“Our Democracy and the American Indian”: Citizenship, Sovereignty, and the Native Vote in the 1920s

In 1890, national suffrage organizations reunited to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association during the pinnacle of federal assimilation policies that aimed to destroy the cultural and political structures of Indigenous nations and to assimilate them into the citizenry of the United States. This chapter focuses on two Native feminist intellectuals, Laura Cornelius Kellogg and Gertrude Bonnin/Zitkala-Sa. These two women may have been eligible to vote in 1920—it is unclear if they were and unknown if they did—and they participated in suffrage debates. Native self-government was at the heart of Bonnin’s vision. She imagined tribal sovereignty as a “democracy wheel,” an image possibly inflected with the Lakota philosophy of the sacred hoop. In 1924, Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act, which endowed all Native Americans with citizenship rights. Some refused this, including many Iroquois, insisting they already had citizenship in their own nations, but Bonnin was thrilled.