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Citizenship defines the terms of belonging to the modern state. It is an ideological and power laden concept which can exacerbate, exaggerate or mediate tensions over the distribution of power and authority. States have used citizenship’s exclusive capacity for the assimilation of indigenous peoples. However, there is also considerable potential for a liberal theory of indigeneity, proceeding from differentiated liberal citizenship, to develop the right to difference in cultural expression, but sameness in political opportunities; difference in forms of land tenure, but sameness in capacity to make decisions about how land is used; difference in the ways one is taught at school, but sameness in educational quality. The principal argument for differentiated citizenship is that liberal democracy alone does not guarantee the elimination of injustice, nor does it guarantee that indigenous political aspirations will not be marginalised by majoritarian politics.

Indigenous Australian economic practices and aspirations emphasise economic activity’s cultural context and purpose; practices and aspirations that routinely differ from Australian public policy’s instinctive assimilationist presumption. For example, indigenous actors’ repeated attention to trans-generational well-being shows that economic development is understood as part of a complex policy domain closely intertwined with social stability, employment, health and educational opportunities. Culture can explain economic activity’s purpose. It is also preliminary to effective schooling which is, in turn, a determinant of indigenous access to labour markets, utilisation of land rights for material purposes and access to the middle class which can be an important constituent of equal citizenship and participatory parity.

Exercising indigenous citizenship in California depended on being emancipated from the missions, a process that began in 1826. The state articulated one vision of what emancipation would mean, and indigenous people expressed another. Whereas emancipation in the Americas is commonly associated with the freeing of enslaved people of African descent, this chapter shows how it also involved Indian peoples held in the unfree condition of neofia at the missions. After almost nine years, during which native communities developed a politics of emancipation, the territorial government passed the final Emancipation and Secularization Decree in 1834. Historians have discussed the importance of secularization, but not the significance of emancipation. Native visions of emancipation involved indigenous claims to their former territories, the missions proper, and the condition of “freedom.” The state took possession of the indigenous territories that had formed the missions, and many indigenous people remained at and around the missions and demanded their rights under the 1834 law. Their attire and the compensation they received marked their new status, but inequity and violence against Indians remained normative. The book argues that these claims to ancestral and historical indigenous space formed an important dimension of native politics in the early national era. It reaffirms the role of the missions as indigenous spaces of authority and memory.

After 1821 indigenous people became equal before the law in Mexico; the government mandated that the term indio be replaced by citizen. A government representative arrived in California and announced Mexican independence and the impending move to legislate indigenous equality and citizenship. In 1824, a Chumash war broke out at three missions that Yokuts and others helped sustain. The war lasted four months, until a pardon allowed over one thousand Chumash to return from exile in Yokuts territory to the missions built on Chumash lands. The war and its causes are often attributed to the new conditions of citizenship. Chumash accounts, however, focus on indigenous belief, authority, and ritual objects of power that fostered the survival of their leadership. Chumash accounts also emphasize the violence, sorrow, and uncertainty that it produced, considerations absent in other records of the event. The chapter argues that indigenous people had a distinct politics from that imaged for them by missionaries, the military, and the government after 1821. While their demands would acclaim their new rights, Chumash histories of the 1824 war focused on indigenous political visions, ritual power, and figures of authority. The chapter also argues that the political transformations–from being legal minors to being Mexican citizens–are also prominent in the shift from a colonial geography to one marked by national concerns.

This chapter explores the prospects of indigenous citizenship as a force to be reckoned with in modern times. In particular, it considers the concept of resignation and one of its meanings—“to sign again,” to re-sign—to affirm an x-mark that was used in the past by North American Indian leaders to sign treaties with the European powers and the American and Canadian governments. The chapter first examines citizenship’s dual character—its dual emphasis on identity and role, meaning and function—and the three international legal principles to distinguish insiders from outsiders: jus sanguinis, jus soli, and naturalization. It then argues that the Indian identity is in crisis, and the Indian culture is at war, but that Indians have the idea of the Indian nation that they can use to get things they want, even if it means an embracement of modernity. Finally, it suggests that instead of giving up on citizenship or constitutions, they must be revised to produce sovereign indigenous nations.

The history of indigenous citizenship in California began to be obscured in 1849, when it was revoked in the California constitution. But the process of obscuring this past began in the Spanish documents and politics of conquest. To narrate this history of indigenous politics and colonial communities, native sources proved essential. In each chapter, analyzing native sources made it possible to develop important new interpretations. They gave insight into the missions as sites of indigenous memory, where native authorities had access to rectify conditions. Indian painters produced a visual world replete with indigenous ways of seeing. Chumash histories of the 1824 war suggested forms of power the Chumash community attributed to their leaders. Emancipation documents defined indigenous political visions in the early national era. They show indigenous citizens negotiating their rights under restricted conditions. Some of this is known because indigenous communities preserved their archives. Other written and visual records and objects became alienated from the communities that produced them and part of repositories of world civilization in European capitals. In recovering archives, histories, and forms of knowing, this history is interested in redressing wounds produced by the historical erasures undertaken during these years.