Mary Klann is a lecturer in U.S. history and Native American history at the University of California–San Diego. Her most recent book Wardship and the Welfare State: Native Americans and the Formation of First-Class Citizenship in Mid-Twentieth-Century America was published by Nebraska in June.

The Indian Citizenship Act (ICA) passed 100 years ago, on June 2, 1924. It unilaterally declared about one-third of the Native population in the United States to be American citizens—the majority of Native people were already citizens before its passage. Nevertheless, in the decades following the ICA, Congress repeatedly attempted to grant citizenship to Native people, something they already had. In 1953, the termination law, House Concurrent Resolution 108 (HCR 108) decreed that certain tribes and Native individuals be “grant[ed] all of the rights and prerogatives pertaining to American citizenship,” and should “assume their full responsibilities as American citizens.” In order to gain these rights and assume these responsibilities, members of “terminated” tribes would no longer be considered “wards of the United States.” They would be “freed from Federal supervision and control and from all disabilities and limitations specially applicable to Indians.” What was citizenship? Not only rights, prerogatives, and responsibilities of a certain population, but also the absence of disabilities, limitations, and federal supervision and control. Citizens weren’t wards—were they? Wards certainly couldn’t be citizens. (Right?)

Why pass laws granting citizenship to a group of citizens? Helen Peterson (Oglala Lakota), the executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, suggested in one of her many testimonies to Congress during the termination era: this was “trickery and unfairness,” purporting to “give Indians something they do not already have.” Peterson asserted, “We want to make it unmistakably clear that we know Indians have been citizens since 1924 and already have the rights of citizens.” Joseph Garry (Coeur d’Alene) questioned in 1954, “Why this sudden over-enthusiasm for freeing an alleged subjugated minority group, numbering only 400,000 in population, unless other motives were involved? Who is to gain?

This question, “Who is to gain?” is crucial for our understanding of the ICA one hundred years after its passage. In American popular imagination, citizenship is an achievement, a marker of inclusion, successful integration (at least on paper) into the polity, with all the rights and duties that integration implies. Wardship’s continuance after the ICA’s passage is what complicates the way citizenship was deployed by terminationist policymakers and state agents as the prize that Native people neither wanted nor needed. Wardship and citizenship were both theoretical relationships with the government (one demonized and one idealized) and lived experiences of those relationships. Wardship and citizenship are best understood as relational, not oppositional. One of the reasons why Peterson, Garry, and many other Native activists who lobbied against termination policies called into question the motives behind terminationists’ use of citizenship rhetoric was because just as Native peoples’ citizenship status seemed unclear, wardship was also misunderstood. Wardship was a reciprocal relationship, an uneven one and an imperfect one, but a known, established relationship between Native people and their liaisons with the United States, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). 

The nature of American citizenship itself changed in the mid-twentieth century with the expansion of the welfare state through major pieces of legislation like the Social Security Act of 1935 and the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (GI Bill) of 1944. Native people, as citizens, were eligible for welfare benefits under both pieces of legislation. But what of wardship? States resistant to extending need-based welfare benefits to poor Native people charged that the federal government bore that responsibility, Native people were wards of the federal government. Welfare caseworkers and Veterans Administration staff communicated with Native clients and applicants through the BIA, relying on the BIA to disperse information, verify living conditions, track down deserting fathers, distribute and surveil the use of benefits, and more.

In some ways, citizenship allowed access to welfare programs like the GI Bill and Aid to Dependent Children, albeit in circumscribed ways, and usually mediated by the BIA. In this way, citizenship changed the relationships Native people had with the BIA, as Native welfare applicants increasingly turned to the BIA to navigate a bureaucratic welfare system that did not understand (nor make any real attempt to understand) the nuances of wardship or the trust relationship between Native nations and the federal government. A particularly interesting example is how Native veterans utilized their GI Bill educational loans to attend veterans training programs at Indian boarding schools, in some cases staffed by the same people as had carried out assimilationist agricultural and vocational training programs before the war. These programs were both different from previous training programs (the GI Bill subsistence payments veterans received were one major distinction) but were also firmly entrenched in a long history of agricultural extension work that the BIA was devoted to carrying out.

My book, Wardship and the Welfare State, explores the nuances of Native citizenship in the years that followed the passage of the ICA. Citizenship is a tangible status, one that brings protections, rights, and duties to a population within a polity. It is also a rhetorical device, deployed in some cases without nuance, a celebratory cudgel. For Native activists in the termination era, citizenship could not be separated from wardship, and both relationships needed to be navigated with care.