A MANIFESTO ON CITIZENSHIP, COLONIZATION, AND CONDITIONAL BELONGING
I often say that the way the United States treated First Nation Indigenous peoples is not a historical anomaly, but it is a blueprint. Indigenous nations were the testing ground for the laws, policies, and power structures that now govern “We the People.” What was done to them first was done deliberately, so it could later be done to others with less resistance.
From the beginning, the United States learned how to control populations by redefining belonging. Sovereignty was acknowledged only when convenient. Treaties were signed only to be broken. Citizenship was offered conditionally, revoked strategically, and reshaped whenever it threatened power. Indigenous peoples were not merely displaced; they were legally experimented on.
Within many Indigenous communities today, there exists a practice known as disenrollment. The retroactive scrutiny of lineage or blood quantum, where individuals are stripped of citizenship and rights within their own nations. This practice did not emerge in a vacuum. It was shaped, incentivized, and intensified by colonial legal frameworks that taught tribes to govern themselves through exclusion, scarcity, and surveillance. Disenrollment mirrors the very logic used against Indigenous peoples by the U.S. government: that belonging is not inherent, but conditional; not ancestral, but bureaucratic; not sacred, but revocable.
So the question is not whether the United States could ever do something similar to its own citizens. The real question is: why do we believe it wouldn’t?
History shows that when a government normalizes exclusion, it never stops with one group. Once legitimacy can be questioned retroactively, once identity can be filtered through state approval, citizenship ceases to be a right and becomes a privilege. One that can be withdrawn. It is not unrealistic to imagine a future where the U.S. enforces citizenship so aggressively that people are effectively “disenrolled” as Americans, based on whether their ancestors acquired citizenship in ways the state later deems acceptable. Paper trails replace lived reality. Bureaucracy overrides belonging.
The irony is impossible to ignore. Many people migrating from Mexico and Central America carry more Indigenous ancestry than most citizens of the United States. How can someone be labeled “illegal” on land that was stolen, divided, and renamed through colonization? The U.S.–Mexico border itself was not solidified until the late 1800s, slicing through Indigenous territories that existed long before either nation or states. Indigenous people were forced to choose between colonial identities, Mexican or American, despite belonging fully to neither construct.
From the very beginning of the Constitution, many Europeans who became “founding Americans” arrived without permission, treaties, or legal standing by the standards they would later impose. They were, by any honest definition, illegal settlers. They occupied land in violation of existing sovereign nations, ignored Indigenous law, and then rewrote legal frameworks to legitimize their presence after the fact. Their citizenship was not earned through legality, it was enforced through violence and then sanctified through law.
Yet the same exclusionary ideas they created are rooted in race, hierarchy, and control, are still being enforced today. The only difference is who they are aimed at.
Immigration is framed as a crisis not because of borders, but because of power. New populations mean new voters. New voters threaten entrenched political and economic control. That is why fear is manufactured. That is why communities are criminalized. That is why legality is selectively enforced.
We have seen this before. When Black communities began to gain political influence, the response was not investment or protection, it was criminalization. The crack cocaine epidemic was not an accident; it was a policy choice that flooded Black neighborhoods with drugs, justified mass incarceration, and stripped millions of their right to vote. Disenfranchisement was achieved not through open declaration, but through law, policing, and cages.
Today, immigrant communities (especially their children) represent a similar threat to power. Children of immigrants are citizens. They can vote. They organize. They advocate for their communities. And so the narrative shifts: their parents are “illegal,” their neighborhoods are “dangerous,” their existence is framed as a drain rather than a contribution. Meanwhile, wealth remains concentrated at the top, extracted from the labor of marginalized communities by the same structures that deny them belonging.
This is not coincidence. It is continuity.
Citizenship in America has never been purely about law. It has always been about who gets to decide who belongs and who benefits from that decision. Indigenous nations were the laboratory. Black communities were the containment zone. Immigrants are the current target. And “We the People” is a phrase that has always come with footnotes.
The warning is not hypothetical. When belonging becomes conditional, no one is exempt. The moment citizenship depends on approval rather than presence, on paperwork rather than humanity, on power rather than truth, it can be redefined again and again and again.
Indigenous peoples were not the exception. They were the beginning.