Native Acts, Immigrant Acts: Citizenship, Naturalization, and the Performance of Civic Identity during the Progressive Era

Abstract

AbstractThis article reveals the complicity of immigration restriction laws and federal Indian policy with organized Americanization in legislating an imagined, desirable “new American” at the beginning of the twentieth century, when resurgent nationalism threatened to restrict undesirable immigrants as it also sought to assimilate Indigenous people into a mass of Americanism. While the immigrant has figured in the U.S. national imaginary as someone whodesiresAmerica, the American Indian was notdesiredto enter into political membership—although Native land was desired, and subsequently taken by settlers through strategies of dispossession written into federal Indian law. This essay argues that theIndian—read as an imagined category with little connection to the lives ofNativepeople—occupies an anomalous position in the legal history of naturalization, finalized with the passing of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, at the same time that racist immigration restriction quotas also limited the entrance of new immigrants into the United States through the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. For Native people, Americanization and the imposition of citizenship were extensions of colonialism, adding one civic status over another—domestic dependent, ward, or U.S. citizen. For new immigrants hailing from southern and eastern Europe, forced by economic and cultural constraints to relocate to the United States, in contrast to their Anglo-Saxon or Nordic settler predecessors, Americanization meant a renunciation of political allegiance to other sovereigns, the acquisition of English, and civic education for citizenship. This essay challenges the myth of America as a “nation of immigrants,” and the settler colonial nation-state's ongoing infatuation with its colonial project as it continues to erase Indigenous presence and sovereignty.