The participation of Native Americans in WWI helped lead to the US government granting Native Americans citizenship in 1924, but it also created new pathways for struggles for sovereignty for Native communities. Native Americans chose to participate in WWI for a variety of reasons ranging from financial, out of a sense of obligation (possibly from conditioning in boarding schools), out of a hope that service would aid Native people in gaining citizenship, among other reasons.
One thing that stands out to me is that this is in the middle of the boarding school era and extreme policies of assimilation for the US government. Given this, the role of code talkers becomes more complicated because the retention of Native language was something that the US government was actively trying to eliminate. While it isn’t surprising that the military abandoned that principle temporarily when it became advantageous to them, it is an interesting perspective to look at it as a mode of resistance to assimilation becoming advantageous to the US government.
I found the DOI report explaining Native citizenship from 1952 to be really interesting. The document describes how Native Americans were granted full citizenship, except they aren’t allowed to drink alcohol “per their own request” – I didn’t know about this and would be interested to know how that has impacted modern day alcohol laws on reservations since they are often different than they are in the rest of the country. This seems like a really weird gesture because it sort of seems to suggest a kind of self determination, but the fact that the federal government upholding that statue rather than allowing communities to make their own laws on their own reservations is obviously not a gesture towards sovereignty.