"Joseph Keith. Unbecoming Americans: Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship, 1945-1960” (original) (raw)
JGAPE: Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 2021
This article reveals the complicity of immigration restriction laws and federal Indian policy with organized Americanization in legislating an imagined, desirable “new American” at the beginning of the twentieth century, when resurgent nationalism threatened to restrict undesirable immigrants as it also sought to assimilate Indigenous people into a mass of Americanism. While the immigrant has figured in the U.S. national imaginary as someone who desires America, the American Indian was not desired to enter into political membership—although Native land was desired, and subsequently taken by settlers through strategies of dispossession written into federal Indian law. This essay argues that the Indian—which I read as an imagined category with little connection to the lives of Native people—occupies an anomalous position in the legal history of naturalization, finalized with the passing of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, as racist restriction quotas also limited the entrance of new immigrants to the US through the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. For Native people, Americanization and the imposition of citizenship were extensions of colonialism, adding one civic status over another—domestic dependent, ward, or U.S. citizen. For new immigrants, hailing from Southern and Eastern Europe, forced by economic and cultural constraints to settle in the United States, in contrast to their Anglo-Saxon or Nordic predecessors, Americanization meant a renunciation of political allegiance to other sovereigns, the acquisition of English, and civic education for citizenship. This essay challenges the myth of America as a “nation of immigrants” and the settler colonial nation state’s ongoing infatuation with its colonial project as it continues to erase Indigenous presence and sovereignty.