YAKIMA — Sixty years before the Civil Rights Act was signed, another law monumentally expanding rights was enacted.
On June 2, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act into law, granting Native Americans birthright citizenship.
While it represented a sea change in American policy, its passage was not deemed noteworthy in the Yakima Valley and, sadly, seemed to do little, if anything, to immediately change life on the ground for Native Americans.
Despite the fact that America’s founders borrowed from the Iroquois Confederacy democratic model in fashioning the Constitution, the document declared that Native people who weren’t taxed could not count as citizens.
By contrast, slaves were counted as 60 percent of a person only for the Census, a move that gave the slave-holding states greater leverage in Congress and the Electoral College.
In one of the worst Supreme Court rulings in history, the Dred Scott case of 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney posited that Native Americans could become citizens only with congressional and legal supervision, while arguing that enslaved Blacks were property and had no rights.
That odious ruling was overturned with the 14th Amendment, which granted birthright citizenship to those born on American soil. But those in power weren’t willing to extend that right to Native Americans, who had been in North America for millennia.
The Senate Judiciary Committee attempted to tackle the problem in 1870, finding that the 14th Amendment didn’t cover tribes in the United States, but “straggling” Natives who were subject to taxation could become citizens.
The Dawes Act in 1887 did grant citizenship to Native people who accepted individual allotments of land from reservations.
The question was finally settled in 1924 with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act, which declared that “all noncitizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States.”
It did have a caveat, though. Natives would not be granted citizenship if it impaired or affected a right to tribal property.
At the time of its passage, 125,000 out of the 300,000 Native Americans in the country were not considered citizens.
Some have credited Nipo Strongheart, a Hollywood actor who was born in White Swan to a Yakama citizen, with the bill’s passage. Strongheart was a regular speaker on the Chataqua and Lyceum lecture circuits, giving talks on Native American culture and life, debunking popular myths.
In his talks, Strongheart drew on his collection of Native American regalia and artifacts, which became the nucleus of the Yakama Nation Cultural Center when Strongheart willed them to the Yakama Nation, to illustrate his talks.
Strongheart would also work with studios and Walt Disney to ensure that Natives and their cultures were properly represented.
Locally, the measure received no fanfare. The Yakima Morning Herald made no mention of it, with coverage of the impending murder trial in Chicago of Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb, considered a genuine “Trial of the Century,” dominating the news pages.
There would continue to be struggles for Native rights. Arizona and New Mexico barred Native Americans from voting until 1948, and multiple lawsuits were brought to ensure Native Americans’ fishing rights, including the Boldt Decision in 1974.
