Native American UK Alien Registration Card

The great expansion into the American West, which began in the 1840s, transformed America. This expansion across the Great Plains of North America came at a high cost to the Native Americans. There were many Native American tribes or ‘Indians’ as they were known, living on this land, and they were seen to be standing in the way of white people who wanted to take these lands as their own. The white settlers wanted this land for railways, building roads, mining, and the ‘sunshine’ states on the West Coast, such as California. White settlers saw the Indians as backward and standing in the way of progress, resulting in battles and wars with the Indians during the nineteenth century. Native American Alien Registration

There is no doubt that the government’s aim was to ‘Americanise’ or assimilate the Native Americans and make them part of American society. By the late nineteenth century, it was clear to most Americans, apart from the American Indians, that all Indian tribes would be extinct in the twentieth century. The plan was that all American Indians, like other immigrants, would be fully brought into mainstream American culture, where they would be English-speaking, Christian farmers.

Reservations Native American Alien Registration

After 1867, all Native Americans had to live on ‘reservations,’ which were small areas of tribal land promised to the Indians by the US government. In 1887, the government passed the ‘Dawes Act’ which went a step further by dividing these reservations into ‘allotments’ or smaller areas of land owned by individual Native Americans. The act stated that the head of each family would receive 160 acres of tribal land, and every single person would receive 80 acres. The government would hold the title to the ground for 25 years. After 25 years, each individual would receive United States citizenship and be allowed to keep their land.

Life on the reservations was deliberately designed to destroy the Indian way of life. For example, Indians did not have the same rights as other Americans, and the reservations were run for them by the US government. Native American Alien Registration

Discrimination

Even before the start of the twentieth century, Native Americans were clearly being discriminated against. In fact, by the end of World War I, Native Americans were suffering from short life expectancy, disease, malnutrition, a diminishing land base, and a poorly developed and unrealistic school system. The 1920s was to be an era of discrimination against the Native Americans. For example, The wearing of traditional clothing was banned. Boys were not allowed to have long hair.

June 2, 1924: U.S. Congress passes the Indian Citizenship Act, granting citizenship to all Native Americans born within the country’s territorial limits. Previously, citizenship had been limited, depending on what percentage of Native American ancestry a person had, whether they were veterans, or, if they were women, whether they were married to a U.S. citizen. Native American Alien Registration

March 4, 1929: Charles Curtis serves as the first Native American U.S. Vice President under President Herbert Hoover.

May 1942: Members of the Navajo Nation developed a code to transmit messages and radio messages for the U.S. armed forces during World War II. Eventually, hundreds of code talkers from multiple Native American tribes served in the U.S. Marines during the war.

April 11, 1968: The Indian Civil Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, granting Native American tribes many of the benefits included in the Bill of Rights. Native American Alien Registration

March 15, 2021: Representative Deb Haaland of New Mexico is confirmed as secretary of the Interior, making her the first Native American to lead a cabinet agency. “Growing up in my mother’s Pueblo household made me fierce,” Haaland Tweeted after her confirmation. “I’ll be fierce for all of us, our planet, and all of our protected land.”

(Travel) documents of Native Americans are scarce to find, but I was lucky to find these two UK Alien Registration Cards from the 1920s.

Meet YELLOW HORSE and probably his wife, GOES IN THE LODGE(?). Two outstanding documents and most important for Native American history.

Both had US passports issued in 1923, and both arrived in the UK on August 27, 1923. The address in the USA is given as Wind River, Reservation, Wyoming. Native American Alien Registration