Citizenship has an anomalous status in the struggles of native peoples for human rights. Citizenship is often understood as a regrettable but necessary prerequisite to securing human rights, and the gradual extension of citizenship to broader segments of the population is seen as the triumph of human rights in the United States. Although this is largely true, it overlooks an important ambiguity with respect to American Indians that highlights the deficiencies of a human rights model that takes the state and the individual as its fundamental categories. The struggle for indigenous rights throughout history has not been only – or even primarily – to gain rights for native people as individuals separate from tribal communities, but to secure their right to self-determination as political entities distinct from states. International human rights law has only just begun to formally recognize this right, but it was at the heart of the earliest debates on international law. Although some native people sincerely did seek citizenship, in U.S. history calls to provide citizenship to American Indians were repeatedly linked to efforts to deny them self-determination.