Born in Indian CountryĬurtis was born in North Topeka, Kansas, to Orren Curtis, who had British heritage and mother Ellen Pappan, who was of mixed Kaw, Osage and French-Canadian heritage. This and another law he pushed furthered the goals of the Dawes Act, which many historians and tribes point to as a disastrous policy of the late 19th and early 20th century. This act overturned treaty rights, allotted tribal land to individuals without obtaining permission from the tribes, abolished tribal courts and gave the Secretary of the Interior the power to lease out mineral rights on tribal lands. House, Curtis, a Republican, served on the Committee on Indian Affairs, where he drafted the "Curtis Act" in 1898. “Pushing for Indians to join white society took the battles from the prairie and plains to the courts.”ĭuring his years in the U.S. “The feeling in those days was, if you were going to be successful, you had to be an assimilationist,” said Dakota Sioux historian Jeanne Eder Rhodes. His tenure was marked with controversy that grew over the years because of his support for legislation to force Native people to assimilate into mainstream American society and leave traditional ways behind, views he would later credit to his maternal grandmother.Ĭurtis' views were shared by a number of Native American intellectuals, academics and professionals of the day as a mechanism to survive and thrive in society, said one historian. Kamala Harris will make history as the first woman of color to serve as vice president, but a Native American lawmaker was elected to the office in the 1920s, only to fall into obscurity in part because of his views on Indigenous issues.Ĭharles Curtis, a member of the Kaw Nation who grew up in Kansas, became Herbert Hoover's vice president in the 1928 presidential election, the first and only Native American to hold the nation's second-highest office.
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