S. Citizenship Policy, 1918-1935,” Journal of American History 91 (Dec. 2004): 847–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sterba, Christopher, Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants during the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Taillon, Paul Michel, “All Men Are Entitled to Justice By the Government’: Black Workers, Citizenship, Letter Writing, and the World War I State,” Journal of Social History 48 (Fall 2014): 88–111CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zeiger, Susan, In Uncle Sam’s Service: Women Workers with the American Expeditionary Force, 1917-1919 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

17 Hoxie, Frederick, A Final Promise (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

18 Quotation from Witkin, “To Silence a Drum,” 384; K. Tsianina Lomawaima, “The Mutuality of Citizenship and Sovereignty: The Society of American Indians and the battle to Inherit America,” Studies in American Literatures 25, The Society of American Indians and Its Legacies: A Special Combined Issue of SAIL and AIQ (Summer 2013): 333–51. For other recent works on Native American citizenship, see: Stanciu, “Native Acts, Immigrant Acts” and Stanciu, “Americanization of Native Terms: The Society of American Indians, Citizenship Debates, and Tropes of ‘Racial Difference,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 6 (Spring 2019): 111–48; Bruyneel, Kevin, The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007)Google Scholar, esp. chapter 4.

19 While the SAI, Pueblo, and Haudenosaunee agreed that the Carter Bill needed to be defeated, they had varying stances on general U.S. citizenship. The Society of American Indians largely pursued U.S. citizenship but its leadership post-1919 argued forcibly for cultural acceptance. The Pueblos shared the arguments for cultural acceptance but rejected citizenship. The Haudenosaunee rejected citizenship as well but focused on legal—rather than cultural—concerns.

20 For examples of congressional misunderstandings and confusion about the Pueblos’ citizenship status, see: “Statement of Mr. Horace J. Johnson, Superintendent of Northern Pueblos, New Mexico,” “Statement of Mr. A.B. Renehan, Attorney at Law, Santa Fe, N. Mex,” and “Brief on Constitutional Rights of New States Coming Into the Union as Applied to New Mexico … ” Subcommittee of the House Committee on Indian Affairs, Indians of the United States: Investigation of the Field Service, vol. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920), 605–16, 647–67, 697–701, respectively.

21 For an introduction to Pueblo histories, see: Sando, Joe, Pueblo Nations: Eight Centuries of Pueblo Indian History (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light, 1992)Google Scholar.

22 For a history of the Pueblos under Spanish, Mexican, and then U.S. rule, see the following sources: Sando, Pueblo Nations; Brayer, Herbert O., Pueblo Indian Land Grants of the “Rio Abajo,” New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1939)Google Scholar; Rosen, Deborah, “Pueblo Indians and Citizenship in Territorial New Mexico,” New Mexico Historical Review 78 (Winter 2003): 1–28Google Scholar; Rollings, Willard H., “Indian Land and Water: The Pueblos of New Mexico (1848-1924),” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 7, no. 1 (1983): 1–21 CrossRefGoogle Scholar;

23 Rosen, Deborah, American Indians and State Law: Sovereignty, Race, and Citizenship, 1790-1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 188 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also: Crandall, Maurice, These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the US-Mexico Borderlands, 1598-1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chapter 5.

24 Rosen, American Indians and State Law, 189.

25 94 U.S. 614 (1876).

26 Jurisdiction over Indian affairs began to shift with the 1910 Enabling Act.

27 231 U.S. 28 (1913).

28 State of New Mexico House Joint Memorial No. 1, Folder entitled Full Citizen Rights to American Indians, Petitions and Memorials, Resolutions of State Legislatures Referred to Committee, Box 843, 66th Congress, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives, Washington, D.C. These types of memorials were nothing new in Pueblo-American relations. See: Crandall, These People Have Always Been a Republic, chapter 5.

29 Crandall, These People Have Always Been a Republic, 201.

30 “Statement of Mr. Hose Ramos Archuleta, of Pueblo, San Juan,” Indians of the United States: Investigation of the Field Service, vol. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920), 599. While called San Juan at the time, it is now known as Ohkay Owingeh.

31 “Pueblo Indians Name Delegates to Washington,” Albuquerque Morning Journal, Apr. 28, 1920.

32 For background on Abeita, see: Sando, Joe S., Pueblo Profiles: Cultural Identity through Centuries of Change (Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 1998)Google Scholar, chapter 4. Abeita would hold many positions in connection with Isleta Pueblo, including governor. For a history on the All Pueblo Council (later the All Indian Pueblo Council), see Walden, Robin S., “The Pueblo Confederation’s Political Wing: The All Indian Pueblo Council, 1920-1975” (MA thesis, the University of New Mexico, 2011)Google Scholar.

33 “Indian Reads Remarkable Address on Attitude of Pueblos to Legislation,” Albuquerque Journal, May 18, 1920.

34 “Indian Reads Remarkable Address.”

35 “Why the Indian Doesn’t Want Citizenship Told by Well Known Isletan,” Albuquerque Morning Journal, May 8, 1920. For further coverage of the Pueblos’ protest, see: “Our Guests,” Albuquerque Morning Journal, May 17, 1920; “Committee on Indian Affairs on Visit Here,” Albuquerque Morning Journal, May 18, 1920, front page.

36 “Indian Blames White Man for Modern Diseases,” Ward County Independent (North Dakota), March 4, 1920, front page.

37 “Annual Convention,” American Indian 7 (Fall 1919): 179. For Bear’s tribal citizenship, see Batker, Carol J., Reforming Fictions: Native, African, and Jewish American Women’s Literature and Journalism in the Progressive Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 29 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 On this point, see: Crandall, These People Have Always Been a Republic, 220–23.

39 “Why the Indian Doesn’t Want Citizenship Told by Well Known Isletan,” Albuquerque Morning Journal, May 8, 1920.

40 The authority on the work and legacy of the Dawes Act remains McDonnell, Janet A., The Dispossession of the American Indian, 1887-1934 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 121 Google Scholar.

41 McDonnell, The Dispossession of the American Indian, 121.

42 McDonnell, The Dispossession of the American Indian, 121.

43 Compare, for example, Carter’s insistence that the bill would not make Indians vulnerable to taxes (“Statement of Mr. Porfirio Mirabel,” Subcommittee of the House Committee on Indian Affairs, Indians of the United States: Investigation of the Field Service, vol. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920), 604–05), with his confusion on the topic (“Statement of Mr. Gabe E. Parker,” Indians of the United States, Field Investigation, 15–18), and his prior representation of the subject in Congress: Congressional Record, 66th Cong., 2nd sess. (Jan. 14, 1920), 1543. The tax provisions of the bill were, indeed, complicated and varied by Indigenous nation. Taxation obligations also varied between pro rata shares of tribal funds and fee patented land. See sections 2-4 of the bill.

44 For the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ articulation of Governmental consent being the primary concern, see: C.F. Hauke to Gustav Voigt, Aug. 22, 1913, file 93978-13, Box 210, Decimal 53, General Service Files, CCF 19071939, Record Group 75, National Archives.

45 For general handwringing over the lack of American Indians applying for citizenship, see the following examples: Subcommittee of the House Committee on Indian Affairs, Indians of the United States: Investigation of the Field Service, vol. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920), 17–8Google Scholar; Debates on HR 288, Congressional Record, 66th Cong., 2nd sess. (Jan. 4, 1920), 1555–56.

46 “Why the Indian Doesn’t Want Citizenship Told by Well Known Isletan,” Albuquerque Morning Journal, May 8, 1920.

47 “Indian Reads Remarkable Address on Attitude of Pueblos to Legislation,” Albuquerque Journal, May 18, 1920.

48 Irrigation and access to water supplies often dominated Pueblo–American relations and were issues of pre-eminent concerns to all communities. See: Ebright, Malcolm and Hendricks, Rick, Pueblo Sovereignty: Indian Land and Water in New Mexico and Texas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019)Google Scholar.

49 “Indian Reads Remarkable Address on Attitude of Pueblos to Legislation,” Albuquerque Journal, May 18, 1920.

50 Russel Lawrence Barsh, “An American Heart of Darkness: The 1913 Expedition for American Indian Citizenship,” Great Plains Quarterly 13 (Spring 1993): 92. For additional information on the Wanamaker expedition, see Lindstrom, Richard, “‘Not from the Land Side, but from the Flag Side,’: Native American Responses to the Wanamaker Expedition of 1913,” Journal of Social History 30 (Autumn 1996): 209–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the expedition’s relationship to broader discussions of Native American citizenship, see: Stanciu, “Native Acts, Immigrant Acts,” 266.

51 Rodman Wanamaker, as quoted in Barsh, “An American Heart of Darkness,” 100.

52 These included Isleta, Laguna, Acoma, and Sandia. “Indians Hesitate Before Signing Allegiance to Flag,” Albuquerque Evening Herald, June 28, 1913.

53 Ibid. Abeita also feared that “the memorial will be more of a memorial to Mr. Wanamaker than to the Indians.” The Pueblos were eventually pressured to sign onto the document. Wanamaker promised that this would make the United States more amenable to requests for aid from the Pueblos.

54 “Statement of Mr. Porfirio Mirabel,” Subcommittee of the House Committee on Indian Affairs, Indians of the United States: Investigation of the Field Service, vol. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920), 604.

55 “Statement of Mr. Porfirio Mirabel,” 605.

56 Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty, 97.

57 U.S. Senate, Subcommittee of the Committee on Public Lands and Surveys, Pueblo Indian Lands, 67th Congress, 4th session, 1923, 3–4. While Fall assured the Pueblos of their right to enforce their laws and practice their customs, he reminded them that they were subject to some U.S. laws, as had been the case with since the passage of the Major Crimes Act U.S., Statues at Large, 23 Stat. 385. Of course, U.S. representatives had been collecting information about the Pueblos for at least a century. See Crandall, These People Have Always Been a Republic, chapter 5.

58 U.S., Statutes at Large, 43 Stat. 253.

59 For a description of the ceremony, which was written by Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane and Indian Agent James McLaughlin, see Lane, Franklin K., The Letters of Franklin K. Lane: Personal and Political, eds.Lane, Anne Wintermute and Wall, Louise Herrick (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1922), 208–210 Google Scholar.

60 For general background on the Bursum Bill controversy, see Huebner, Karin L., “An Unexpected Alliance: Stella Atwood, the California Clubwomen, John Collier, and the Indians of the Southwest, 1917-1934,” Pacific Historical Review 78 (Aug. 2009): 3337–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sando, Pueblo Nations, chapter 5; Kelly, Lawrence C., The Assault on Assimilation: John Collier and the Origins of Indian Policy Reform (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1983)Google Scholar; Philp, Kenneth, John Collier’s Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920-1954 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977)Google Scholar, chapter 2.

61 John Collier, “Our Indian Policy,” Sunset Magazine, Mar. 1923, 13.

62 U.S. Senate, Subcommittee of the Committee on Public Lands and Surveys, Pueblo Indian Lands, 67th Congress, 4th session, 1923, 191–92.

63 Quotation from Wenger, Tisa, We Have a Religion, The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), xiiiGoogle Scholar. See also: Wenger’s “Land, Culture, and Sovereignty in the Pueblo Dance Controversy,” Journal of the Southwest 46 (Summer 2004): 381–412. The most famous and consequential protest was in relation to the Pueblo Dance Controversy. For additional background on the dance controversy, see Philp, John Collier’s Crusade, chapter 3.

64 For background of Kallen and cultural pluralism, see: Steiner, Michael C., Horace, M. Kallen in the Heartland: The Midwestern Roots of American Pluralism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meyer, Gerald, “The Cultural Pluralist Response to Americanization: Horace Kallen, Randolph Bourne, Louis Adamic, and Leonard Covello,” Socialism and Democracy 22 (2008): 19–51 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ratner, Sideny, “Horce M. Kallen and Cultural Pluralism,” Modern Judaism 4 (May 1984): 185–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wacker, Fred R., “Assimilation and Cultural Pluralism in American Social Thought,” Phylon 40 (1979): 325–333 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 Kallen, Horace M., “The Meaning of Americanism” (1916), reprinted in Kallen Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924), 61 Google Scholar.

66 Higham, John, Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 210 Google Scholar.

67 Deloria, Philip J., Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 121 Google Scholar.

68 Deloria, 122.

69 Sissons, Jeffrey, First Peoples: Indigenous Cultures and Their Futures (London: Reaktion Books LTD, 2005)Google Scholar, chapter 2.