Citizenship Not Wanted, but Received

Abstract

The United States has a lengthy history of welcoming immigrants from throughout the world and ultimately naturalizing and conferring citizenship to them. Yet, a number of indigenous and people of color never consented to citizenship and many still do not wish to have it. This article explores the role of citizenship as a tool to not only appropriate, assimilate, and colonize indigenous peoples and their lands, but to also decouple citizenship and political participation. We ultimately suggest the deployment of a Structured Academic Controversy about indigenous patriotism so that students can consider negative, positive, neutral, and multifaceted perspectives on the normally assumed uncontroversial topic of U.S. citizenship and assimilative culture from the perspective of indigenous peoples.