Introduction

On June 2, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Indian Citizenship Act (ICA), which unilaterally made United States citizens of all indigenous people living in the United States. This new law made citizens of approximately 125,000 of the 300,000 indigenous people in the country (the remainder were already U.S. citizens).¹

In this article, I begin with a brief look into the meaning and context of the ICA itself, and then turn to its direct concern, which is how indigenous people of this era viewed the prospect of becoming and being U.S. citizens. In this regard, I have found that two distinct and direct indigenous responses to the prospect of U.S. citizenship prevailed at this time: (1) support for it as a just measure to secure the long-standing political identity of indigenous people in America; and (2) outright rejection of it in the name of tribal sovereignty and citizenship. These two stances offer a way to look into the complex question of the unique status and location of indigenous political identity in the North American context. I define political identity as that which binds a group together through its collective vision of how to generate, sustain, or expand the group's capacity to determine its future.²

No single indigenous viewpoint of the early twentieth century better and more consistently personifies the impossibility and slippage of the American nation-state than that of Tuscarora Chief Clinton Rickard, who articulated an indigenous political identity that explicitly stood for defying and crossing the borders of settler nation-states like the United States and Canada. While Rickard stands as the best historical representative of the “reject U.S. citizenship” position, I argue that his perspective also defines the general politics of ambivalent Americans. This politics, in the dying words of Chief Rickard's friend, Cayuga Chief Deskaheh, seeks to “’fight for the line,' meaning the border.”³

The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924

The Indian Citizenship Act states:

It is important to note that the Indian Citizenship Act conferred U.S. citizenship on indigenous people unilaterally. Specifically, this unilateral action meant that, unlike earlier federal laws such as the 1919 act that offered citizenship to indigenous World War I veterans, indigenous people did not have to apply for citizenship after the 1924 law.⁵

Within the very language of this American federal law, then, we have already located the presence of “border-crossing” as a vibrant and integral component of indigenous/U.S. political relations. This is so, most particularly, with regards to the dual citizenship implication of the ICA, which confirmed that indigenous people could be legally recognized citizens of two polities. Following the logic of the ICA, tribal citizenship cannot be contained within American political space and identity. While dual citizenship was implicitly codified through the phrasing of the ICA, it was not the explicit objective of those most responsible for its passage.

As it was passed through the House and Senate Committees on Indian Affairs in the Sixty-Eighth Congress, the Indian Citizenship Bill developed its precise language as a consequence of being shaped by two political groups: Progressive legislators and white American activists. In the 1920s, the Progressive movement and political party were in decline, but individual Progressive legislators still maintained some power, particularly through their roles on congressional committees.⁶

In contrast to the Progressives' focus on regulatory matters, a number of white American citizens calling themselves the “Friends of the Indian” worked to address the concerns and conditions of indigenous people for many decades prior to the ICA.¹¹

There were two main views compelling a drift away from full citizenship: (1) indigenous people were not “civilizing” rapidly enough to be competent full citizens, and (2) nonindigenous Americans were taking advantage of indigenous people and the allotment process to get easy and cheap title over tribal land. These conclusions led Americans reformers to advocate increased federal guardianship: the “idea that the government had an obligation to supervise and protect native citizens.”¹⁶

Not long after passage of the ICA, an editorialist from the magazine The Survey referred to such a citizen-ward status as “baffling” and “anomalous.”²⁰

We Are the First American Citizens

In 1915, Seneca Arthur C. Parker, an anthropologist, asked some pointed questions regarding the status of indigenous people in the U.S. context: “Who is the Indian? What is he in the eyes of the law? The legal status of the Indian has never been defined. He is not an alien, he is not a foreigner, he is not a citizen.”²²

One of these voices was that of Charles Eastman, a Santee Sioux and founding member of the SAI, who, in the early twentieth century, “had been considered by many early reformers to be a testament to acculturation.”²⁴

In a 1915 article in Lippencott's, “The Indian as Citizen,” Eastman observed that the forces of civilization seem to be winning over – or wearing down – indigenous people: “after due protest and resistance, [the American Indian] has accepted the situation; and having accepted it, he is found to be easily governed by civilized law and usages.”²⁶

Eastman here is mapping out a complicated relationship between, on the one hand, an indigenous political identity that is being transformed – in his terms, “civilized” – through contact with American political culture and, on the other hand, the need to preserve and defend the autonomy of indigenous people as they gradually integrate into the American polity, ultimately as full citizens. He did not want this mapping to be seamless.

While Eastman did want indigenous people to become legal U.S. citizens, he neither wanted them forced into this status nor compelled to accept and perform the prevailing American political culture “in toto against [their] original views and wishes.” Thus, the border-crossing is along cultural lines, with “native American” cultural influences – what I take him to mean when he refers to “religious and racial codes” – maintaining some distance from the “modern civilization” of American political culture. This was not an overtly radical position to take, as is evident in the fact that he qualified his argument for a form of cultural pluralism by stating that it should only extend “as far as is compatible with the public good.” Eastman was focused on cultural issues rather than expressly material or political concerns. This emphasis on cultural over material concerns was again evident four years later in a commentary he wrote for the SAI's newly renamed American Indian Magazine, where Eastman concluded his “Indian's plea for freedom” by stating: “We do not ask for territorial grant or separate government. We ask only to enjoy with Europe's sons the full privileges of American citizenship.”²⁸

Yavapai Carlos Montezuma was one of the most politically outspoken indigenous people of the Progressive Era. He held such strong views, in fact, that he often found himself at odds with his own colleagues in the SAI – and eventually broke from the organization and began to publish his own newsletter, Wassaja – because he felt they were not seriously committed to one of his primary political objectives, the abolishment of the BIA. In this sense, Montezuma was certainly more radical than Eastman. In a manner that might have earned him honorary membership in the Progressive Party, Montezuma saw the BIA as the critical roadblock “keep[ing] us from our rights.” He made this statement in 1917 in Wassaja, in the course of writing a scathing critique of the American policy of drafting indigenous men to fight for the United States in World War I, despite the fact that many of these men were not U.S. citizens. To Montezuma, the fault for this life-threatening injustice was the BIA's, which “tells the country that we are competent to be soldiers, but are not competent to be citizens.”³⁰

Montezuma's solution to the problem of noncitizen indigenous men being drafted into military service was not to demand that they be exempted from the draft. Rather, he used this moment as the means for making an even louder case for the full, legal recognition of indigenous citizenship in America. I use the term recognition intentionally, as Montezuma argued that the draft further revealed that indigenous people have been active and competent citizens for centuries:

To his question “what are we now?” Montezuma answers that the indigenous person is “THE FIRST AMERICAN CITIZEN. Why not? He was here before Columbus, he was here before Washington, he was here before Lincoln.” In this sense, citizenship is not something that must be conferred or granted but rather is a “just title” that must be “bestow[ed]” before any demands, such as military service, can be made upon indigenous people by the U.S. government. This “bestowal” is the just way to treat indigenous people, who he calls the “true Americans.”³¹

Writing in the late nineteenth century, French political theorist Ernest Renan argued that “forgetting, I would go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.”³²

When he states that indigenous men are willing to fight under the U.S. flag in World War I to “defend the country of our forefathers” as they have done for “five hundred years,” Montezuma writes a narrative of indigenous political identity as a form of American citizenship that goes back, at least, half a millennium and continues on actively to the present. In this way, he traces out an indigenous-American political identity that crosses the historical boundaries of a U.S.-American political identity. Montezuma does this by revealing what Homi Bhabha calls a tension between “the people as an a priori historical presence, a pedagogical object, and the people constructed in the performance of narrative, its enunciatory ’present' marked in the repetition and pulsation of the national sign.”³⁴

In the course of his passionate arguments, Montezuma, like Eastman, did not present a direct challenge to the U.S. nation and state – other than demanding the abolishment of the BIA. Rather, both men drew upon the ambivalent status of indigenous political identity in the U.S. context to say that participation of indigenous citizens among the people constructed in the performance of the narrative of American political identity could not involve simple assimilation or integration to preexisting and unwavering cultural or historical boundaries. The ambivalence here is the performance of two culturally and historically overlapping forms of American political identity, constructed through indigenous- and U.S.-centered narratives, that will never seamlessly map onto one another. Reading the claims of Eastman and Montezuma as articulations of the ambivalent American political identity of indigenous people captures the manner in which these men sought to argue simultaneously for U.S. citizenship and for the persistence of a culturally distinct indigenous identity. This form of political argument in favor of U.S. citizenship for indigenous people prevailed beyond the war and through the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act.

Right after World War I, Yankton Sioux Zitkala Sa (a.k.a. Gertrude Bonin), secretary of the SAI and the editor of American Indian Magazine, echoed the ambivalent American theme in an editorial addressing what indigenous people want in return for their participation in and support of the U.S. war effort: “The Red man asks for a simple thing – citizenship in the land that was once his own – America. . . . There never was a time more opportune than now for America to enfranchise the Red man!”³⁵

To this end, Zitkala Sa and her husband, Yankton Sioux Raymond Bonin, formed the National Council of American Indians (NCAI) in 1926, a “pan-Indian group” with local chapters “on numerous reservations.”³⁶

I take the pairing of the notions of “racial self-respect” and “loyalty to the United States” as further evidence of the efforts of mainstream indigenous political actors to continue to argue for a form of meaningful U.S. citizenship that does not remove from indigenous people their distinctive cultural, and by extension, political identity. That this argument was articulated after the passage of the ICA, and thus after legal status was secured, indicates that this rhetorical strategy is aimed at carefully defining and manifesting a form of substantive political participation for indigenous people in the United States that does not require surrendering a substantial foothold within indigenous communities. Frederick Hoxie has referred to this as the effort to define a “middle position between [the] two extremes” of, on the one hand, abandoning tribal communities for the sake of the “trappings of American civilization” and, on the other hand, completely embracing tribal communities without regard to the reality of modern political development in North America.³⁹

It is indicative of indigenous politics generally that the indigenous political actors of the SAI and the NCAI, who were rather acculturated to and supportive of Euro-American ways, sought to find a way to define a form of political status that involved being an active part of, but not fully contained within, the dominant American polity. They did this for the sake of preserving and supporting the cultural autonomy of indigenous communities, an effort that conveys its own type of challenge to the United States. The challenge is that in crossing boundaries the political claims and narratives of indigenous people reveal, in this case, the cultural and historical limits to the power and purview of U.S. nation and state. As mentioned, this is not a direct challenge. Still, the ability to cross such boundaries in the face of centuries of overwhelming efforts by the U.S. nation and state to oppress and eliminate indigenous tribes – as human beings, collectivities, and cultures – likely contributed to the survival of many tribes to this day. As such, these cultural and historical forms of border-crossing must be given their due. Furthermore, the passage of the ICA, as well as the Johnson Act in 1924, prompted the development of a form of indigenous politics that placed border-crossing – of the most direct kind – at the center of a political challenge to the American nation and state.

Our Citizenship is in Our Own Nations

In July 1924, a little over a month after the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act, the Chippewa Indians of Minnesota held their annual general council meeting at Cass Lake, Minnesota. In his opening address to a council composed of more than seventy delegates representing ten reservations, Benjamin Caswell, President of the Chippewa Indians, Incorporated, stated:

This telling statement represents how some indigenous political leaders foresaw the impact that the ICA could have on their tribal communities and political claims. As discussed earlier, the precise legal language of the ICA promised to grant U.S. citizenship without threatening tribal property rights. Still, this legal assurance, which Caswell likely knew, did not dissuade him from seeing the conferral of U.S. citizenship as a significant step on the path toward the dissolution of indigenous communities as meaningful political entities in the U.S. context.⁴¹

While some tribes, like the Chippewa, sought to adjust to a citizenship status they believed a fait accompli, and still other tribes mostly ignored the ICA because their people were already U.S. citizens and they had more pressing concerns, likely the most vocal indigenous voices on this matter were those that questioned and challenged what they saw to be the imposition of U.S. citizenship.⁴²

Drawing on the discursive strategy noted above, Zane Gordon marked out the historical boundary crossed by the “Indian,” who “prior to . . . the government of the white man . . . was here in undisturbed proprietorship of the entire landed estate of America, with his organized municipal governments, his social institutions, his well-defined property laws.” She then critiqued the ICA's violation of a basic political principles: “No government organized . . . can incorporate into its citizenship anybody or bodies without the[ir] formal consent.” The importance of the latter point stems from a basic political fact: “The Indians are organized in the form of ’nations,' and it has treaties with [other] nations as such. Congress cannot embrace them into the citizenship of the Union by a simple act.” Thus, Zane Gordon sets out a legal, historical and political argument against citizenship to drive home the basic premise that “the diplomatic status of the Indian is established” as a citizen of his or her indigenous nation.⁴⁴

Writing in a newspaper in a major American city to a distinctly nonindigenous American audience, Zane Gordon was seeking to make the case for the historical and legal distinctiveness of an indigenous political identity that could not be consumed by the United States through unilateral legislation. That said, twice in the article she employs the phrase “if the Indian accepted citizenship.” The obvious implication here is that Zane Gordon did not see the ICA as a unilateral fait accompli by the U.S. federal government. Instead, she stated that, whether asked for their consent or not, it is the political obligation of indigenous people to make their own decision about whether they will accept the “gift” of U.S. citizenship. Should they do so, she warned that “both the men and women of the tribes will prove the ready victim of political intrigue.”⁴⁵

During the 1920s, no group of indigenous people more vocally and consistently refused U.S. citizenship than did those tribes and citizens of the Iroquois nations: the Mohawk, Seneca, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Tuscarora. A year before the passage of the ICA, officials from the Department of the Interior visited and sought out the views of the Iroquois – or “New York Indians” – on various matters. In an annual report submitted for a fiscal year of June 30, 1924, the following is conveyed:

This offers clear evidence not only that the U.S. government was aware of the Iroquois' view on U.S. citizenship well before June 1924, but also that it deemed the concerns of the Iroquois to be addressed and their protestations quelled by amending the ICA to include a clause concerning rights to tribal property. However, the ambivalent American citizenship conferred by the ICA was neither what the Iroquois desired nor did it quiet them. A few weeks after the ICA's passage, the political leaders of the Iroquois nations “promptly sent letters to the president and Congress of the United States respectfully declining United States citizenship, rejecting dual citizenship, and stating that the act was written and passed without their knowledge or consent.”⁴⁷

Rickard was born in 1882, raised on the Tuscarora Reservation in western New York, and, at the turn of the century, “enlisted in the U.S. Army and fought for the U.S. government.” His U.S. military service is interesting not only in light of the World War I debate regarding the drafting of indigenous people, but even more so because it underscores the fact that, while he retained strong “anti-assimilation, anti-citizenship, and pro-tribal sovereignty” views throughout his life, Rickard also “moved easily in the white world and even became a leader and educator of whites.”⁴⁸

In his autobiography, Fighting Tuscarora, Rickard describes how the Iroquois viewed the ICA after it passed, “despite our strong opposition”:

Rickard's foremost message here was that the Iroquois people did not want U.S. citizenship in any form, whether it was dual citizenship or citizen-ward status – it amounted to political integration at the expense of “citizenship in our own nations.” Rickard saw political integration, even if it involved qualified or ambivalent American citizenship, as leading to cultural assimilation within America society and the loss of the Iroquois nations' government-to-government political relationship with the United States. On this latter point, it is important to note that ratified treaties between indigenous nations and the U.S. government⁵⁰

Rickard twice refers to the “expectation” that the U.S. government would “protect” the land of the Iroquois nations. This expectation of protection evolves from the very treaties that, for Rickard, secured the status of the Iroquois nations as distinct sovereign governments. Rickard's effort to assert the fundamental importance of Iroquois sovereignty while also demanding that the American state protect Iroquois land reflects a common indigenous political strategy. In this approach, political actors directly oppose colonization through inter-national assertions of sovereignty while also acknowledging the circumstances and opportunities within the colonizer's political realm to advance the cause of indigenous rights and sovereignty. Political theorist James Tully has referred to this as the way in which “indigenous peoples struggle for freedom as peoples in resisting the colonial system as a whole . . . [while they also] exercise their freedom of manoeuvre within the system.”⁵²

While Rickard saw the passage of the ICA in June 1924 as another way that America sought to gain “greater control” over indigenous people at the expense of their political identity and “independence,” he was also encouraged by the fact that “there was no great rush among my people to go out and vote in white man's elections.”⁵⁴

Signed just a week before the ICA, the Johnson Act imposed significant quotas on immigration to the United States. While the most notable aspects of this law were the restrictions on the immigration of Eastern and Southern Europeans, Rickard observed in his autobiography that one clause of the legislation, “Section 13 (c), asserted that ’No alien ineligible to citizenship shall be admitted to the United States'.”⁵⁵

The combination of the Johnson Act and ICA amounted to an effort by the U.S. government to firm up the boundaries of the American nation and state, and to declare that all indigenous people residing within these boundaries were citizen-components of this solidified American political space. By political space, I mean the lived and envisioned territory through which a people defines and expresses the collective past, present, and future of its political identity.⁵⁷

The territory of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy spans the boundary between Canada and the United States, with the largest parts of such territory sitting within the state of New York and the provinces of Ontario and Québec.⁵⁸

Like Carlos Montezuma before him, Chief Rickard invoked the historical priority of indigenous political identity in this land. However, where Montezuma referred to indigenous people as the First Citizens of America, Rickard concerned himself with the freedom of “the original North Americans.” The difference in the way these two men define the histori- cally rooted political identity of indigenous people is not minor – it points to the larger distinction regarding what being an ambivalent American means to them.

For Montezuma, being an ambivalent American meant wanting to be an American citizen in the U.S. polity as a continuation of, not at the expense of, his people's indigenous citizenship and cultural roots in this land. Chief Rickard had no such ambivalence about attaining the status of a legal citizen of the United States – he absolutely did not want it. In stating that indigenous people are the original North Americans, Rickard offered the image of a political space that historically precedes but does not thereby delegitimate the forms of political space later set down by settler-states. He granted that the U.S.-Canada boundary exists as a legitimate marker of political space, but only for Canadian and U.S. citizens. He also acknowledged that his people “live on both sides” and “move back and forth” across the settler-state boundary. It was not the U.S.-Canada boundary as such that bothered Rickard, but rather how and to whom it was practically applied. This distinction reveals that his vision of indigenous political space was one that overlapped rather than replaced the political spaces of the United States and Canada. He tolerated these overlapping spaces providing that settler-state boundaries were not imposed in a way that limited the ability of indigenous people to express their political identities. However, when the boundaries of the United States were imposed and thereby threatened indigenous peoples' freedom of manoeuvre, he protested vehemently. This boundary imposition became very evident to Rickard as he observed the fate of his friend Chief Deskaheh, which would compel the Fighting Tuscarora to organize political actions that placed settler-state boundaries at the center of indigenous political struggle.

During the early 1920s, Cayuga Chief Deskaheh was the official speaker and international spokesman for the Grand River Council of the Six Nations residing within Canada.⁶²

It was then, just before he died, that Deskaheh told Rickard to “fight for the line.”

While this dramatic exchange between the two Chiefs symbolized the emerging focus of Rickard's political concerns and activities, what compelled him to form an organization to address the border-crossing issue were his persistent trips to the U.S.-Canada boundary to persuade border officials to let indigenous people into the United States. On December 1, 1926, Rickard formed the Indian Defense League of America (IDLA) “to guarantee unrestricted passage on the continent of North America for Indian people.”⁶⁴

The judicial case concerned Caughnawaga Mohawk Paul Diabo, an ironworker who had been traveling from Canada to work in eastern U.S. cities since 1912. In 1925, Diabo was arrested for illegal entry into the United States. Eventually, Diabo's fight against this arrest and for his rights to travel to the United States ended up before District Court Judge Oliver Dickinson in 1927. Throughout the ordeal, the IDLA supported and raised funds for Diabo's case. Furthermore, Rickard “wrote to the judge before he rendered his decision and sent him copies of treaties and other documents relating to Indian border-crossing rights.”⁶⁵

This ruling held up through the appeals process, which affirmed, “that the right of free passage in traditional indigenous homelands is an inherent aboriginal right, even where an international border has been created subsequently.”⁶⁷

Since the founding of the organization, Rickard and fellow leaders of the IDLA lobbied Congress to amend the Johnson Act to recognize the border-crossing rights of indigenous people. This lobbying focused on a bill that Rickard had “picked out” as the best, which was the one written by Senator William King, a Utah Democrat, stating: “That the Immigration Act of 1924 shall not be construed to apply to the right of American Indians born in Canada to cross the borders of the United States.”⁶⁸

The “fight for the line” is annually personified and enacted by a parade across the bridge at Niagara Falls every July 14. To contemporary IDLA members,

The explicit and literal practice of border-crossing represents the political position of those indigenous people who do not accept the notion that the presence of settler-states and nations deprives them of their rights of citizenship in their own nations. While Charles Eastman, Carlos Montezuma, Zitkala Sa, and their colleagues of the SAI were primarily concerned with indigenous culture and history, Jane Zane Gordon and Clinton Rickard saw indigenous national citizenship as fundamental to the survival and growth of indigenous people's political and cultural life in North America. In challenging U.S.-Canadian boundaries while also working within the U.S. judicial and legislative processes to further manifest this resistance, Rickard and his contemporaries sought to “resist the colonial system as a whole” by means of “exercising their freedom of manoeuvre within the system,” to recall James Tully's words. This politics on the boundaries is most evident when one observes the efforts and arguments of political actors in organizations such as the IDLA, who seek to challenge American boundaries and refuse to open the “gift” of U.S. citizenship. In general, politics on the boundaries should be seen as an elastic form of indigenous political practice that not only encompasses a diverse set of political perspectives but also raises rather radical questions about how we define and experience political identity and political space in North America.

Conclusion: The Boundary Politics of Indigenous Citizenship

During the first few decades of the twentieth century, the political views of indigenous people on the matter of U.S. citizenship ran the range from the cultural pluralism of such integrationists as Eastman and Montezuma to the indigenous nationalism of sovereigntists like Zane Gordon and Rickard. Nevertheless, in seeking to resist the American state's efforts to impose upon indigenous political identity, political actors as different as Eastman and Rickard emphasized, in their own ways, an ambivalent American status that reflected both the unique location of indigenous people in North America and the fissures in U.S. colonial/settler-state authority. Ambivalence is a key concept for discussing colonial relations, as postcolonial theorist Bill Ashcroft elaborates:

This dual orientation, I believe, can be applied to the ambivalence expressed by indigenous political actors as well as by the U.S. nation-state regarding the political relationship between indigenous people and the American polity.

For indigenous political actors, the dual orientation's “two-way gaze” takes in, through one lens, the experience and vision of a specifically indigenous political life and, through the other, the dominant presence of the norms and institutions of the American polity. Given the diversity of indigenous political perspectives, the exact meaning of this ambivalence can take very particular form. Eastman and the SAI sought to retain a strong connection to indigenous cultural and social norms while also seeking out the cultural and institutional benefits of inclusion in U.S. political society. Rickard and the IDLA saw participation in the U.S. political system as necessary for experiencing and eventually constituting a form of independent indigenous existence free from the colonial domination of North American settler-states. In both cases, ambivalent American-ness expressed a form of indigenous political agency that, at a very meaningful level, refused the overwhelming power of the American nation and U.S. government for the sake of maintaining and further manifesting some expression of indigenous political life in this land. That such indigenous agency has an impact is evident in the policies and practices of the United States.

The U.S. nation and state was and still is ambivalent about whether and how indigenous people should be included in the American polity. During the early twentieth century, this ambivalence was apparent in the legislative language of the Indian Citizenship Act, which expressed the U.S.'s dual orientation by simultaneously drawing indigenous people into the American polity through the conferral of citizenship, and then in the next sentence placing many of these indigenous people at least somewhat outside the American polity by affirming their rights to citizenship in their own tribes. Despite decades of efforts to eliminate indigenous existence by literally killing off or culturally destroying indigenous tribes and their citizens, the ICA example shows that the U.S. had to face the reality that it could neither fully exclude nor fully include indigenous people. In this regard, ambivalent American-ness signifies the impossibility of the U.S. nation-state as an ultimate delineator of political identity and political space. As such, the notion of the ambivalent American raises questions about how we recognize and define the meaning, location, and practice of citizenship generally in the North American context.

An examination of indigenous people's political concerns and claims regarding the prospect of U.S. citizenship should lead us to shed greater critical light on the ways in which we draw boundaries around the recognition and practice of citizenship in the American context. While I focused on indigenous political actors in the early twentieth century, the continued activity of organizations such as the Indian Defense League of America is further demonstration that the effort to resist and negotiate the terms and boundaries of citizenship continues. The specific lesson of indigenous people's politics is that the negotiation of citizenship should not be seen solely as one in which a marginalized group figures out how to maneuver its way inside a dominant political com- munity, such as that of the United States. Rather, the politics on the boundaries approach pursued by many indigenous political actors could serve as a model for witnessing more complicated, even ambivalent, forms of citizenship that might be pursued by, among others, immigrants, especially those that see themselves as members of transnational communities. This is not to posit ambivalent American status as an unqualified ideal; rather, the goal is to set it out as an option for defining and seeing expressions of American citizenship that are not confined by dominant political boundaries. This possible challenge to American political boundaries also raises a challenge to the field of American political development itself.

As I hope this essay has shown, any serious study of indigenous people's politics in the U.S. context necessarily challenges us to be clearer about what we mean by the American of American political development. The plea here is not for the replacement of American with U.S. Such superficial sleight of hand does more to displace than address the historical, cultural, and political roots of the dominant identity and institutions of the U.S. context. Rather, American political development scholars and readers should see analyses of indigenous people's politics as seeking and setting out viable alternative ways in which an American political identity can be negotiated and expressed. For example, a pluralistic reading of the boundaries of American political identity would likely shed more light on how the political condition, claims, and aspirations of people in the general North American context (Canada, the United States, and Mexico) help shape the purposes and practices of U.S. political institutions. In particular, a critical insight gained from the study of indigenous political activity and expression is that the dominant institutions and boundaries of American politics are still deeply defined by their colonial practices toward the “First American Citizens” or, alternatively, the “original North Americans.”

Every effort of an indigenous political actor to assert that indigenous people's history, culture, or space does not seamlessly map within U.S. history, culture or space is a refusal of the colonial practices of the American settler-state and nation. Given the latter's very evident dominating power in relation to indigenous people, such refusals, be they deemed more integrationist or more nationalist, contain within them a radical gesture against colonial political boundaries imposed and maintained by settler-states. Thus, it is in relationship to boundaries that we can observe the active presence, historically and in our contemporary era, of indigenous citizenship in the North American political setting. When indigenous political actors express their constituency's experiences, claims, and visions, they do so in tension with and across the boundaries of states such as the United States and Canada. As such, the politics on the boundaries articulated, variously, by Eastman, Montezuma, Sa, Zane Gordon, and Rickard represent alternative forms of political identity and political space in North America that cannot be adequately understood solely through the political perspectives of American or Canadian politics. Rather, politics on the boundaries demands that such settler-state perspectives acknowledge that they too are engaged in a double gaze that reflects back on the incompleteness and ambivalence of settler-state identity as much as it reflects forward onto the unique location of indigenous political identity.