The full story is here, but this was one of the most substantial legal civil rights victories in American history, and one of the scant few that ever occurred to obtain legal recourse against US abuses of native people.
The full story is here, but this was one of the most substantial legal civil rights victories in American history, and one of the scant few that ever occurred to obtain legal recourse against US abuses of native people.
This was an interesting read. I know, though, that at the time there was a lot of interesting debate among indigenous nations about whether US citizenship was a desirable goal. On the one hand, it can confer some real protections and benefits, like Crook being able to bury his son in his homeland (from which he was forcibly removed). But on the other hand, I know that US citizenship was also viewed as an incursion on tribal sovereignty. See the “debate” section of this Wikipedia page for more info from about 50 years after the story of Crook: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Citizenship_Act