Tribes doubt U.S. Census, conduct their own

WARM SPRINGS, Ore. – Jason Hintsala was living in his cousin’s crowded house with his girlfriend and nine relatives when U.S. census takers passed through the Warm Springs Indian reservation in 2000. Later, he moved with his family to his parents’ trailer.

“We have no choice but to bounce from house to house” because the waiting list for tribal housing is so long, Hintsala said.

American Indian reservations posed a multitude of problems to Census takers – not the least of which were big, ever-changing households, frequent moves, mistrust of government officials and differing definitions of who is an Indian. As a result, the head count of Indians had some of the highest error rates for any minority group in the country.

For the first time, however, tribes will not have to accept the official Census numbers, which are used by Washington in doling out federal aid.

More than 100 tribes around the country are challenging the 2000 Census results and conducting their own head counts, hoping ultimately to win more federal money for things such as health care and housing.

As of Nov. 1, 78 tribes had completed their recounts and 39 had won challenges to the official numbers, said Donna White, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Fifty or so other tribes are conducting or considering their own head counts, according to Rick Anderson, a demographer with Tribal Data Resources, a Redding, Calif., company that is advising tribes.

The Native American Housing Assistance and Self Determination Act, signed by President Clinton in 1996, authorized the recounts.

“Tribes were finally given the right to challenge the Census,” Anderson said. “Before, they were victims of the Census.”

Each additional person counted brings in several hundred dollars a year in federal grant money, according to George Hough, a demographer with Portland State University.

“We’re being shorted on funding,” said Hintsala, 27, an unemployed father of two, recently laid off from a job milling logs from the reservation’s pine forests on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains. “The numbers they have are totally inaccurate. We’re doing our Census to get the money we’re owed.”

The Warm Springs recount began in October, with 17 new canvassers fanning out and ringing doorbells. As of Monday, the recount on the reservation was about half done.

The counts offer a window into the delicate politics of counting American Indians, whose numbers vary by hundreds of thousands of people depending on how the tribes themselves define who is an Indian.

Tribes typically require one-quarter Indian blood to be considered a member, but some allow as little as one-thirty-second. The Census Bureau lets people define themselves.

Nationwide, 2.1 million people reported to census takers that they consider themselves pure American Indian or Alaska Native, far more than the 1.7 million officially enrolled in the country’s 560 federally recognized tribes.

Yet some tribes, including the Warm Springs, found the Census counted fewer Indians than were enrolled in the tribe and living on the reservation.

A long-standing mistrust of government officials such as census takers is partly to blame, some say.

“There’s a long history of lack of trust with the federal government,” said Nancy Linn Holder, who served as a liaison for Northwest tribes during the 2000 census. The Census Bureau encouraged tribes to hire their own census takers, but not all did.

In the past, Holder said, inaccurate Census information has resulted not just in grant denials but also in unflattering federal reports on topics such as suicide rates and alcoholism.

At Warm Springs, the 2000 Census counted 3,334 people, of whom 3,018 indicated they are Indians. According to tribal registries, 3,522 tribal members live on the reservation. That suggests the Census missed 504 Warm Springs tribal members, for an error rate of 14 percent.