Good Fences Make Good Citizens

The paper examines how California Indians resisted the pull of assimilation to non-Indian culture and undermined the homogeneity of federal Indian citizenship policy in the early twentieth century. Prior to 1924, Indians wishing to become United States citizens had to first demonstrate their assimilation to American culture through the ownership and appropriate use of land. In this way, the Indian Office hoped to align the individual, functional relationship with the state to an affective sympathy with the collective national culture. But this paper provides two case studies of how Indians navigated the crosscurrents of federal Indian policy, leveraging citizenship and off-reservation employment to strengthen Indian communities.