In reading about war hero Ira Hayes, I was wondering if when a draft is active in the United States, are Native American’s eligible, or they are exempt ? Some literature makes me think they are exempt, but I have not been able to find any definite answer.
No they arent’ exempt to my knowldege, but I suppose they could claim conscientious objector status.
Welcome to the SDMB.
This page is the government’s list of who has to register and who doesn’t. It doesn’t say anything about Native Americans, but it does say illegal aliens have to. I wonder how many actually register.
Welcome, phigurephreak!
I can say with assurance that today, all American Indians are now citizens, and therefore would be eligible for a draft should one be initiated.
However, when I looked at past drafts, I discovered that this is actually a rather difficult question to answer. The reason for that is because citizenship was bestowed upon American Indians in an erratic fashion over a very long period of time.
Some Indian tribes, such as the Citizen Band of Potawatomi, as their name implies, had citizenship bestowed upon them in the 1800s. The Citizen Band itself was given citizenship in 1861, just in time for the Civil War, but do not appear to have served in large numbers. They were presumably eligible for the draft as a result of citizenship, but I’m not even sure of that. Though many wanted to, American Indians found it difficult to serve in the Civil War, as they were treated as “people of color.”
I did find this research paper, which speaks specifically of World War I, among a great many other things. It would appear that in 1917, it was very, very difficult to determine which Indians were citizens and which were not. (Before the American Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, citizenship had been bestowed upon roughly two thirds of American Indians.) This uncertainty seems to have been exploited by many non-citizen Indians, who enlisted and served in an illegal capacity in the First World War.
As an aside, I thought you might like to know that many American Indian tribes have a proud and long-standing tradition of serving the United States and even the Colonies in wartime, whether they had to or not. I can’t give the complete particulars for legal reasons, but I studied one tribe that had a somewhat unusual tradition of matriarchal leadership throughout its history. Furthermore, at one point, female tribal members outnumbered male tribal members by over three to one.
After a long, long time wondering about this, I finally realized that male members of the tribe had served on the side of the Colonies and the United States in virtually every single major war in North America since the 1600s, sometimes in regions far away from the tribe’s own geographical location. No wonder the women were running the show–the men were all dead or off fighting!