INDIGENOUS CITIZENS

Documenting the political relationships between and among hundreds of Native nations and the U.S. and state governments.

This ambitious history by Rosier, a Villanova University scholar, joins other recent sweeping surveys of Native history, including Pekka Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Continent (2022), Ned Blackhawk’s The Rediscovery of America (2023), and Kathleen DuVal’s Native Nations (2025). Rosier focuses on Native political history, namely Native peoples’ complicated relationship with citizenship within tribal nations, states, and the United States as a whole. From its origins, the U.S. has grappled with how Native people would fit into the nation, with varying “assimilation” programs deployed as early as 1778. Assimilation was more often than not a euphemism for coercive civilization programs rooted in Americans’ white supremacy and insatiable desire for land. In response, Native people developed ingenious methods of “political syncretism and pragmatism,” navigating generations of “broken promises, robbery, and violence.” American citizenship was not something Native people “won” with the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 as much as it was something imposed on them without their consent. In response, Native people crafted a conception of “dual citizenship,” where they retained both Indigenous identity, land, and political sovereignty and maintained active participation in the U.S. citizenry: casting votes, engaging in civil disobedience, and serving in the military. Rosier balances specific policy analysis with the larger story of Native peoples’ navigation of persistent racial stigma, ignorance of Native history, and backlash against enforcement of treaty rights. Notably, conflict within Native nations—relating to removal, incorporating formerly enslaved people and their descendants into tribes, and the recognition of same-sex marriage—demonstrate that citizens of Native nations, like the U.S., are not monolithic.

Native sovereignty is alive and well in this engaging introduction to the politics of Indigenous dual citizenship.