Citizen-Indians and Home Rule: The Contradictory Valences of Indian Citizenship and Sovereignty in Southern California

Until 1924, federal Indian policy required Indians wishing to become United States citizens to first demonstrate their assimilation to American culture through, among other things, the ownership of land. The coupling of these two valences—an individual relationship with the state which secured the functional protections of citizenship, and an affective sympathy with the collective national culture through land ownership—ensured that Indians who resisted the full onslaught of assimilationist policy found federal citizenship difficult to obtain. This paper disentangles those two valences by comparing the trajectories of two southern California Indians, who both made lives for themselves on the Pala Indian reservation in San Diego County. 

In 1920, Domingo Moro (Cupeño) was the only citizen-Indian in the Pala jurisdiction. He leveraged his citizenship status into federal employment on the reservation as well as ownership of an off-reservation homestead adjacent to the hot springs at Kupa, from which the Supreme Court had ordered the Cupeño’s eviction in 1903. While not a citizen before 1924, Robert Magee (Luiseño) voted in federal election(s) and worked extensively in the non-Indian regional economy. He leveraged his relationships with Indian peoples across the region into an allotment at Pala, where he became politically active as vice president of the newly-formed Mission Indian Federation. 

Despite their deep disagreements over the proper distribution of political power at Pala, both men resisted the pull of assimilation to non-Indian culture. While the Mission Indian Federation used land and labor to assert “human rights and home rule,” Domingo Moro, and others who opposed the work of the federation, asserted a distinct, individual, functional relationship with the federal government as Indians. Both paths undermined the homogeneity of federal Indian citizenship policy.