I thought about this as the president rampaged against the “garbage” people and country of Somalia. When he asked why we couldn’t get more people from Norway, Sweden, or Denmark. And a year ago, when he and the Veep went on about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Illinois. Local refutations didn’t matter, as the Haitian-pets non-event still gets mention.
I thought about the invisible wall that emerged when the president mentioned Native Americans as part of his assault on “birthright citizenship.” We could quibble about the status of children born to people in the country illegally. We might argue about children of green card holders and people here on student and work visas. But the idea that the nation’s and continent’s first inhabitants would not be its citizens is patently absurd.
There is reason for the misunderstanding, and maybe Steven Miller or some other aid saw that the law that made all Native Americans citizens did not occur until 1924, and lobbed it at the president as one more category of non-white Americans to attack.
The reason is that most Native Americans were considered citizens of their sovereign tribes prior to 1924. Some had become citizens of the United States by taking up allotments and paying taxes, but, especially during the treaty period—roughly 1778-1871—American Indians were citizens of their tribes.
By 1924, we were done making treaties with tribes, we had tried various means, e.g. allotment and boarding schools, of assimilating Indians into the mainstream, and we had welcomed them into the US Military during WW I. Giving them US citizenship seemed the natural thing to do. It also, if we could couple it with some new laws or rules, would get rid of the Nation’s treaty obligations to tribes and their citizens, and do away with the pesky idea of “tribal”—read “common” lands. In fact, a final assault on tribal lands occurred with “Termination” programs in the 1950s.
But Indians were U.S. citizens by then, and having served admirably in two world wars and the Korean War, there was no argument to take away that citizenship—just programs like Termination and Relocation (moving young Natives to cities for jobs and/or training) that would relieve the federal government of responsibilities for health care, education, etc., AND do away with “common” lands (sounds like “communist” in the Cold War 1950s).
Native American response was mixed—some liked the idea of a cash payout—but in the end the Eisenhower programs’ final thrust at total assimilation was a failure. (You might be surprised that it was President Nixon who put a nail in the coffin of Termination; and not surprised that our mentor, Alvin Josephy, wrote a long “white paper” on the state of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and recommended that Nixon do just that. Nixon then famously said that “there will be no more termination, but self-determination for Indian people.” Nixon was a pro-Indian president, another peculiarity in American History.
For American Indians, it was another victory in a long-running war about survival as tribes and descendants of the first Americans. There had been victories and defeats in the treaty period, and in the period we call “Indian Wars.” There was discrimination all along. But there was also resistance, and today that residence is paying off with the revival of Indian languages and cultures, acqusition of tribal lands, and acceptance of Native wisdom on water, fish, forest and fire.
Somalis, Haitians, and recent brown and black immigrants from around the globe do not have that hole card of being here first. Descendents of African slaves also have their historical argument for being citizens. Although there was an effort to send slaves and their descendants back to Afrida, a Civil War settled their right to be here—and their citizenship.
Long tenure and successful work in the country did not stop Chinese and other Asians from being deported and excluded in the late 1800s. And thousands of Japanese American citizens were sent to internment camps in the 1940s, during World War II.
In the 1930s we deported some two million Mexican Americans, many of them citizens, to make jobs available to white workers during the Depression. Some of the Mexican Americans had been citizens of Mexico before the Mexican-American War, when they stayed in their California, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico homes as US citizens after the war and changing borders of 1848!
White was also not always good enough for immigrants if you were from Eastern or Southern Europe, when quotas ensured higher numbers of Northern Europeans. The Irish, European Jews, Italians and Poles all gathered mean nicknames that told people they were not Northern European—and especially Protestant—white.
There is nothing new about the assaults on Black and Brown and Asian immigrants. Nothing new about damning them for having strange diets, hair styles, languages and rituals. But the president crossed a line when he tried to take citizenship away from the first Americans. We can all gather around that bulwark and remind the white Christian nationalists that their roots—even if they go to the Revolution or the Mayflower, are not near as deep in this country as those of thousands of Native Americans.
