The Mutuality of <em>Citizenship</em> and <em>Sovereignty</em>: The Society of American Indians and the Battle to Inherit America

Abstract

The Mutuality of Citizenship and Sovereignty: The Society of American Indians and the Battle to Inherit America K. Tsianina Lomawaima (bio) It is the sense of this committee that every member of the association should exert his influence in every legitimate way to bring before each member of the race the necessity of promoting good citizenship. [End Page 332] US policymakers have long sought to define and regulate the relationship between the American Indian individual and the group, whether Native nation or US nation. In 1910 sociologist Fayette Avery McKenzie called ambiguity in Indian individuals’ legal status “the great confusion in Indian policies” (“Indian and His Problem” 228). In the early twentieth century the tension between individual and group dwelt at the heart of the fight for US citizenship for American Indians, which seemed to require abjuring tribal life. The fraught choice between Native nation and US nation bedeviled the Society of American Indians (sai) and frames the central question posed here: Why did the sai identify the crucial problem of their day as wardship, an ambiguous legal status deemed curable by citizenship?1 Understanding sai intellectuals requires more than judging them as sellouts or saviors by our current standards. Studying the sai requires a decentering from us and now to visualize the options they faced or could imagine, to see the world as they saw it. To gain analytic purchase on the sai in the early twentieth century, we must survey the landscape where settler colonial society asserted its rights to nationhood and territory and the federal government asserted its plenary powers over Native peoples.2 The sai has been criticized for desiring a US citizenship that would render Native sovereignties obsolete, based on the dichotomies conceived at the time: that “achieving” US citizenship meant refusing tribal authority. The settler-colonial concept of citizenship—with the material opportunities it enabled and blocked off for Native individuals—made the mutual exclusivity of Indian “ward” and US “citizen” appear inescapable and natural.3 At the time ward versus citizen looked like the only [End Page 333] choice possible. Similarly, contemporary settler-colonial conceptions of sovereignty made the choice for Native nations between domestic dependent nation or nothing at all appear inescapable, natural, and the only choice possible.4 Examining the concepts of citizenship, sovereignty, and their mutuality offers analytic purchase to understand the sai’s fight for US citizenship as a fight for a place as full, modern, and dynamic participants in American life. The mutuality5 of citizenship and sovereignty means they are linked in an ideological and material landscape, but not in a causal way. They rise up out of the same ground, shaped by similar contexts and serving similar purposes. In this analysis, the settler-colonial conceptions of citizenship and sovereignty share three characteristics of mutuality: (1) they mark a necessary, enduring difference as Indians for individuals as wards and for Native nations as domestic dependents; (2) to perpetuate Indianness, they use plenary power and trust authority to block access to home ownership for individuals and to economic development for Native nations; and (3) they strategically utilize ambiguity in Indian status to maintain federal powers over Indian individuals and nations. Detailing the mutuality of the terms sets the ideological and material context within which the sai developed its goals, and against which some sai members proposed Indigenous alternatives. The sai’s papers incisively identify industrial, educational, legal, political, moral, and religious problems whose sharp edges were shredding Indian country. Out of them all, reformers chose wardship as the crucial problem and proposed US citizenship as the cure. How was the concept of citizenship deployed? sai archives reveal a language confined by false dichotomies as public discourses reiterated the incommensurability of wards and citizens, savagery and civilization, past and future, Native tribe and US nation—you can be or have one but not the other! The sai’s battle for the possibilities of a freedom they could imagine within US citizenship, however, was doomed by entrenched American interests to keep safely domesticated and clearly different “Indianness” under federal control. The US possessed powerful reasons to maintain Indian individuals as wards and tribes as domestic dependent nations, even after 1924...