Unwanted and ambivalent citizenship 87 in the polity. They wanted to be ‘counted’. Within the existing system of States, the only mechanism that there is for such recognition is citizenship or quasi citizenship. Citizen noncitizens and imposition Members of indigenous groups in North America were initially defined out of citizenship. The policy of the United States began to change in the late nine teenth century. It increasingly became one of enforcing citizenship without consent. In 1887, the ‘Allotment Policy’ was introduced, giving people land that had previously been held in common by their national groups, in exchange for US citizenship.24 Official literature from the time presents this as part of an intentional effort to ‘civilise’ the people concerned, through a move towards individualistic ownership of land. It could also be seen as an effort to emancipate and so give power to the individuals concerned. Others have argued that the Allotment Policy also had the aim of breaking up national groups to increase the likelihood of peaceful submission to colonial rule and to enable US entities to take control of more ‘Indian land’.25 The Indian Citizenship Act 1924 then imposed US citizenship on all those indigenous individuals who had been born within the territory of the United States but were not yet citizens. This was seen by some (mainly White activists including, reportedly, Eleanor Roosevelt) as emancipatory.26 Others saw it as a decisive next step in the project of colonisation.27 In his memoirs, Chief Clinton Rickard, who lived from 1882 until 1971 and founded the Indian Defence League in 1926, reflects upon the move towards imposing citizenship upon native peoples in the US: ‘We did not request this citizenship, did not want it, and opposed it.’28 This presents decisively the nature of the citizenship from his perspective, and it helps to demonstrate that the individual-State relationship for those thereby rendered citizens cannot be analysed in terms of citizenship alone. It requires recognition of a foundational relationship of a different sort. I propose to fill this gap with the analytical category of unhyphenated noncitizenship. In the mythology of early settler Americans, citizenship represented a rejec tion of monarchy, of imposed foreign rule, and a rejection of inherited privilege. For them, it was a move towards self-rule and equal ownership of society 24 Through what was known as the Dawes Act. 25 For example, see Mark A. Michaels (1998) ‘Indigenous Ethics and Alien Laws: Native Tradi tions and the United States Legal System’, pp. 1565–1584 in Fordham Law Review 66(4), at p. 1576. 26 Laurence M. Hauptman (1999) ‘Eleanor Roosevelt and the American Indian: The Iroquois as a Case Study’, The Hudson Valley Regional Review 16(1). 27 For example, Douglas M. George-Kanentiio (2006) Iroquois on Fire: A Voice from the Mohawk Nation, Praeger, at p. 27; Laurence M. Hauptman (1999) ‘Eleanor Roosevelt and the American Indian: The Iroquois as a Case Study’, in The Hudson Valley Regional Review 16(1). 28 Clinton Rickard (1973) Fighting Tuscarora: The Autobiography of Chief Clinton Rickard, Syracuse University Press, at p. 126.