Indigenous Citizens chronicles Native Americans? extraordinary resilience and resistance to colonialism, coercive assimilation programs such as Indian Boarding Schools, and white Americans? backlash against their treaty rights, from the American Revolution to the 2024 election. It highlights their efforts to both preserve tribal sovereignty and secure the civil rights accorded to other Americans, a dual citizenship codified in the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act. Covering the arc of American history, Paul C. Rosier reveals Indigenous Americans? vision of a country that lives up to the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Through patriotic military service, activism, and political writings Native Americans championed their belief in a multicultural America that honored its legal obligations as it assumed international prominence in the twentieth century.
 

 

When the colonial era began, Europeans did not consider themselves as 'Whites,' and Native Americans did not think of themselves as 'Indians.' Yet as a genocidal struggle for America unfolded over the course of generations, all that changed. Euro-Americans developed a sense of racial identity and national mission--of being chosen. To them, Indians must necessarily disappear so the Christian civilization could spread. Native people countered that the Great Spirit had created Indians and Whites separately and intended America to belong to Indians alone."

"In The Chosen and the Damned, acclaimed historian David J. Silverman traces Indian-White racial arguments across four centuries, from the bloody colonial wars for territory to the national wars of extermination justified as 'Manifest Destiny'; from the creation of reservations and boarding schools to the rise of the Red Power movement and beyond.