The first US census that asked about race was in 1790. Every year the categories are revised to use slightly different criteria so that numbers can’t be reliably compared. Hispanics/Latinos can be either Indian or not, so their category can be separated but overlaps with Indians.
But there is another caution: the US Census uses sampling to arrive at their numbers. Samples are commonly used in surveys and care is taken to make sure they reflect reality, but inevitably the forces discussed above will mean that assumptions will make a difference. In the 2000 Census Report of the US Census Bureau, ten tribes were selected to stand for the 4.3 million people (1.5 percent of the total population) who claimed to be American Indian or Native Alaskan, which included Alaska Athabascan, Aleut, Eskimo, and Tlingit-Haida. Ten tribes were chosen to represent all the rest: Apache, Cherokee, Chippewa, Choctaw, Creek, Iroquois, Lumbee, Navajo, Pueblo, and Sioux.
There are deep geographical and historical differences among these tribes. Generalizations are necessarily very broad. Also, the US Government has a peculiar way of erasing tribes, admitting new tribes, combining several historical tribes into a new one, and generally confusing matters. These ten tribes above are large, historical, and relatively stable compared to some of the smaller groups.
To the degree one can generalize, these are the 2000 findings.
1, Persons surveyed are younger than the general population. About a third are under 18. Median age is 29, compared to the general 35. Less than ten percent were 65 or older.
2. More people lived in family households: 73%
3. 72% to 90% spoke English at home except for Navajo, Pueblo and Eskimo where as many as a fourth of the people don’t speak English very well.
4. 71% of the surveyed people had a high school diploma, compared to 80% of the general population. 11% of the groups had a BS degree or higher, compared with 24% of all people.
5. 66% of men were employed, compared to 71% of all. 57% of women were employed, compared to 58% for all women. No estimate was made of jobs “off the books.”
6. Among American Indians, 22% to 29 % had management or professional jobs. 15% to 25% had service jobs.
7. American Indians and Alaska Native men with full-time jobs averaged $28,900 a year, compared to $37,100 for all men.
8. Twice as many people in these two groups lived in poverty (25.7%) as all people (12.4%) The poorest tribes were Apache, Navajo, and Sioux, all of them having more than one-third living in poverty. The Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Iroquois, and Lumbee all had a little less than one-fifth in poverty. [Recently the definition of poverty has been changed.]
9. One third of the two big groups lived on reservations or the equivalent.
In the interval between the 2000 Census and the 2010 Census, there was a sudden awakening among the Native American populations who realized that resources (money) are allocated according to population. It was in their best interest to be counted. An advertising campaign, grassroots organizing, and general reassurance were extended. The numbers are still being “crunched.”
An earlier jump in people self-identifying themselves as Native Americans came in the Sixties when romantic times and block-buster books like “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” persuaded a lot of people who had been “passing” as white (or black) that they should declare themselves Indians.
NORTH AMERICAN NATIONAL DIFFERENCES
The roots and assumptions of Canada and Mexico were different from the history of the United States. Two major wars fought in the United States, the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, involved Indians fighting on both sides, but also were fought on American ground which was mostly NATIVE American ground. Villages, gardens and livestock were destroyed as wars always do. Aside from humans being in the way, scorched earth policies wiped out habitat and game. But Indians hardly counted as human in the minds of hardened soldiers and renegades fighting their own brothers.
One of the major U.S. influences was the Dawes Act, an imitation of the Homestead Act, which assumed that people should be scattered across the land on homesteads that they owned. Reservations were divided into plots and assigned to the members of the tribe who, if they were declared competent, then could manage their own matters, including the sale of the land. If they ran up debt against it, it could be seized. Or they could leave the land in the trusteeship of the United States. (We know how that worked out.)
In Canada the emphasis was on tribe rather than individual and reservations were left in joint ownership as communal property. (Communism and socialism are not the bugaboos in Canada that they are in the USA.) Some chafe at this system. Much of Canada was for a long time under the guardianship of the Hudson’s Bay Company and therefore managed by educated male employees who often married tribal women, even if it was only in the “country way,” creating the Metis. Hudson’s Bay factors kept careful records so we have counts of people, inventories of merchandise, and numbers of furs acquired.
Mexico fought an internal war that was fueled by differences in class between Europeans and indigenous people. The upshot was a system formally declared to be pluralistic and respectful of indigenous languages and ways. Also, the Catholic religious view was that indigenous people had souls and ought to be converted to the church regardless of status.
This part of the continent had already seen the rise and fall of major cities. By the time of the arrival of the Spanish in Mesoamerica, many of the diverse ethnic civilizations were loosely joined under the Aztec empire. The capital of the empire, Tenochtitlan, became one of the largest urban centers in the world, with an estimated population of 350,000 inhabitants at about the same time as the first major cities around the Mediterranean and in China.
The new infections ravaged the entire continent, just as they did in Australia. Alaska was infected by Russians. Smallpox was only one of many diseases, mostly those with origins in the domestication of animals, but also those with insect carriers like malaria that came from Africa. Later on, a virulent flu arose in China, traveled to Moscow, went from there to Europe and crossed the Atlantic to spread across America. When Lewis & Clark made their trek, they thought that once they had crossed the Rocky Mountains going West, they were far enough from civilization to safely indulge themselves in female company. Alas, they had not thought about the ships coming up the Columbia, even though they hoped to return to the east the easy way by hailing one of them. The impact on their health was devastating. It was Thomas Jefferson who had instructed them to carry cowpox to vaccinate the tribes against smallpox, but there was no good cure for syphilis.
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