1962: Our Indian Citizens

Our Indian Citizens

1962, Sep 19 Star Tribune

      Many white Americans do not know that the oldest Americans, the American Indians, have been full citizens for a long time. Some believe that Indians cannot vote or cannot buy a drink legally. This is simply no longer true.

      Blanket citizenship, with fill voting rights, was conferred on all Indians by Congress on June 2, 1924, in the American Indian Citizenship Act. Even before that certain Indians had had citizenship through service in the armed forces, by specific provisions of certain Indian treaties or by terms of land tenure conferred by act of Congress.

      Since 1953 there has been no national Indian prohibition. Congress repealed the Indian prohibition laws Aug 15, 1953. Before that time it was, of course, illegal to sell liquor to an Indian or even to take liquor onto an Indian reservation. Some Indian reservations, by tribal law, still restrict liquor but this is a matter of local option and not of the national government. 

      Minnesota barred liquor to Indians, by state law, up to 1947. The repealer by the legislature, while effective that year, seemed to some lawyers deficient technically. Hence, references to Indians in the liquor laws were again struck down by the legislature in 1961.

      As far as the law is concerned, the Indian is a full citizen entitled to all the rights and privileges of any citizen. In some areas, however, especially in the western states and in places where there is a heavy concentration of Indians within a white community, he may run into the same kind of discrimination the Negro encounters in the South. But just as in the South, there is nothing legal about it. It is, In fact, a violation of the constitutional guarantee of the equal protection of the laws to all citizens. 

1962, Sep 19 Star Tribune 

1960, Feb 22 Corvallis Gazette Times