Native Americans were granted U.S. citizenship nationwide on June 2, 1924, when President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act (also called the Snyder Act) into law.

Quick Scoop: Key Facts

  • The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 declared that all nonā€‘citizen Native Americans born within U.S. territory were citizens of the United States.
  • This did not make them the ā€œfirst citizensā€ of the country, but in many ways they were among the last groups to be fully recognized as citizens at the federal level.
  • Even after 1924, several states (including Arizona and New Mexico) still blocked Native Americans from voting through state laws and practices, so full voting rights came only later, well into the midā€‘20th century.

Longer Backstory (In Brief)

  • Before 1924, some Native people became citizens in specific ways: through individual treaties (like the Choctaw after the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek), landā€‘allotment laws such as the Dawes Act of 1887, military service, or marriage to U.S. citizens.
  • The 1924 Act was important because it extended citizenship broadly to all Native Americans born in the U.S. who had not already obtained it, without requiring them to give up tribal identity or property rights.

In other words: the legal status of ā€œcitizenā€ arrived in 1924, but equal treatment and full political participation took many more decades to even begin to materialize.

TL;DR: When were Native Americans granted citizenship?
ā†’ Formally, nationwide, on June 2, 1924, with the Indian Citizenship Act, though many were still denied voting rights for years afterward.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.