Native Americans fight barriers to voting, 100 years after being recognized as U.S. citizens

[RandySF]

WOLF POINT, Mont. – Louise Smith sits at her daughter’s dining room table on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, poring over photographs and newspaper clippings – the everyday scraps that weave a tapestry of her 101 years of life.

She revisits the decades she spent as an Indian Health Service nurse; her retirement to care for her husband, Buck, before he died; and how, late in life, she was named the grand marshal at a parade this year marking the 100th anniversary of the Indian Citizenship Act.

With an umbrella in hand to shield her from rain, she rode the parade route in a convertible clad with a banner that read: “Montana’s Oldest Native American Voter.”

The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 took effect nine months after Smith was born, recognizing Native Americans as U.S. citizens and, on paper, extending the privileges of citizenship to them. Yet for decades, states continued to block Indigenous people from voting.



https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/09/15/states-restricting-native-americans-access-voting/75097055007/

[BOSSHOG]

1. Recognizing Native Americans as US Citizens???

Akin to recognizing members of the Republican Party and the Ku Klux Klan as domestic enemies of the Constitution.

With the exception of Native Americans we are all either immigrants or descendants of immigrants. So White of us to give Native Americans Citizenship of their land.

[Lulu KC]

2. The irony

is so absurd I could choke.