CITIZENS | 2005-11-14
Historically most Indians fell into the constitutional category of "Indians not taxed." They were not counted in the census for a state's number of congressmen.
Many of these "Indians not taxed" were highly educated. The leader of the Cherokees who caused the "trail of tears" was only one-righth Indian, and his portait shows that he was blue-eyed and very Nordic-looking.
He owned a plantation and about a hundred slaves. But his identity was Cherokee.
A number of these "Indians" travelled abroad. Some of them went to Oxford. But they went abroad not as US citizens but as "US nationals."
In fact, in the 1950s residents of some of the American colonies in the Pacific were still "American nationals but not American citizens."
When the fourteenth amendment made a person a citizen of the state in which he resided, it did not include Indians. But until the fourteenth amendment, the United States could have done with blacks what almoswt everybody at the Constitutional Convention wanted to do: Send them "back" to Africa.
In 1857 the Supreme Court had declared, "A black man has no rights that a white man is bound to respect."
So today we talk about the fourteenth amendment as if it was concerned with integrated schools or the right to eat at any restaurant. The average person has no idea of the CONTEXT that made that amendment so radical that it had to be cheated into the Consitution.
Today the Supreme Court says that illegal aliens have the same rights as any citizen, plus affirmative action, all because of the fourteenth amendment.
The Supreme could require states to declare that blue was pink and the United States Army would enforce it.
But that was only after the World War II Generation, the Obedient Generation, took over.