Native Americans were intentionally excluded from the census when the Constitution was written. Directly before the infamous \u201cthree-fifths\u201d clause, Article 1, Section II of the Constitution states that \u201cIndians not taxed\u201d would not be included in the census count. It wasn\u2019t until 1850 that Native Americans were counted in an organized manner at all, and that was mostly targeted toward \u201cassimilated\u201d Native Americans who lived in predominantly white communities and owned land on U.S. soil. In the first few censuses when Native Americans were counted, many were also skeptical of the federal government\u2019s efforts: after all, this is the same government that had killed hundreds of thousands of Native Americans and pushed many off their land.<\/p>\n
During the 20th century, the Census Bureau gradually changed the census to allow for a fuller count, adding a question about \u201ctribal affiliation\u201d in 1970. Political power had been hard to earn: Native Americans weren\u2019t full U.S. citizens until 1924.<\/p>\n
In the 1940s, the National Congress of American Indians was formed, intent on securing voting rights and giving Native Americans a say in the nation that funds basic services on their lands.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have sort of a dual citizenship role. You know, we have our citizenship responsibilities for our tribal nations, and then we also have our citizenship responsibilities to the state and the country in which we reside,\u201d said Lycia Maddocks, NCAI\u2019s vice president of external affairs.<\/p>\n Because it counts who lives in the U.S., the census is tied to political power. Census information shows that the population of Native Americans is growing, but is underrepresented. From 2000 to 2018, the group\u2019s share of total population doubled, according to census data.<\/p>\n Yet in the 2010 census, an estimated 4.88% of Native Americans living on reservations were undercounted, the biggest undercount of any ethnic group. That affects funding for health care and broadband, which are vital during a pandemic.<\/p>\n Maddocks said that because the government uses those low numbers, it can deprive Native Americans of basic services.<\/p>\n \u201cMany people, including my mother, live down a dirt road,\u201d Maddocks said. \u201cIf we\u2019re undercounted, then we\u2019re underfunded. That\u2019s the bottom line.\u201d<\/p>\n Natalie Landreth, a senior attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, said each person who does not answer the census costs their community $3,200.<\/p>\n In 2015, members of NARF like Landreth and other advocacy organizations formed the Native American Voting Rights Coalition to improve political representation of Native Americans. Landreth gives the example of the Yakima reservation in Washington state, where there is a clear, concentrated population of 30,000 Native Americans who might ordinarily be drawn into their own voting district. Instead, they\u2019re divided into four voting districts, diluting their ability to elect a politician who represents their interests.<\/p>\n \u201cThe coalition identified problems in redistricting, and we walked back from there and we set a plan that we really needed to start with the census, and that\u2019s why we\u2019re here,\u201d Landreth said. \u201cThat census data is really intricately linked more to political power, voting cases, redistricting cases, language assistance cases.\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, redistricting is proving to be a sticking point when it comes to the 2020 census. In response to questions from reporters, census officials have repeatedly said they are unable to meet key deadlines for reporting data to the federal government and to individual states. But states such as Colorado would ordinarily rely on the data to redistrict as early as 2021, and without a timely update, some are already considering pushing back redistricting efforts for at least two years to account for the lost time.<\/p>\n How those numbers will be determined, and whether they\u2019ll be more or less accurate, remains unclear.<\/p>\n To boost response rates, the Census Bureau has invested in new technologies to make it easier for people to self-respond. But the most notable innovation, an online census, is ineffective in remote tribal communities where many don\u2019t have access to broadband.<\/p>\n Nez, the Navajo Nation\u2019s liaison, has been frustrated with the way the census has used technology this year. Enumerators in remote communities used laptops that were intended to use GPS and cellular service to help navigate and geolocate a person\u2019s home. But the cellular service maps vastly overstated signal strength in rural Navajo country.<\/p>\n \u201cDuring the tribal consultations, we had raised that issue that you know, if you rely on internet access, if you rely on cellular service on the Navajo Nation, it\u2019s actually not a good strategy,\u201d Nez said. \u201cSome of these enumerators, they\u2019re not adventurers. They don\u2019t use maps very often. \u2026 Those kinds of people were really lost.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond new technologies, the Census Bureau spent several years working with tribes on how to increase response rates. The Ute Mountain Ute and Southern Ute Indian tribes, for example, have put out PSAs to their communities and established booths at PPE dropoff locations to assist residents with completing the census.<\/p>\n Anabelle Talk, the Ute Mountain Utes\u2019 census liaison, said her community planned several in-person events before the pandemic hit. On March 12, the tribal government held its first census event at the Towoac Recreation Center, where attendees used iPads to complete the questionnaire. She planned a big follow-up event for April 1, with another questionnaire booth and barbecue, but it was canceled by the pandemic.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were starting off really good in March,\u201d Talk said. \u201cWe had it all planned out that we\u2019re going to have this many events, and even April 1 was our big event.\u201d<\/p>\n But the April 1 event was canceled. Since then, the reservation has been largely shut down, though Talk persuaded census employees to drop off census questionnaires on residents\u2019 doorsteps. Nearly a dozen community members were hired to perform the in-person follow-ups to help people feel safe enough to open their doors and respond to questions.<\/p>\n \u201cOur people here are comfortable with people with familiar faces that are coming to their door,\u201d Talk said. \u201cThey can speak their own language, so if they can come across elders that don\u2019t understand they can (still) speak.\u201d<\/p>\n The Southern Ute Indian Tribe has performed outreach efforts of its own. In a statement provided to The Durango Herald,<\/em> Southern Ute Indian Tribe spokeswoman Lindsay Box said the tribe considered the census \u201cextremely important.\u201d The tribe\u2019s response has already exceeded its self-response rate from the previous census.<\/p>\n Currently, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe\u2019s response rate is at 47.2%, among the highest of all reservations. The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe has a 30.5% response rate, and the Navajo Nation has a 14.7% response rate, among the lowest of all reservations.<\/p>\n Randall Akee is an associate professor of economics and American Indian studies at UCLA-Luskin, and served on the National Advisory Council on Race, Ethnic and Other Populations at the U.S. Census Bureau from 2013 to 2019. He said before the pandemic, it seemed the census was taking the issue of reaching out to underrepresented communities seriously.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the big things we were always focused on is how to reach the hard-to-count population,\u201d Akee said.<\/p>\n But the pandemic means that \u201ceverything went weird,\u201d Akee said. The online option likely mitigated some of the response concerns, but remote communities simply need more time and resources for an accurate count.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are high costs of getting to places and getting to people in these particular communities, which is the reason why undercounts are prevalent.\u201d Akee said.<\/p>\n On Aug. 11, census enumerators will begin the Non-Response Follow Up process, during which they travel to each house that has not responded to the census to help fill out the questionnaire. Adakai, the head of the Navajo Nation\u2019s Complete Count Commission, said the nation\u2019s government will do everything it can to push for a high response rate. But absent intervention from Congress, he\u2019s worried it\u2019s too late for a representative count.<\/p>\n \u201cIt seems like we\u2019ve been forgotten too long, and we\u2019re still being forgotten, and that\u2019s why I think people need to come down from Washington and look at what we\u2019re facing down here,\u201d Adakai said. \u201cPeople are strong, resilient. We just have to support one another and fight the challenges, fight the pandemic and fight the census count and make sure we\u2019re not undercounted again.\u201d<\/p>\n Jacob Wallace is an intern for The Durango Herald and The Journal and a student at American University in Washington, D.C.<\/em><\/p>\n 1789: Article 1, Section II of the Constitution states \u201cIndians not taxed\u201d are excluded from population counts, which was meant to specifically exclude Native Americans living in their own communities (as opposed to those of mixed descent living in white communities) or, later, on reservations. aren\u2019t always enough to reach rural Native American reservations<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":52220,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[28,561,1655,138,445,4636,629,547],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-52219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-headlines","tag-native-american","tag-navajo-nation","tag-new-mexico","tag-newsletter-lead","tag-population-and-census","tag-southern-ute-indian-tribe","tag-ute-mountain-ute-indian-tribe"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52219\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52219"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=52219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Native Americans and the census<\/h4>\n
\n 1850: Rough estimates of the Native American population were published in the census for the first time, though these numbers were based on those prepared by the newly created Indian Department for the Secretary of War.
\n 1860: Native Americans who were considered \u201cassimilated\u201d were counted in the census, and were noted as \u201ccivilized Indians\u201d in census documents.
\n 1890: The first time Native Americans were counted throughout the country and those results were published in official census totals, though relatively few resources were devoted to the endeavor. A single agent was sent to enumerate the entire Navajo reservation.
\n 1930: The census includes an additional form in its questionnaire for Native American populations.
\n 1940: The first time Native American populations were included in the total census population count. Enumerators themselves chose the race of census respondents.
\n 1970: The census includes a question about tribal affiliation for the first time.
\n 1980: The census counts Inuits and Aleuts for the first time as distinct ethnic groups.
\n 2000: The census combines the Native American\/Alaska Native ethnic group in its questionnaire, which remains the case today.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"