Native Americans won U.S. citizenship 100 years ago, but fight for right to vote continued decades more
SACRAMENTO – The year 2024 marks 100 years since Native Americans were officially recognized by the federal government as United States citizens, which technically meant the rights and privileges of citizens, like the right to vote, were afforded to tribal communities.
However, decades of voter suppression meant the fight for the right to vote would continue for decades more and even today, activists continue working to remove barriers when it comes to voting access for Native American communities a century after citizenship was first achieved.
A state-by-state fight for Native voting rights
President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 which granted citizenship to all Native Americans, stating by law, "All noncitizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States: Provided that the granting of such citizenship shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property."
Still, securing the right to vote as citizens became an uphill climb thanks to Jim Crow-style state laws which barred Native Americans from voting in many states until the late 1950s when Indian citizens started suing and pushing back against states which then started to walk back those restricting laws.
"It didn't automatically mean everybody was voting," said Calvin Hedrick, lead organizer with the Northern California chapter of the California Native Vote Project.
As Congress deferred to state governments qualifications on who qualified to vote, legal access to the ballot was denied under existing state constitutional provisions and statutes until 1948 in Arizona and New Mexico — and until 1957 on reservations in Utah, according to the Associated Press.
"There were a lot of barriers like literacy tests, things like that, that kept a lot of communities of color away from voting," Hedrick said. "Some states were determined to keep Native people from voting."
The passage of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, brought on by the Civil Rights movement led by African American leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., outlawed discriminatory voting practices and protected the right to vote within communities of color.
The Voting Rights Act was readopted and strengthened in 1970, 1975, and 1982.
Still, scars exist to this day in the form of low voter turnout and access to voting within tribal communities in California and nationwide, especially on the most remote reservations.
Access and turnout: getting out the vote still presents challenges
"Our voice has meaning, our voice can be powerful," Hedrick said. "We're really trying to get more Native people involved in the political process, more Native people registered to vote, more people voting."
That's the message that powers the California Native Vote Project.
"Just making sure you have a plan to vote within your community," Hedrick said. "We've seen voter registration of eligible voters as low as 10 percent in some tribal communities. We try to get out to those communities and make it something that people want to do."
Even a century after Native Americans secured citizenship Hedrick says the California Native Vote Project is still fighting to break down barriers that prevent people from voting — some of those barriers are walls built up from centuries of emotional trauma inflicted by federal and state governments on the Native people.
"Recently, at a voter registration event, a person came and said, 'Well, I don't vote because my grandma told me not to vote. They told her it's not for us.' My response to that was, 'Who told your grandma she couldn't vote?' That's the bigger thing we need to think about. Voting is a right," Hedrick said.
The fight nowadays has a new focus: making voting accessible to all Native American communities.
"We have people who tell stories here in California, just in the last couple of elections, of having to drive two hours off-reservation just to be able to vote," Hedrick said. "We will go out to tribal communities and do voter registration parties, events. During the primary, we did a couple of candidate forums where we had candidates for local elections come out to tribal communities. For some of them that was the first time that had ever happened in those communities."
Democratic Assemblymember James Ramos says even reliable mail delivery for ballots and the location itself are struggles that remain today on rural reservations.
"We're starting to turn a page but there's still obstacles and barriers there," Ramos said. "The outreach that goes out to get the vote out in the state of California does not reach reservation boundaries or even tribal communities in the state."
The first Native American lawmaker, but hopefully not the last
Assemblymember Ramos is the first and only California Native American elected to the state legislature. He has been in his seat since 2018.
Ramos is a member of the Serrano/Cahuilla Tribe and a lifelong resident of the San Manuel Indian Reservation.
Before running for the California State Assembly, Ramos held positions on his Tribal Council, the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors and the San Bernardino Community College Board of Trustees.
"We still see a great need of California Native Americans to run for political office," Ramos said. "We made it to the state legislature. So if I can do it, other Indian people can do it also."
Ramos said that in addition to easing access for Native voters, there is also a need for more healing here at home in California.
"When people start to accept that blame and move forward, then we are going to see people feel more part of a process of a state that now acknowledges a horrid past but also builds on the resiliency of California Indian people. We're still not at that stage yet," Ramos said.
It was not until 2019 that California Gov. Gavin Newsom apologized for the treatment of California Native people.
Ramos has authored legislation signed into law by Newsom to help remove the barriers that still exist for the Native voting population, including requiring the Secretary of State to establish a Native American Voting Accessibility Advisory Committee.
Today, 4.7 million Native Americans are eligible to vote nationwide, but only about 36% have turned out in recent general elections, according to the Native American Rights Fund.
The group also estimates that one in four eligible Native people are not registered to vote.
"There is a lot of hesitancy about trusting a government that has never really been honest with you," Hedrick said. "But we have seen that increase in voter registration in nearly every community we have been to. So people are actively becoming more engaged and we have definitely seen that."
The year 2024 also marks the centennial anniversary of a major desegregation case in Native American history.
Alice Piper, a 15-year-old Paiute student, made history in 1924 when she and her parents sued California's Big Pine School District to integrate their classrooms — and won.
Her successful case set an important precedent for the future Brown v. the Board of Education Supreme Court case in 1954 that made school desegregation illegal 70 years later.
Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 5. November also marks Native American Heritage Month nationwide.