Senate Majority Leader in the context of "Charles Curtis"

Charles Curtis (January 25, 1860 – February 8, 1936) was the 31st vice president of the United States from 1929 to 1933 under President Herbert Hoover. He was the Senate Majority Leader from 1924 to 1929. An enrolled member of the Kaw Nation born in the Kansas Territory, Curtis was the first Native American to serve in the United States Congress, where he served in the United States House of Representatives and Senate before becoming Senate Majority Leader. Curtis also was the first and only Native American and first multiracial person to serve as vice president.

Curtis believed that Native Americans could benefit from mainstream education and assimilation. He entered political life when he was 32 years old and won several terms from his district in Topeka, Kansas, beginning in 1892 as a Republican to the U.S. House of Representatives. There, he sponsored and helped pass the Curtis Act of 1898, which extended the Dawes Act to the Five Civilized Tribes of the Indian Territory. Despite Curtis being unhappy with the final version, implementation of the Act completed the ending of tribal land titles in the Indian Territory and prepared the larger territory to be admitted as the State of Oklahoma in 1907. The government tried to encourage Indians to accept individual citizenship and lands and to take up European-American culture.