Native American Rights

Native American Rights

Native American civil rights are the civil rights of Native Americans in the United States.

Although indigenous to the Americas, American Indians became one of many minorities and the movement for American Indian civil rights began almost as soon as Europeans started to arrive in the Western Hemisphere. Following the establishment of the United States of America, Native Americans were denied basic civil rights for many years. While American Indians did not have a particular period of fighting for their civil rights like the African American Civil Rights Movement, measures have been taken to achieve equal rights for American Indians throughout history.

Because American Indians are citizens of their tribal nations as well as the United States, and those tribal nations are characterized under U.S. law as "domestic dependent nations", a special relationship exists which creates a particular tension between rights granted via tribal sovereignty and rights that individual Indians retain as U.S. citizens. This "dual citizen" status creates tension within the U.S. colonial context even today, but was far more extreme before Indians were uniformly granted U.S. citizenship in 1924. As non-whites, and non-citizen indigenous people, the United States built discriminatory language into their own laws and took on special colonial projects that denied basic human rights—particularly in the areas of cultural expression and travel—to their indigenous non-citizen "wards".