The Ballot Box Was the Way to Change Things
In late April 1945, delegates of 49 nations attended the United Nations Conference on International Organization to finalize the details of the United Nations (UN), one of which was to establish its headquarters in the United States. Representatives of over 200 American towns and cities applied to become the site of the new headquarters. Ben Choate, a Choctaw state legislator from Oklahoma, sought to bring the UN to Tuskahoma, Oklahoma, the Choctaws’ old national capital before it was subsumed into the state of Oklahoma in 1907. During World War II, Choate’s nephew was killed in action in Europe and his sister served in the Women’s Army Corps.
After establishing his patriotic credentials, Choate argued in letters to Oklahoma’s congressional representatives and to President Truman that Oklahoma’s climate and geography were ideal for the “International Capitol of the World,” while noting in a letter to John D. Rockefeller, a chief advocate of the UN, that “since the prime motive of the [UN] was for the protection and help to the minority nations or races, no more fitting and timely gesture could be made than by placing the World Capital here at a place formerly used as the seat of a Government of a minority Nation here in our own country.” A competing Oklahoma proposal came from Claremore, the home of Will Rogers, who died in 1938. The president of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) wrote that Rogers was “a world citizen, and an ambassador of good will,” and therefore the Claremore site would be a “fitting tribute to him and in recognition of his world service.” In both of these proposals we see Native people situating themselves as citizens of the world, a world recently engulfed in a violent conflagration, a world soon to be rent by global tensions in the emerging Cold War. The Choctaws’ and Cherokees’ pursuit of the UN headquarters represents just one of the ways in which Native people imagined themselves and their minority nations becoming part of the postwar world order.
Indigenous citizens also had local concerns following the war, including securing the civil rights most other American citizens enjoyed and addressing endemic racism that denied them access to jobs, housing, and GI benefits. At the same time, Native people were forced to fight for their long-standing treaty rights that were under assault by a renewed coercive assimilation movement called “termination,” fueled by non-Native Americans’ perception that the Indian reservation was a socialistic or communistic space and thus an un-American space. The goal of this movement was to finally incorporate Native people into mainstream America by terminating all treaties that protected their reservations, settling all outstanding legal claims, and then relocating Native people into cities and rural communities.
The future of those reservations lay at the heart of Native Americans’ campaigns to secure the promise of citizenship embedded in the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, the dual citizenship of both American and tribal citizenship. Throughout the 19th and into the 20th century, American politicians and reformers had sought to eliminate the “reservation system,” which they viewed as a haven for Native Americans’ “primitive” traditions as well as a barrier to white Americans’ access to their valuable land and resources. Attacks on the reservation system had intensified after World War I when American politicians considered Native Americans’ patriotism during the war as evidence that they wanted to leave their reservations for good. The events of World War II produced a new description of the reservation as a concentration camp. Although President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t call internment camps for Japanese Americans “concentration camps” until 1942, as early as March 1940, a member of Congress compared an Indian reservation to a concentration camp by describing how “the white man took the Indians’ land, debauched their women, killed many of them, and herded the survivors in concentration camps which we now call Indian Reservations.” To cite one more example: In 1944, a congressional committee tried to repeal the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) so that Indians “may be assimilated into the American way of life and not be in the reservation like a concentration camp; for, after all, a reservation is only a step or two from a concentration camp.”
The term entered popular culture in Henry Miller’s 1945 book The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, which offered a national origin story of settler colonialism in which Americans “began by poisoning the Indians with alcohol and venereal disease, by raping their women and murdering their children … When they had finally completed their work of conquest and extermination they herded the miserable remnants of a great race into concentration camps and proceeded to break what spirit was left in them.” Politicians seeking to terminate Indian reservations and open them to development used the terms “concentration camp” and “socialistic environment” into the 1950s to describe them as an oppressive and un-American place from which Native Americans needed to be “liberated” or “freed” in order for them to attain socalled full citizenship. Those criticizing reservations may have been right to point out the difficult economic conditions Indigenous citizens faced. Yet, in this narrative, they were seen as victimized by and imprisoned on reservations, from which they needed to be liberated. Native Americans, now, would have to defend the reservation as an ancestral homeland, as a sanctuary from white racism and discrimination, and as a sacred space that allowed them to maintain necessary cultural practices and religious rituals. Similar to Black Americans and other people of color, Native Americans fought to secure civil rights and benefits available to other American citizens, their activism animated by national service in World War II. They argued that they had earned the basic privileges of citizenship, especially voting rights, after meeting their obligations to the United States during the war.
Indigenous citizens had been advocating for suffrage for years in the states that did not allow them to vote. By 1937, a Department of the Interior report concluded that Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, North Carolina, Utah, and Washington denied voting rights to Native Americans, while noting that in southern states they faced poll taxes and literacy tests that limited their access to the polls. The report recommended challenging the constitutionality of the discriminatory provisions in the seven states that explicitly denied suffrage.
Native people had confronted these unconstitutional provisions as the world war drew them to foreign battlefields. In 1940, World War I veterans Fred Bauer and Jack Jackson (Eastern Cherokee) tried to register to vote in North Carolina but were rejected by county registrars despite meeting the state’s eligibility criteria. An outraged Cherokee council claimed that Cherokees’ inability to vote in state and national elections would preclude equal rights and fair treatment from county draft boards, which could fill their county draft quotas with Cherokees rather than whites. In its November 5, 1940, resolution, the council highlighted Cherokees’ willingness to serve their country by claiming that “there is not a more patriotic people to be found anywhere in this country,” and called for an independent draft board to ensure fair treatment.
The first major challenge to voter suppression after the war occurred in North Carolina. When 300 Eastern Cherokee veterans returned from service abroad, they qualified for education grants under the GI Bill of Rights and Veterans Administration training programs, but they remained unable to vote in the state. Having fought for freedom abroad, they insisted on getting it at home. During the fall of 1945, members of the Steve Youngdeer Post of American Legion 111 requested a hearing before the Jackson and the Swain County election boards to protest their denial of voting rights. The boards ignored their appeals. North Carolina required its voters to be able to read and write to a standard set by an election registrar. In May 1946, two groups of Eastern Cherokee veterans tried to register in the two counties, to no avail, despite reading from the North Carolina state constitution. Veterans complained that the Jackson County registrar told them that he was “under orders from the election board of Jackson County not to register Indians regardless of qualifications.”
Facing such opposition, Cherokee officials turned to the governor and state attorney general for help, again to no avail. A visit to the two registrars by two FBI agents sent by the U.S. attorney general also failed to produce changes. But in early October, the two county election boards relented in the face of organized pressure from other American Legion posts and local newspapers, and agreed to register all Cherokees. The case represented just one of many in which Native veterans, animated by their national service, sought the benefits for which they had fought and their comrades had died overseas. Lumbee veteran James Locklear helped organize Native and Black citizens to fight for voting rights in North Carolina, arguing that “the ballot box was the way to change things.” Locklear spoke for many of his fellow Native and Black veterans when he said that he was no longer going to be “a second-class citizen. I had tasted … what it was like to be a first-class citizen. I was with whites and I had heard them talk about their opportunities, opportunities that I didn’t have.”
Other Native leaders employed this rhetoric of patriotic service in their campaigns to secure civil rights. In an August 1947 radio broadcast titled “Are Indians Getting a Square Deal?,” Navajo and Pueblo leaders claimed that justice was denied “so long as an Indian cannot vote for the government they must pay taxes to support and give their lives to defend.” Like tens of thousands of other Native people in the American Southwest, Ira Hayes (Pima), who helped raise the flag on Iwo Jima in 1945, could not vote after the war.
In late 1947, Native activists in Arizona and New Mexico launched campaigns to attain those voting rights. Two Mohave-Apache men living on the Fort McDowell Reservation outside of Phoenix, Frank Harrison, an army veteran, and Harry Austin, the tribal chairman, sought to register as Democrats in Maricopa County in advance of the 1948 national elections. The county registrar, Roger Laveen, refused to register them because they were “persons under guardianship” according to the Arizona state constitution, a restriction upheld in the 1928 Porter v. Hall decision. Harrison and Austin filed a writ of mandamus to force Laveen to register them, asserting that “if they were denied the right to register and vote they would be deprived of the franchises, immunities, rights, and privileges of citizens which are guaranteed to them under the constitution and laws of both the United States and the State of Arizona.” NCAI and U.S. government amicus curiae briefs put pressure on the state to reverse the Porter v. Hall ruling. Citing these briefs and the President’s Committee on Civil Rights report’s condemnation of Arizona’s voting restrictions, the Arizona Supreme Court acknowledged that “the oldest and largest minority group” in the state, representing 11.5% of the population, had “served in the armed forces with pride and distinction.” In its ruling in Harrison v. Laveen, the court found no basis to support the use of guardianship to deny Native people their voting rights and overturned Porter v. Hall.
The NCAI also challenged New Mexico’s denial of suffrage to Native people based on its state constitution prohibiting access to the polls by “Indians not taxed.” Miguel H. Trujillo (Isleta Pueblo), a Marine veteran of World War II, a teacher at a Bureau of Indian Affairs school, and a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, agreed to work with a group of attorneys to fight the state’s discriminatory practice; among them was Felix Cohen, who had assisted Harrison and Austin with their suit against the state of Arizona. Cohen wanted to highlight Trujillo’s military service to press for suffrage, recognizing that Arizona judges had emphasized Native people’s significant wartime contributions in their ruling.
In June 1948 Trujillo initiated the legal challenge by attempting to register to vote in Valencia County, just south of his Isleta Pueblo community. The recorder, Eloy Garley, refused to register him, citing the state constitution’s “Indians not taxed” clause, leading Cohen and two other attorneys to file an injunction in Santa Fe’s Federal District Court. After reviewing the evidence in Trujillo v. Garley, a threejudge panel issued a permanent injunction against New Mexico using that clause to deny Native people suffrage, arriving at the “inescapable” conclusion that the practice violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution and thus constituted “discrimination on the grounds of race.” Native people in New Mexico paid all taxes other New Mexico citizens paid, including state and federal income taxes, with the exception of taxes on reservation property; in addition, the state allowed African American and Latino citizens of the state who were not taxed to vote. It is important to note that it would take until 1962 for New Mexico to allow Native people to vote in its state elections. But the decision represented another important victory for Native voting rights.
On the heels of Trujillo’s successful suit in New Mexico, Idaho deleted from its state constitution the suffrage provision “Indians not taxed,” opening the polls to Native voters. Governments in Maine and Utah remained opposed to Indian suffrage until the mid-1950s. In September 1954, Maine’s legislature approved the Maine Suffrage for Native Americans Referendum, granting voting rights to the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy, but only in federal elections; they would have to wait until 1967 to vote for state representatives. Maine officials acted in part because they were motivated by assimilationist sentiments; one state senator argued that granting them suffrage was the best way to extend the “white man’s civilization” to them and thus solve “the Indian problem in the State of Maine.”
Utah officials disfranchised Indians on the basis of a state law claiming that Native people were not technically state residents because they lived on a reservation and could not understand the intricacies of state election law and white politics. Preston Allen (Uintah and Ouray) disagreed, filing suit in Allen v. Merrell. After the Utah Supreme Court upheld the state’s disfranchisement of Native people, the case wound its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which told the Utah State Supreme Court to revisit the issue, intimating that it had one choice to make. Under pressure, Utah’s state legislature relented and repealed the statute in 1957, becoming the last state to give Native people the national franchise.
The legal victories in Arizona and New Mexico generated enormous press coverage and inspired thousands of Native people to register. The Black newspaper Chicago Defender mentioned the decisions in a brief column titled “Democracy Wins a Round,” quoting the comments of NCAI secretary Ruth Muskrat Bronson, who called them “a smashing victory for civil rights of our oldest national minority.” The Defender wryly but also seriously noted in closing, “However may we add that while Indians have the right to vote in all states except one, they often find themselves in the position of a Negro who has the right to vote in Meridian, Mississippi, if you know what I mean.” Indeed, the courts had decided the issue, but, as with other sites of civil rights suppression, enforcing the decision would become the true test of the federal government’s resolve. In addition, what Native people would do with that right of suffrage remained in question.
The Navajo Nation newspaper Ádahooníłígíí, published in both English and Navajo to keep its citizens aware of important political events, called the New Mexico decision “a great step forward for all Indians,” and expressed hope that “someday soon there will be an Indian in the State governments here in Arizona and New Mexico. And maybe someday soon there will be Indians from out here in Congress. There is nothing to stop them now.” Another article in the issue stated that Navajos “must learn that we the people are the government … It is our own fault if we vote unwisely or fail to vote at all.” Accordingly, Ádahooníłígíí began to publish reminders about Navajo Tribal Council elections and provided information about upcoming state and national elections. During the 1951 council election, 87% of eligible voters participated, an increase of 82% in the number of voters from the 1946 council election.
NCAI Executive Director Helen Peterson (Cheyenne-Lakota Sioux) observed that during the 1950s Native people began voting and writing, calling and petitioning their congressional representatives. She highlighted Native voters’ impact on close elections in states such as Idaho, where democratic U.S. Senate candidate Frank Church won by 170 votes with support from Indigenous citizens. Peterson cited politicians who frequently heard from Native leaders concerned about legislation that affected them, leading members from both parties to court Native voters.
Gaining the franchise in states such as Arizona and New Mexico helps explain the rise in voting, but as importantly the rise in terminationist policies required Native people to be vigilant in defending their interests. Because of the Republican Party’s promotion of termination legislation, Native voters in 1954 and beyond leaned heavily toward Democratic Party candidates. In 1957, as termination pressures threatened the Navajo Nation, 12,000 Navajos living in New Mexico formed a voting bloc, leading many of them to register and vote for the first time. A Navajo spokesman explained the surge in interest: “The same group of politicians who didn’t want us to vote still make up New Mexico’s Congressional delegation. They’d sell us down the river in a minute if they thought it would enhance their chances of reelection.”
Adapted from Indigenous Citizens: Native Americans’ Fight for Sovereignty, 1776-2025. Copyright © 2026 by Paul C. Rosier. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
