Indigenous Peoples’ Voting Rights
By Emily Kubota, Museum Curator
Native American man with horse and plow while attending Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, Hampton VA, c. 1900, courtesy of the library of congress
During Reconstruction in 1868, the 14th Amendment was passed granting citizenship rights to anyone born in the United States. Unfortunately, the interpretation of this law excluded indigenous people. The reason? Courts considered American Indians to be citizens of sovereign tribal nations--and therefore not entitled to the protections of the United States Constitution. Native Americans were also not included in the 15th Amendment (1869), which allowed male citizens the right to vote regardless of race, or the 19th Amendment (1920), which allowed citizens to vote regardless of gender.
The history of Native peoples’ self governance is a complicated one. Indigenous tribes had been self-governing for thousands of years prior to colonization. Many lived in separate nations with different laws, governance, and designated lands. After European conquest, the tribal communities suffered greatly at the loss of their rights and independence. Some states created circumstances in which tribal members could become citizens, including requiring them to give up tribal affiliations or marrying a white citizen. No matter what the qualifier was, the intent was always the same: assimilate.
A Native American Family family at Hampton Institute, c. 1900, Courtesy of the Library of Congress
The Dawes Act of 1887 was passed in order to break up tribal bonds and force individuals to speak and act like their new European neighbors. Many tribes were no longer considered to be legal entities and their ancestral lands were divided among individual American Indian families, and the remaining land was then appropriated by white homesteaders. The results of the Dawes Act were disastrous and led to more than two-thirds of native lands being taken from the tribes and the loss of traditional culture. Many tribal children were sent to residential schools where they were forced to assimilate and abandon their tribal identities. Native languages, names, and practices were forbidden, and instead the students learned skills deemed necessary to live in the European-American world. In the decades following the act, the United States government took a “hands-off” approach to tribes and largely excluded them from government.
Virginia’s native people had already been affected by assimilation by the time the Dawes Act was passed. Virginia tribes no longer had any federally recognized land and the Monacan Indian Nation had mostly receded to their ancestral land in the mountains of Amherst County. Several members from their confederacy joined them in Amherst, including the Tuscaroras, Tutelos, Saponis, and Occaneechis. Missionaries began building churches and schools in the area in the 1860’s. In most cases, native people in Central Virginia were considered either “white” or “negro,” and they shared the rights (or lack of rights) of their attributed race.
carlisle Residential School students reading, 1901, Courtesy of the library of Congress
It wasn’t until the passage of the Snyder Act of 1924, also known as the Indian Citizenship Act, that all indigenous people received equal suffrage. The federal government specifically began including native people as citizens, and as such they had equal voting rights. Unfortunately, discrepancies in state and federal law allowed for some states to continue disenfranchising Native Americans for the next forty years. Voting restrictions that were meant to stop African Americans from voting also impacted the native communities and hurdles like literacy and citizenship tests made it difficult to cast votes until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Reactions to voting in elections were mixed among the tribal communities. Some began voting with pride and a sense of responsibility as enfranchised citizens. Some did not want to vote because they did not recognize the United States as their governing body. Others did not want to be citizens of the country and felt they were having a colonized version of “citizenship” forced on them without their consent, while their loyalties were still with their tribal identities.
Today, some restrictions are still making it difficult for tribal communities to vote. Many who live on reservations do not have a traditional street address, leading to their voter registrations being rejected. A lack of infrastructure on some reservations means a lack of convenient polling sites or facilities to cast absentee ballots. Many places do not have enough interpreters. Some voting sites do not accept tribal IDs as a valid form of identification. Many other hurdles stand in the way of equal suffrage for native communities.