Questions about the recent Supreme Court case Trump v. Barbara, and how a decision will affect American Indians’ rights are completely valid. There is a danger that all Native people who were born on Reservations, or all Native people born in the US, and/or born after the date of the executive order, could be denaturalized by a decision that affirms the view of the present regime and their racist executive order (Protecting the Meaning and value of American Citizenship) that would end birthright citizenship. This would affect millions of Americans who are currently citizens under several federal laws, acts, policies, and the 14th Amendment, and their offspring.
There is no proposal about how an application process for citizenship would be handled, and if the present administration addressed it, it would be horribly long and bureaucratic, potentially affecting all citizens of the US who have children. That means a naturalization process that would have to handle 3.6 million births each year. A whole new branch of government would have to be born to address this level of application! I am guessing that there would be a golden ticket application option that would effectively line the pockets of the politicians in some manner. I am also guessing that most immigrants and people of color, and American Indians, would be priced out of this option. I have no confidence in federal solutions if birthright citizenship ends. I mean, seriously, look at what happened to the first year of Obamacare, and that policy and law were meant to actually help people!
The road to American Indian citizenship was very rocky. Treaties that purchased the lands of tribes and placed them on reservations did not grant US citizenship. For most of the 19th century, US citizenship was held up and away from American Indians and most (undesirable) immigrants- those from Asian countries who were allowed in the US or attracted to or contracted to come into the US to be laborers. They built roads, dams, railroads, and many other large structures to help develop the US into an economic and political powerhouse. Yet politicians did not want them to remain and passed laws to keep them from citizenship, from voting, etc. These policies and laws were then applied again to Mexican and Latin American workers brought here following the Bracero Program Act (1942). The nation at the time needed laborers to expand its economic potential. The trend allowing Latin American workers into the US extended well beyond the Bracero Act and became a needed and necessary allowance to continue to help the US economy. White Americans took to blue-collar and white-collar jobs and stopped being laborers and farmworkers in many industries. But in recent decades, politicians have sought to make political points by demonizing immigrants, stating they are somehow always illegal and criminals. The present regime is in the midst of taking action against immigrants, ignoring their legal and human rights, assuming “real” Americans will not do anything about it. But in 2026, we are beginning to see the effects of their policies, the economy is tanking dramatically, and they are losing the fight for the hearts and minds of the voters. I trust Americans are taking note of the dehumanizing, potentially illegal, irresponsible, and elitist direction of the present Republican policies.
American Indians were promised a road to citizenship when President Ulysses S. Grant stated in his presidential acceptance speech that he would support a route to citizenship for Indians who became civilized. The concept of what constituted “civilized” in the 19th century is different from today. Then the word and concept were tossed around by politicians and missionaries who meant that since American Indians are widely considered savages and barbarians, they are not civilized and therefore do not deserve citizenship. Citizenship was only supposed to be available, in an elitist stance, for the right people- those who were white, Christian, and doing something worthwhile for the country, like farming. It did not matter, apparently, that American Indians had supported hordes of American settlers by feeding, hosting, guiding, hunting, and helping them build homesteads and farms, so they might prosper in their newly claimed lands in the West. Without American Indian aid, I don’t know that the “manifest destiny” mission of many settlers would have been successful. Frankly, tribes would have been justified in banding together and forcing the settlers out of their lands, because they owned everything under well-established policies and even the laws of the settlers’ own governments, of aboriginal title. Still, because of the biased perspectives of missionaries, explorers, early anthropologists, and settlers, the Native people were considered savages, and they were denied citizenship.
Oregon, a supposed anti-slavery state, interestingly enough, followed suit with this concept of disallowing Native peoples’ citizenship or rights. Oregon also disallowed the rights of Blacks and, later, Chinese and other laborers from gaining citizenship rights. In Oregon, numerous politicians and the highly influential Henry Pittock and Harvey Scott, both at the Oregonian as founder and editor, were elitists and wanted to keep the rights to voting and equal citizenship away from anyone but white men.
In an editorial in the Oregonian at the closure of the Civil War, Scott wrote,
Black people “as a class possess no capacity of self-government, and the few who are intelligent enough to take part in public affairs are offset by the multitude who do not,” said a March 1865 editorial, written just before Scott was formally hired as editor. “There again, this nation of the white race should well ponder the question before it admits the African, the Mongolian, and the Indian to all its privileges.” (https://projects.oregonlive.com/publishing-prejudice/racist-legacy)
About American Indians, Scott was less clear, but
“He volunteered as a soldier in the 1855-56 Puget Sound War, fighting “to subjugate the Indians,” he said in a later speech…” (https://projects.oregonlive.com/publishing-prejudice/racist-legacy)
Generally, Scott was the voice of the Oregonian, and white men loved him for his views. He was famously against women’s suffrage, countering the work of his sister Abigail Scott Dunaway, and sided with paternalistic and elitist views that voting should be reserved for white men only. He was working with Republican politicians in the State Legislature who drafted anti-voting laws.
“Many of these same Oregon leaders [including Scott], however, also drafted constitutional measures in 1857 to ensure that Negroes, people of mixed races, women, and Chinese—and later Japanese, East Indian, and Filipino—could never become citizens or vote. Oregon’s message to Asian laborers seemed to welcome them to work but not to stay.” (Johanna Ogden, East Indians of Oregon and the Ghadar Party, Oregon Encyclopedia, https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/east_indians_of_oregon_and_the_ghadar_party/)
These views are nearly identical to the politics of the present Republican Party today in supporting elitism in the federal government and seeking to destroy the rights of immigrants, laborers, and anyone who would vote and act against their elitist paternalism. Our Republican Congresspersons seem set to hand the whole nation over to this ideology without a single qualm. Harvey Scott would have fit well on the cabinet of the present administration. So much for draining the swamp; they seem to be creating a much more caustic swamp!
The truth of these statements is unassailable, and the effect of the various executive orders and challenges is to damp down the voting against the present party. They do not need to be completely successful, only to suppress 10-15% of the democratically-minded votes in the midterms, and they may keep their party in power. They are simply whittling away at the rights of voters nationally, through a series of challenges to our constitutional rights- to redrawing voting districts, to challenging vote by mail, to challenging the right of states to control the voting in their state, to challenging birthright citizenship. They are really into challenging anything that will whittle away a small percentage of voters and maintain their power through the midterms. Their goal is not only to maintain power but to take power away from the people in the next presidential cycle, to become an autocratic-aristocracy where the leader cannot be replaced by a vote of the people.
Regarding American Indian Voting rights, no legal or historical description of its history can match that of Robert J. Miller.
Nazi Germany’s Race Laws, the United States, and American
Indians
St. John’s Law Review
Volume 94, 2020, Number 3 Article 5
Robert J. Miller-
“American Indians were also treated differently in regards to naturalization. As citizens of their own nations, they signed trea-
ties and engaged in diplomatic and political relations with the English, French, Spanish, and, later, the United States. There-
fore, it is perhaps understandable why federal and state governments would not have automatically considered American
Indians to be United States citizens. The Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment state that Indians were only to be
counted in the decadal census if they paid taxes.274 Slowly, as tribal nations became more controlled by the United States and
more subsumed within the states, questions about Indian citizenship arose.
The language of the Fourteenth Amendment would seem to have made citizens of all Indians that were born within the
United States. 275 In 1866, however, Congress debated whether the proposed Fourteenth Amendment or the Civil Rights Act of
1866 would make Indians citizens. 276 For several reasons Congress decided that the answer was no. According to Congress,
Indians did not recognize the United States as their government and were subject to very few federal laws; the United States
made treaties with Indian nations and the tribes had their own laws; thus, individual Indians were not considered to be “subject
to the jurisdiction” of the United States as the Amendment requires for citizenship. 277 In 1884, the United States Supreme
Court agreed. 278
In 1887, the United States began granting statutory citizenship to some Indians. 279 In 1888, Congress granted citizenship to
Indian women who married white Americans. 280 In 1901, all American Indians in the American Indian Territory, now part of
Oklahoma, were given citizenship. 281 In 1919, American Indian veterans of World War I were also awarded citizenship.282 Final-
ly, in 1924, after over a century of racially motivated discrimination, Congress conferred citizenship on all native American
Indians.283″
Notes:
275 U.S. CONST. amend. XIV, § 1.
276 C ONG. GLOBE, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 527 (1866); PARKER, supra note 268, at
131.
277 U.S. CONST. amend. XIV, § 1; see also C ONG. GLOBE, 39th Cong., 1st Sess.
527; PARKER, supra note 268, at 131.
278 Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U. S. 94, 98–99 (1884).
279 The General Allotment (Dawes) Act, ch. 119, 24 Stat. 388 (1887) (codified as
amended in scattered sections of 25 U.S.C.).
280 Act of Aug. 9, 1888, ch. 818, § 2, 25 Stat. 392 (codified at 25 U.S.C. § 182
(2018). Cf. Mackenzie v. Hare, 239 U. S. 299, 311 (1915) (upholding a 1907 federal
law that denaturalized American citizens who married foreigners). Thousands of
American women lost their citizenship under this Act. PARKER, supra note 268, at
177.
281 Act of Mar. 3, 1901, ch. 868, 31 Stat. 1447 (amending Act of Feb. 8, 1887, ch.
119, § 6, 24 Stat. 388, 390).
282 Citizenship Act of 1919, ch. 95, 41 Stat. 350 (codified at 8 U.S.C. § 3 and since
repealed).
283 Indian Citizenship Act, ch. 233, 43 Stat. 253 (1924) (codified at
8 U.S.C. § 1401(b) (2018)). Under the rule of Plessy v. Ferguson, however, once
American Indians became United States citizens they could still be segregated and
treated differently from other citizens. See Piper v. Big Pine Sch. Dist., 226 P. 926,
929 (Cal. 1924) (holding that it was not a federal or state law violation to require
American Indian children, or others in whom racial differences existed, to attend
separate schools provided they were equal); see also Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S.
537, 543 (1896) (holding that State-mandated racial segregation does not violate the
Fourteenth Amendment), overruled by Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
(NAZI GERMANY’S RACE LAWS, 788-789, https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7173&context=lawreview)