When Charles Carter took to the floor of the U.S. House on January 14, 1920, he did so as a U.S. congressman from Oklahoma and as a member of the Chickasaw nation. Carter had long been a reliable advocate for Indigenous people within the United States, having served—at various times—as superintendent of Schools of the Chickasaw nation, vice president for legislation with the Society of American Indians, and chair of the House Committee for Indian Affairs. Carter rose in support of HR 288, “a bill for the purpose of conferring citizenship upon Indians,” a piece of legislation that Carter wrote himself and presented in various incarnations over the preceding four years. “There is no one within the boundaries of the United States who is more entitled to citizenship than the aborigines of this country,” Carter asserted. “Yet we have gone along, during more than a century of this Government, excluding them from those rights.”Footnote ¹

Carter hoped that the bill would pass easily. Fewer than six months prior, Congress had passed a bill conferring citizenship on Indigenous veterans of World War I, and Carter drew on the legacy of the “12,000 [American Indian] soldiers and sailors who marched beneath the folds of our flag” in making his case for broader American Indian citizenship. “Not only has the Indian contributed his full part during this war,” Carter proclaimed, “but he has contributed his full part toward the upbuilding of this country.” “There was a time when his word was supreme on the American continent, a time when he was master of all he surveyed,” Carter continued, “and this great Republic has been carved and built from his domain.” As his time on the floor drew to a close, Carter detailed the history of the white European immigrant-turned-American who had repeatedly asked the Indian to change, to give up his “manner of dress,” his religion, and his tribal affiliation—all of which Carter believed the Indian had done. “The purpose of this bill,” concluded Carter, “is a simple act of justice to render to the Indian that which has long been due to him.” And that due was citizenship.Footnote ²

Carter’s broad articulation of citizenship—its themes if not its particularities— will be familiar to many students of American history. Carter repeatedly emphasized the sacrifices made by fellow Native people. Their sacrifices had earned them the privileges of citizenship and the essential rights leading to security: the right to vote, to serve on a jury, and to be represented in Congress. Citizenship was a positive good, one that would fold Indigenous people into the American body politic. Overall, Carter constructed HR 288 as a way to ensure Native people’s civic and political well-being. For Carter, as for most historians, citizenship bestowed was evidence of a wrong atoned, and citizenship was an improvement of status.

This article paints a different portrait of citizenship, one that congressmen found quite common in Indian country but is less common in our stories about civic belonging. For many Indigenous Americans, citizenship was not a promise but a threat, and U.S. citizenship violated, rather than secured, sacred rights. Indeed, many of Carter’s fellow Indigenous Americans led a sustained opposition to U.S. citizenship. Through formal protests and memorials, aggressive courting of powerful allies, and vigorous press campaigns, these activists challenged Carter’s vision of citizenship. So, too, should they challenge scholars’ portrayal of American citizenship in the early twentieth century. By centering the Indigenous activists who opposed U.S. citizenship, historians can reclaim the central role Indigenous people played in shaping citizenship policies for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Americans alike. Their protests were an early, grass-roots victory for cultural pluralism, but U.S. lawmakers also responded by making citizenship unquestionably imposed, rather than consensual.

Four months after Carter’s HR 288 had passed the House and was pending in the Senate, a different articulation of citizenship reached Carter’s ears as he sat in a YMCA building in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Carter was in the Southwest as part of a Congressional delegation investigating conditions across Indian territory, and Pablo Abeita of the Isleta Pueblo people took the opportunity to condemn Carter’s corrupted sense of justice: “You may have thought that you was doing a very good thing for the Pueblo Indians by passing this bill, but you was not; you are greatly mistaken … ” In particular, Abeita objected to the imposition of citizenship, the lack of “consent” in making Pueblos U.S. citizens. “They will ask for it” when they were ready, Abeita asserted. He equated citizenship with a loss of racial and cultural integrity, protesting, “[W]hatever you do or whatever you say, you can not make a white man out of an Indian by legislation. Legislation can kick an Indian out of existence or can roll him on the mud, but when he gets up he will still be an Indian, and an Indian he will remain to be till doomsday.” Leaving the Pueblos alone, Abeita concluded, “is what you are supposed to do by that invincible thing called Justice.”Footnote ³

In that YMCA building in Albuquerque, two vastly different conceptions of citizenship and justice mingled. For one American Indian man, citizenship was the embodiment of justice, and for the other, citizenship was its antithesis. The moment, and the broader debates over the Carter Citizenship Bill, as HR 288 came to be known, exposed the fault lines of Indigenous citizenship in the United States. Some saw compulsory citizenship, along with forced assimilation, as an ultimate good, and others rejected any form of political or cultural imposition.Footnote ⁴ By the time Carter and Abeita met in New Mexico, there were over nine ways that Native Americans could become citizens, including treaty provision, marriage, and special acts of Congress. Since the passage of the Dawes Act in 1887 and its revision through the Burke Act in 1906, the primary modes of obtaining citizenship for Native people were tied to individual land ownership and “adopting the habits of civilized life.”Footnote ⁵ In most cases, citizenship followed from application or treaty negotiation. Those processes involved, however tentative and wavering, threads of consent. By the second decade of the 1900s, a confluence of factors began to challenge this precedent, and congressmen started to introduce blanket citizenship bills for America’s Native peoples with some frequency.Footnote ⁶ This process culminated with the passage of the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, which conferred citizenship on “all non citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States.”Footnote ⁷ As the positions of Carter and Abeita suggest, some saw this act as a way to secure the rights and integrity of Indigenous people, while others saw it as an attack. Those in the former camp argued that citizenship would secure Native Americans firmer claims to basic rights, would remove the scourge of paternalistic policies, and would eliminate the confusing legal limbo that dictated Native Americans’ position in American society. Those in the latter camp explained that making citizens of American Indians undermined already weakened tribal governments and was akin to political genocide.

While Carter saw HR 288 as a “simple act of justice,” the bill itself was quite complicated. Its first provision made every American Indian in the territorial United States a citizen, making each new citizen “subject to the laws, both civil and criminal, of the State or Territory in which he may reside.” Subsequent provisions called on the secretary of the interior to finalize tribal rolls within a year of passage and to make an official record of each tribal member’s blood quantum. Any new citizen who was “able-bodied and mentally competent … over 21 years of age [and] less than one-half Indian blood” would automatically be given a patent in fee to any allotted land they had claim to. All other citizens would be subject to interview by a competency commission composed of three people, “one of whom shall be a member of an Indian tribe, another a member of the Board of Indian Commissioners, and another to be designated from the Indian Service.” These commissions—three in total—would be tasked with visiting every reservation and “determining the competency of Indians” with over one-half Indian blood. They would deliver fee patents to those deemed competent, while those deemed otherwise would remain under Bureau of Indian Affairs supervision. HR 288 also called for the final dispersal of tribal funds within ninety days.Footnote ⁸ In all, it aimed to shrink the size the Bureau of Indian Affairs in an expedited fashion.

The Carter Citizenship Bill ultimately failed. While it passed the House in January of 1920, it was never taken up by the Senate. Its relegation to the dustbin of proposed legislation in part accounts for its place in historical obscurity, and it keeps good company with the other failed pieces of legislation meant to confer citizenship on the United States’ Native population. Indeed, between 1919 and the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act (ICA), Congress and its committees took up—and rejected—at least four general citizenship bills, and historians have yet to understand how these failed proposals shaped and were shaped by more general debates about citizenship policies.Footnote ⁹ Focusing on these pieces of legislation presents myriad benefits. First, it returns Indigenous voices to the debates on early twentieth-century citizenship, whose historiography has been dominated by congressional viewpoints.Footnote ¹⁰ Indigenous opposition to citizenship ultimately and repeatedly brought citizenship bills down and explains the gap of five years between the 1919 Indian Veterans Citizenship Bill and the 1924 ICA.Footnote ¹¹ When the ICA did pass, its vision of citizenship looked much different than it had at the end of the nineteenth century—due, in part, to Indigenous activists.

Second, and more broadly, such a study problematizes citizenship as an ultimate aspirational status. Historians have long complicated the linear, progressive portrait of U.S. citizenship policies; scholars such as Rogers Smith, Gary Gerstle, and Kunal Parker have shown time and time again that policies are neither as liberal as many believe nor did they become steadily more expansive over time.Footnote ¹² This is particularly clear in the Progressive Era, as officials and their constituencies responded to increased immigration with nativist policies and rolled back the promises of the Reconstruction Constitution.Footnote ¹³ The rise of Jim Crow laws and lynching, the expansion of American imperialism, the denial of independent citizenship to women—all complicate citizenship as a reliable category of good. Yet citizenship—in its most robust forms—often remains the gold standard, the ideal for marginalized groups.Footnote ¹⁴ The Progressive Era has not been immune from this trend, particularly as historians evaluate the period’s close. World War I—the contested, but perhaps begrudgingly accepted—harbinger of the Progressive Era’s chronological demise, brought substantial changes to citizenship.Footnote ¹⁵ Many marginalized groups, fighting overseas and at home for the United States, saw their struggle for citizenship rights acknowledged, even if far from fulfilled.Footnote ¹⁶ In this study, citizenship is cast as “the struggle against,” rather than the traditional “struggle for.” Centering Indigenous opposition to citizenship helps historians explore an alternate side of citizenship while also highlighting the different models of legal being envisioned in the early twentieth century.

Even within the smaller field of Native American citizenship, centering the Pueblos’ resistance to the Carter Bill reframes conversations. Scholars writing about American Indian citizenship often fall into one of two categories. The first, such as Frederick Hoxie in A Final Promise, align with more generalist studies of citizenship. These scholars view citizenship positively but decry the form in which Native Americans received it. They remind their readers that citizenship did not ensure the franchise, did not remove paternalistic policies, and did not wipe out the Bureau of Indian Affairs.Footnote ¹⁷ In summary, these scholars see citizenship as mostly impotent. Other scholars, such as Alexandra Witken and K. Tsianina Lomawaima, give citizenship much more power. In their analysis, citizenship was the apogee of imperialism. It put on full display the oppressive control of Congress and constituted the “ultimate act of domination by a relentless alien power.”Footnote ¹⁸ These scholars see citizenship as a death knell to tribal sovereignty. Citizenship, rather than impotent, was all-powerful.

Protests like the Pueblos’ complicate these portraits. The Pueblos certainly saw citizenship as threatening and as a powerful force that had the potential to destroy their communities. But they also helped mitigate its worst potential effects. They proved their collective power regularly, and the United States was unable to pass the Carter Bill and other similar legislation. Protests thwarted some of the most destructive parts of prior citizenship bills. The Pueblos were one of three major Indigenous groups fighting the passage of the Carter Bill. The Haudenosaunee mobilized arguments of political sovereignty and national integrity in its opposition, and the Society of American Indians, the premier pan-Indian reform organization of the time, rejected it based on the bill’s inability to meaningfully secure equal rights for Indigenous people. The Pueblos—the subject of this article—led the attack based on ideas of cultural sovereignty.Footnote ¹⁹ The Pueblos were in a unique position to bring attention to the Carter Bill’s attack on cultural integrity, for they had amassed powerful allies in artist colonies surrounding their communities. Cultivating reverence (tinged with paternalism) for Pueblo cultures and histories, these artists—particularly those located in Taos—had the ear of the era’s most powerful publications.

Though the SAI, Haudenosaunee, and Pueblos did not coordinate their efforts, together, these groups were successful in holding off U.S. citizenship for four years. Yet their protests—particularly those of the Pueblos—had much larger implications. By protesting citizenship, by insisting on the value, rectitude, and longevity of their culture, the Pueblos changed notions of citizenship itself. While citizenship for American Indians had long been predicated on conformity to white American ideals, by 1924 such foundations would be shaken.

From the vantage point of American officials, the citizenship status of the Pueblo people was unclear in 1920. Indeed, during their time among the Pueblo people in 1920, American congressmen debated more than once whether or not Pueblo individuals already had American citizenship. Depending on the day and the authorities at hand, their answers could be different.Footnote ²⁰ The Pueblo nations had experienced life both independently and under many different jurisdictions by 1920. By then, they populated nineteen different pueblo communities in New Mexico, connected through language, culture, and history. Occupants of the North American Southwest, the Pueblos had seen and survived incursions by at least three foreign powers.Footnote ²¹ Until 1821, they were subjects of the Spanish crown, but became citizens of Mexico when the country declared its independence. When the United States and Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, the status of the Pueblo peoples became the subject of great debate. The Treaty called for “Mexicans now established in territories previously belonging to Mexico, and which remain for the future within the limits of the United States” to declare if they wished to retain their Mexican citizenship within a year of the treaty’s signature. If these Mexicans did not proclaim their intention to keep their status, then they “shall be considered to have elected to become citizens of the United States.”Footnote ²² The Pueblos had been made Mexican citizens through the Plan of Iguala; thus, many assumed they were included in the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo’s provision.

Yet officials within the New Mexico Territory found much to argue about. According to Deborah Rosen, “In practice, legislation pertaining to Pueblo citizenship [in territorial New Mexico] remained ambiguous, with some statutes suggesting citizenship and others denying it.”Footnote ²³ Not until the late 1860s would “the judiciary [step] in assertively to resolve the issue.”Footnote ²⁴ In 1876, in US v. Joseph, the Supreme Court upheld lower court decisions that ruled Pueblo individuals to be citizens.Footnote ²⁵ This would more or less be the status quo until New Mexico prepared to become a state in 1912. As federal and state jurisdictions shifted, so, too, did Pueblo citizenship.Footnote ²⁶ The following year, the Supreme Court ruled in US v. Sandoval that the Pueblos’ citizenship status was unclear.Footnote ²⁷

New Mexico officials found the Pueblos’ murky status inconvenient and petitioned Congress to clarify their political status. Ongoing land disputes between Pueblo communities and New Mexicans made many legislators eager to force upon the Pueblos a definite legal position, one that would make them accountable to state courts. On May 4, 1920, New Mexico Secretary of State J. Manuel Martinez sent to Congress a House Joint Memorial “requesting Congress of the United States to pass legislation defining the legal status of the Pueblo Indians in the State of New Mexico.” In the memorial, legislators declared the Pueblos’ status to be a “confused situation” that was leading to “the moral tone of said Indians … being rapidly lowered.” Lack of clarity was producing “bitter and needless differences between them and their non-Indian neighbors, and a general contentious state of feeling.”Footnote ²⁸ While the memorial called for clarity of legal status—not necessarily citizenship—a congressional aide filed the memorial with petitions and memorials resolutions pertaining to full citizen rights to American Indians. Citizenship for the Pueblos would mean additional state control over the Pueblos and allow some of the ongoing land disputes into state courts.Footnote ²⁹

While there may have been confusion on the part of American legislators, there was little confusion among Pueblo representatives: The Pueblo people were not American citizens, nor did they want to be. Repeatedly and consistently, Pueblo activists rebuffed congressmen’s attempts to sell them on citizenship. They seized their opportunity as the congressional delegation that included Carter settled in town. On the first day of public meetings in New Mexico, the committee assembled at 10:15 a.m. at Tesuque Pueblo. There, Jose Ramos Archuleta of Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo passed to committee members a petition from “the Indians of the pueblo of San Juan [Ohkay Owingeh], Taos, Picuris, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Nambe, and Tesugue [sic]” requesting an amendment to the “Indian citizenship bill so that it will not apply to the Pueblo Indians.”Footnote ³⁰ According to the Albuquerque Morning Journal, the communities planned to send six delegates to Washington, D.C., to directly protest the bill.Footnote ³¹ As Carter and other congressmen began to listen to testimony from Pueblo people, they were confronted time and time again with the unpopularity of citizenship.

The strongest objection to citizenship came from Pablo Abeita, who saw citizenship as an attack on cultural integrity and sovereignty. Abeita spoke as a representative with the All Pueblo Council, a political organization that had various levels of support from the nineteen Pueblo communities in New Mexico. He was no stranger to political dignitaries, having met with every U.S. president since Grover Cleveland and having acted as an interpreter during King Albert of Belgium’s state visit in 1919.Footnote ³² Abeita rose in 1920 to offer a rebuke to the committee in general and Carter specifically. Abeita began his address by thanking the committee for taking time to listen to him. “It is very seldom that an Indian is being privileged to say something to such a distinguished gathering,” he remarked, continuing on to draw a stark picture of the differences between Indians and the white men in front of him. “I am an Indian as you see, a Blanket Indian as the white people call those Indians who return from school and pick up a blanket.” While the blanket looked much different from the congressmen’s overcoats, they, to Abeita’s “way of thinking” were “made for the same purpose.” Yet the blanket was much more functional than the overcoat, Abeita asserted, and provided the Indian with flexibility for moments of attack or crisis. The blanket could be dropped and discarded with ease; the overcoat “you have to have your valet to take it off and by the time your valet starts to help you take if off the game is gone or the bear is upon you.” Do not judge me by the blanket, Abeita concluded: “Look at the Indian who is wearing the blanket.”Footnote ³³ While Abeita urged his listeners to look beyond his appearance, the garments of the respective parties became a metaphor for the relationship between the Pueblos and the American nation. Each judged the other for its culture and habits, and neither wanted to be forced into the ways of the other. Yet the blanket and the overcoat could co-exist, unabused by the other.

Abeita continued his speech by drawing a history of signs and the Great Spirit. When the Great Spirit placed the Pueblos on the land (and “said it was our land”), he also told them to watch for signs of two people: the people from the East who were “white as snow” and people from the West who were “sun burnt … deformed from the heat of setting sun.” If the people from the East arrived first, the world would last long, but if the people from the West arrived first, the world would be short. Thus, when white people arrived from “the rising sun,” the Pueblos were heartened, for the Great Spirit also told them that “their hearts are white and just.” Yet they had also been warned that “their greed is great,” and where the Pueblos would see this greed, the white people would see only “justice.” When the two sides met, each, according to Abeita, was indomitable. “Your aim is to conquer the world and have very near done it,” Abeita remarked, “but you did not conquer us Pueblo Indians, did not have to.”

Instead, the strength of each community produced an impasse. “An Indian is not a part of you nor you a part of us,” he proclaimed, continuing, “The trouble is that you are unconquerable, you cannot be whipped,—you was made to stay.” And so, an uneasy, aloof allegiance was made, with Pueblos sending men and money to support the United States during the Great War; they had, according to Abeita, “cast our lot with you.” But casting their lot with Americans did not mean living with Americans: “You have a coat and I have blanket: you eat on a marble table and we eat on a Malpai tableland.” The Americans, proclaimed Abeita, should leave the Pueblos alone, without forcing them to change their garments, their furniture, or their citizenship status. By making Indians citizens, they were mistaking their greed for justice. “Do not throw to the winds the great credit that the Great Spirit gave you but keep it,” concluded Abeita. Let the Indian “live in peace” and do not force him into the ways of the white man, he emphasized. Citizenship and cultural adaptation required consent, and the Carter Bill suggested otherwise.Footnote ³⁴

Abeita’s speech highlighted the main objections to U.S. citizenship that congressmen would confront repeatedly during their time in New Mexico and beyond. For one, the Pueblos viewed citizenship as an attempt at cultural assimilation. In Abeita’s formulation, citizenship was an attempt to force Indians into overcoats. When the Albuquerque Morning Journal reported on the Pueblos’ protests, they reported that “the reasonable conviction of the most advanced of their [Indian] race” was that there was “no reason why he should ever leave his own ways of dress and living, nor the customs and diversions which are dear to him.” American politics and government were “Greek to him” and unneeded to continue his “life in his pueblo.”Footnote ³⁵ Some Native Americans beyond the Pueblos felt the same concerns, such as Assiniboine citizen Joshua Wetsit, who proclaimed that U.S. citizenship was “painting the red man white.” When “selected for citizenship,” Wetsit asserted, “I refused it.” Footnote ³⁶ Louise J. Bear, a member of the Society of American Indians and a Winnebago citizen, feared that “it sounds that if we become citizens that we are going to throw away our old people.”Footnote ³⁷

The Pueblos believed the Carter Bill’s attack on cultural sovereignty went even further; the bill would make their land vulnerable by transforming their holding practices and by making them accountable to local and national taxes. This was not a new concern for the Pueblos; instead, it was the latest incarnation of attempts to make their holdings taxable.Footnote ³⁸ A key provision of the Carter Bill called for a finalizing of tribal rolls and for the allotment of land that had escaped such a fate under the Dawes Act. Newspapers at the time saw clearly the connection between land holding and cultural integrity, with the Albuquerque Morning Journal reporting that as “[t]he present communal system of holding land will be entirely broken up” so too would “the manner of life which the Indians have followed for generations.”Footnote ³⁹ While the activists that midwifed the Dawes Act saw this as a virtue of their legislation, by the 1920s, their thinking had been challenged consistently. Native and non-native activists alike decried the extensive loss of land the act brought. Well underway by 1920, the Dawes Act would ultimately lead to the loss of approximately eighty-six million acres of indigenous land.Footnote ⁴⁰

The Pueblos and allies also feared that having escaped allotment, taxation would bring them to their knees. “They could not bear the huge burden of taxation which would be imposed upon them with the granting of citizenship,” wrote the Albuquerque Morning Journal. The Pueblos “would eventually lose their lands for unpaid taxes,” a trend “Pablo”—as the Journal called Abeita—and his people “clearly” saw.Footnote ⁴¹ Indeed, historian Janet A. McDonnell estimates that of the eighty-six million acres of land loss through allotment, about twenty-three million acres were fee-patented lands lost, with at least 100,000 American Indians alienating their titles due to unpaid taxes and assorted debts.Footnote ⁴² As congressmen left New Mexico and toured other Native American reservations, they would be exposed to the same fear repeatedly, leading Carter to willfully misrepresent his bill multiple times.Footnote ⁴³

To Abeita, the most objectionable portion of the Carter Bill was one that imposed citizenship upon the Pueblos without consent. From the Dawes Act until the 1920s, the American legislators were consumed with the question of what would qualify an Indian for citizenship—under what terms, in other words, the U.S. government would consent to have American Indians brought into the body politic.Footnote ⁴⁴ Consumed with this issue, they paid little attention to the fact that many Indigenous people had no interest in seeking this consent nor did they offer their consent to be made into citizens. The issue reached a boiling point in the 1920s, as American legislators realized that many American Indians were outright refusing citizenship. The Carter Bill—in its unilateral imposition of citizenship—was meant to make this a moot issue.Footnote ⁴⁵ Emboldened by flexes of plenary power in determining the civic status of people within newly acquired territory, congressmen did not question whether they had the ability to impose citizenship. Abeita maintained over and over that “the white man has no right to bring about [citizenship and allotment of land] by force.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Volitional allegiance was a key American principle, according to Abeita.

Beyond the legal questions, Abeita raised and relied on moral ones. “Let [a man] follow his own path, don’t obstruck [sic] him,” said Abeita. “Don’t trod on him or knock him down, but invite him to join in, but don’t pull him in to it by force.” Abeita left open the possibility that Pueblo Indians would one day be interested in citizenship, but as of yet, they were unconvinced that the American way was the better way. “In conclusion,” he said, “I will say that if you will leave us alone and just show us that your way is a better way than the Indian way and show us with a smile and not with a smite we will get there some day not by legislation but by consent and good will.” “In the end,” he concluded, this “will be a lot better for all of us” and much more attuned to true justice.Footnote ⁴⁷

The Pueblos, therefore, had a much different vision of the proper Pueblo-American relationship than members of Congress. In his opening speech, Abeita articulated what he saw as the current and ideal relationship between the Pueblos and the Americans: one of mutual—albeit uneven—protection. The Pueblo nations had sent their men and invested their money in the American fight against Germany, and the American nation would help solve the collective issue of water irrigation in the New Mexico area.Footnote ⁴⁸ “We need your help which we did not some three hundred years ago,” said Abeita, “but now that you have gobbled up all our help and means of our help, it remains for you to help us.” The Pueblos, Abeita reminded the Americans, “cast our lot with you and we will stay with you, by you and for you till dooms day [sic].”Footnote ⁴⁹ Citizenship in the United States, however, seemed to bring doomsday much nearer, for the status would throw into confusion Pueblo status vis-à-vis state and federal jurisdiction. New Mexican courts were famously hostile to Pueblo land interests, and the Pueblos counted on federal intervention to stay local hands. Citizenship, some feared, would throw their land claims into local and state courts, removing the buffer of Washington, D.C. All in all, citizenship made protections the Pueblos relied on—tax exemptions, moderated state power, communal land holding—more tenuous.

This was not the first time Abeita had framed the relationship between Americans and Pueblos in terms of mutual protection while still rejecting U.S. overtures toward citizenship. In 1913, he rebuffed attempts made by the Rodman Wanamaker Expedition of Citizenship to the North American Indian to sign a statement of allegiance. The Wanamaker Expedition was the brainchild of Joseph K. Dixon, a member of the Wanamaker Company’s Educational Bureau and a “self-styled expert on Indian life.”Footnote ⁵⁰ While Wanamaker was a popular department store, its owners concerned themselves with everything from the arts, to aviation, to Indian affairs. In 1913, Wanamaker funded a six-month tour of eighty-nine Indian reservations. There, Dixon and his crew asked Indigenous representatives to raise the American flag on their land and to “strengthen in their hearts the feeling of allegiance and friendship for their country.”Footnote ⁵¹ “It is a high, imperative call,” wrote Dixon, “before the last of this great race shall succumb to the iconoclasm of civilization.” Dripping with paternalism and infused with imagery of the disappearing, noble savage, the expedition had the endorsement of presidents William Taft and Woodrow Wilson, Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane, Indian Agent James McLaughlin, and derived funding from financial elites such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller as well as Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. Dixon and the Wanamaker company hoped to not only rally Indigenous support for American citizenship and patriotism but also for a memorial to the Native American to be erected in New York Harbor.

When Dixon and James McLaughlin presented their case to the Pueblos, Abeita rejected their call for allegiance, speaking as “the most influential Pueblo Indian in New Mexico” and as the appointed representative for four Pueblos.Footnote ⁵² “I feel personally that I cannot sign this allegiance,” said Abeita, “because I feel my people have not been treated right by the United States’s government’s people.” While the American government and Bureau officials had helped the Pueblos, their people abused the Pueblos at every turn. “Protect us as did the Spanish government, as did the Mexican government,” Abeita called, “and we will sign with our hearts… . Protect us as we protected your people when they were few in this country.” Abeita claimed he would walk from New Mexico clear to New York to sign once he felt the United States was upholding their part of the bargain.Footnote ⁵³

The desire for a relationship based on protection rather than civic inclusion found other advocates in New Mexico. One of the most poignant moments of the 1920 congressional visit to the Pueblo communities was testimony given via translator by former Taos Pueblo Governor Porfirio Mirabel. Mirabel detailed how Pueblo land claims had been systematically challenged and abused at the hands of the U.S. government. “One thing I fear very much is about citizenship,” Mirabel ended his testimony. “All I ask the Government of the United States is that we want to be left alone and not to be made citizens, to be as always we have been from the old time of our ancestors’ time, not molesting us any as to the citizenship.” To emphasize his point further, Mirabel ended forcefully, “We do not want to be citizens.”Footnote ⁵⁴ After delivering his testimony, Mirabel faced questioning by congressmen, including by Congressman Carter, who wanted to know if opposition to citizenship was based purely on the threat of taxation. When Mirabel wavered, explaining he had not studied how the bill would affect taxation, Carter told the translator, “Tell him that I wrote the bill myself and I am an Indian, and I wrote if for the benefit of the Indians.” Clearly stretching his case, Carter said, “ … I wrote it with the view not imposing anything upon the Indians, but with a view to giving him some of the rights and liberties which he does not now have.” Mirabel found Chair of House Committee on Indian Affairs Homer Snyder’s case unconvincing: “I do not want to be wiped out. I want to be free, as I have always been. We do not want to be citizens.” Yet he clarified that did not mean the Pueblos wanted to be left alone by the United States: “We want its protection always.”Footnote ⁵⁵ While the American congressmen saw the relationship with the Pueblos as proceeding toward citizenship, the Pueblos were firm in their conviction otherwise.

Taken as a whole, these Pueblo protests are an example of what Kevin Bruyneel has called “the third space of sovereignty,” in which American Indians challenged the ideologically and physically imposed boundaries of U.S. power. While U.S. officials sought to draw clear lines around Pueblo status—to make them definite, legal citizens—Pueblos articulated another “indigenous political identity, neither fully inside nor fully outside the political, legal and cultural boundaries of the United States.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Protests from the Pueblos, joined with resistance from the Haudenosaunee peoples, the Society of American Indians, and individual American Indians, ultimately frustrated congressmen’s attempts to make U.S. citizens of Native peoples. The Carter Bill quickly lost momentum over the summer of 1920, and by the fall, it was permanently stalled. In June of 1921, Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall penned a letter to representatives of the Pueblo communities asking for information “concerning your customs, your laws, your methods of election, and all other matters pertaining to your Pueblo governments.” From better understanding would follow better protection, Fall promised, and his future “instructions generally will be to the effect that no interference will be permitted with your trial or Pueblo customs, elections, etc.”Footnote ⁵⁷

The Pueblos had won—albeit temporarily. Just four years later, in June of 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Indian Citizenship Act, making all American Indians “born within the territorial limits of the United States” citizens.Footnote ⁵⁸ It might be tempting to see this as a final loss, as a sidelining of the Pueblos’ opposition to citizenship. Afterall, one of the hallmarks of the ICA was its lack of choice and consent. Yet looked at from a different angle, the Pueblos’ protest was quite influential in the preservation of Pueblo cultural sovereignty and producing changes to citizenship policies and ideology.

The twentieth century had opened with Indian citizenship predicated on conformity to Anglo-American culture. The Dawes Act, for example, made citizenship contingent on individual land ownership or an Indigenous individual’s desire to prove they had adopted “the habits of civilized life.” Moreover, the governmental ceremony used to induct American Indian people into the citizenry—the Last Arrow Ceremony—was an elaborate performative “shedding” of Indigenous names, clothing, and tools for the adoption of the Anglo-American counterparts.Footnote ⁵⁹ To be a citizen was to perform and present a certain way. Indigenous activists, such as the Pueblo leaders featured here, argued for the value and persistence of their cultures in the face of these pressures. Their lives and “habits” were of benefit separate and apart from those of Anglo-Americans, they argued. And as the twentieth century reached the end of its first quarter, there was evidence that the cultural plurality advocated by the Pueblos was finding followers.

Events from the Pueblos’ own history highlight this growing, yet begrudging, acceptance of Indigenous cultures. Take, for example, the intense reaction and resistance to the 1922 Bursum Bill. The bill was introduced by New Mexico Senator Holm O. Bursum at the suggestion of Secretary Fall and was meant to settle at least a century of competing land claims between the Pueblos and the non-Pueblo settlers in New Mexico. While Fall had promised the U.S. government would respect Pueblo self-governance and cultural practice, he came to look a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The first draft of the bill would have stripped an already dwindling Pueblo land base, and the Pueblo people—represented through the All Pueblo Council—rallied to resistance. As Bursum and Fall soon found out, the Pueblos had amassed quite powerful allies. Writers Mabel Dodge Sterne (later Luhan through her marriage to Tony Lujan of Taos Pueblo), D.H. Lawrence, Mary Austin, Alice Corbin Henderson, and Elizabeth S. Sergeant had all taken an interest in the Pueblos and inhabited artist colonies in the Taos and Santa Fe areas; Stella Atwood, chairman of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs Indian Welfare Committee hired social worker (and future Bureau of Indian Affairs commissioner) John Collier to run a publicity campaign. Seeing the Pueblos under threat, the writers lent their pens in defense. Articles in The New Republic, Outlook, Survey, The Nation, The Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Times soon drew attention to the Pueblos’ situation and drew firm connections between Pueblo land and culture; they also affirmed the Pueblos’ right to their own customs.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Indian, wrote John Collier, “represents not an inferior civilization to ours, the White Man’s, but a different civilization.”Footnote ⁶¹

In 1923, representatives from the All Pueblo Council, including Pablo Abeita, once again had an audience with members of Congress—senators on the Subcommittee of the Committee on Public Lands and Surveys. As Abeita argued against the Bursum Bill, he reminded senators he had spoken to their colleagues just a few years before. He reminded them that the Great Spirit had judged their hearts white and just. He reminded them that their “simple act[s] of justice” could have grave consequences for America’s Native people. And he reminded them that the Pueblos were meant to help set their vision of that “invincible thing called justice” right.Footnote ⁶²

Between article writing, petition drives, and protests in Congress, the Pueblos and their allies brought the bill down, and they continued to challenge pieces of policy and legislation that sought to weaken Pueblo customs. As Tisa Wenger has shown, these controversies marked a watershed moment in federal policy. While assimilationist, Christian-oriented reformers “had long dominated Indian affairs,” new reformers, “who saw positive value in Indian traditions” began to gain ground.Footnote ⁶³ Through the efforts of the Pueblos and their advocates, a more secular path in Indian affairs was on the horizon, one rooted in nascent ideas of cultural pluralism.

The Pueblos, in their arguments against citizenship, had stretched the bounds of citizenship itself. When the ICA became law, it did so as the first Native American general citizenship act that separated cultural (“habit”) requirements from citizenship. While assimilationist pressure continued at extreme levels, it would not be officially required for citizenship. The Carter Bill would have forced allotment on nations who had not yet undergone said process, and the ICA contained no such provision. The Carter Bill graded rights and privileges of citizenship based on blood quantum and “competency;” the ICA did not. Culture was no longer a predeterminate for citizenship. Joined with the work by anthropologists and theorists, a more culturally pluralistic model of citizenship was born. Whether they wanted the political designation or not, citizens could be dressed in overcoats or blankets.

Indeed, the Carter Bill’s demise was an early, if isolated, victory for cultural pluralism. Historians usually credit the theory—that minorities have a right to their cultures amidst a larger, dominant society—to Horace M. Kallen. In the same year that Congress passed the ICA, Kallen coined the phrase cultural pluralism in Culture and Democracy in the United States, though he had been cultivating the idea since the early 1900s.Footnote ⁶⁴ In pluralism, Kallen saw the health of society, particularly one founded on democratic ideals. “Democracy,” Kallen wrote, “involves not the elimination of differences but the perfection and conservation of differences.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Other anti-assimilationists advocated for an American melting pot, in which differences eventually boiled away to create a new unified stock, but for Kallen, this eventual homogeneity was undesirable. Instead, Kallen advocated an American orchestra, in which each unique instrument (i.e., culture) contributed to a distinctive sound to an ongoing symphony. Unlike the assimilationists and melting pot advocates, Kallen believed differences could produce harmony. Radical for its time, cultural pluralism did not find mainstream acceptance until mid-century.

Abeita’s fight against the Carter Bill demonstrates two things: First, that cultural pluralism had grassroots, that it was being practiced and advocated for by members of a marginalized community as Kallen theorized in an ivory tower. Second, the Pueblos show that American Indians were in a unique position to win acceptance of culturally pluralistic ideas as other minorities—particularly immigrants and African Americans—faced increased pressure to assimilate. Indeed, historians of cultural pluralism have noted how marginalized the theory—never mind the practice—was in the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁶⁶ World War I’s Americanization campaign targeted hyphenated Americans, Congress restricted immigration, and African Americans faced the brutality of Jim Crow laws and emboldened racism. Toleration of differences, never mind the celebration of them, was far from mainstream.

Yet the Pueblos had made inroads. As Philip J. Deloria has written, American national identities have always been constructed in relation to Indianness, whether through rejection of a savage “other” or the glorification of an eco-imbued, romantic “primitive.” During the early twentieth century, as fears of modernity filled newsprint, Indians came to represent the “pure” and “authentic,” the “hope for modern society.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Thus, non-Indigenous people like Mary Austin, John Collier, and D.H. Lawrence called for the preservation of American Indian culture as an antidote to modernity’s ills. The cultures that American officials had tried to eliminate were now their people’s preferred medicine. More than other minorities, then, American Indians had a bargaining chip when advocating cultural integrity. If non-Indigenous Americans wanted the customs and inspiration of their Indigenous compatriots, then they could not rally around the assimilationist messages of the late nineteenth century. Many Indigenous activists took advantage of these sentiments. Abeita, for example, joined the likes of Charles Eastman (Santee) and Gertrude Bonnin (Yankton) in donning tribal regalia and, in the words of Deloria, “using antimodern primitivism to defend native cultures against the negative stereotypes left over from colonial conquest.”Footnote ⁶⁸ When Abeita spoke at the YWCA in Albuquerque, he dressed not in his day-to-day garb, but in clothing his interlocuters associated with Indianness. He was, he proclaimed, “a blanket Indian.” By projecting what white Americans associated with Indians, Abeita formed a visual representation of what the Carter Bill endangered, the very culture that congressional constituents sought. For the Pueblos, a different culture was a defense. For other American minorities, it produced a target.

The arguments allowing for cultural pluralism’s growth in the Pueblo case were also harbingers of cultural pluralism’s risks. On the one hand, Abeita’s arguments called for greater Native American autonomy. But the sentiments he exploited—the modernist’s hunger for purity—often froze American Indian peoples in a historical, static mold. While people like Mary Austin may have seen value in Native American cultures, she did not see them as dynamic, fluid, and as flexible as that of non-Natives. This type of pigeon-holing could lead to what Jeffrey Sissons has called “oppressive authenticity,” ultimately its own type of racism.Footnote ⁶⁹ As critics of Kallen’s theories would point out, cultural pluralism could traffic in stereotypes and flirt with ideas of racial predestination. While pluralism may have secured the Pueblos more autonomy, it could present a more uniform and fixed portrayal of the Pueblo people. Moreover, this strategy perpetuated the idea that accepted cultures had to “add value” to the larger society. While Abeita may have argued that each person had a right to their heritage and culture as a human right, the larger non-Indigenous society selectively protected cultures based on a “value added” metric.

Abeita rose to defend his people as the norms, rights, and responsibilities of citizenship were changing rapidly in America and across Indian country. His defense and the protests of the Pueblos demonstrate how American Indians forcibly interjected themselves in this milieu. These activists ask us to revisit the central paradigm of citizenship: that civic belonging is sought and increases people’s rights. Citizenship is much more dynamic and double-edged. It is a tool of not only rights and responsibilities but of force and compulsion. For those already acquainted with this portrayal of citizenship, particularly as it relates to settler-colonial societies, the Pueblo resistance to U.S. citizenship offers other benefits. They emphasize that conversations about citizenship were not one-sided. By dismissing citizenship as impotent or by deeming it an unqualified imperialistic construction, we miss the ways in which Indigenous activists subverted imperial intentions and stripped citizenship of its most coercive implications. The ICA was hardly any of these activists’ dream, but it also was not the nightmare presented in 1920. Even after the passage of the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, Indigenous individuals and nations continued to challenge the meanings of U.S. citizenship, frustrating non-Indigenous conceptions of belonging and blurring the lines between citizenship and sovereignty.