THEY WILL LET YOU IN, BUT ONLY ON THEIR TERMS AND ONLY IF YOU STOP BEING YOU.

T. J. Stilles, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America (New York: Knopf, 2015) ("They had been treated as external clients of the American economy--though that would soon end, Already the U.S. government attempted to break down the Indians' distinctiveness in order to digest them. The Medicine Lodge Treaty defined a fixed location for the residence of the Southern Plains nations--giving three million acres in exchange for the ninety million they had roamed across--and promised them farm implements, schools, teachers, skilled artisans. Grant called for their integration into U.S. society; in this inaugural address, he supported 'any course toward them which tends to their civilization and ultimate citizenship.' . . ." "This was a great contradiction, or conundrum, produced by the civil rights revolution of Reconstruction. With the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and later the Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, Americans brought to fruition the vision of universal, individual rights expressed by the Declaration of Independence. As noted earlier, the triumph was flawed. The framers of the Civil Rights Act meant to exclude resident Chinese and 'Indians not taxed,' and the latter phrase reappeared in the Fourteenth Amendment. With black men, the intended beneficiaries, equality long remained merely theoretical; and women did not receive the right to vote until the twentieth century. Still, for the first time, the nation's basic law guaranteed the same freedoms to every person regardless of race. It was a profound break with the European past. Before the modern era, liberty generally referred to the protected status of a given location or population, not universal, personal rights. The Edict of Nantes, for example, issued by France's King Henry IV in 1598, exempted the Protestant Huguenots from religious laws and granted them armed sanctuaries in designated towns; it did not establish a general principle of freedom of conscience. And the British colonies in American were long exempt from taxation. Something of this traditional concept of liberty persisted in relations between the United States and the Indian nations. As Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in Worcester v. State of Georgia in 1832, the federal government acknowledged 'the Indians as a separate and distinct people, and as being vested with rights which constitute them as a state, or separate community--not foreign, but a domestic community . . . existing within [the United States.]' American Indian rights were community rights, in the eyes of U.S. law--the exemptions and privileges of people who stood apart, yet lived within the domain claimed by the federal government. Grant wished to extend to the indigenous the revolution of individual rights--but their autonomy stood in the way. They would have to move out of the category of 'Indians not taxed,' or the category itself would have to be abolished, if they were to be citizens. The Peace Policy's irony is that it could only work after the Indians' functional independence had been crushed." Id. at 330-332.).