This story was originally published by ICT.
WASHINGTON — Even in the fight to decolonize data, Abigail Echo-Hawk thinks about how she’s counted, whether that’s on a census form, in the doctor’s office or for a survey.
She’s a citizen of Pawnee Nation in Oklahoma and a member of the Upper Ahtna Athabaskan people of Mentasta Lake in Alaska.
“I am blessed to be able to contribute to both of those tribes in the way that I should as a tribal person,” she said. “And we deserve to be seen and counted in all of that.”
The public health researcher and director of the Urban Indian Health Institute has trained her two sons to not check the box, “Hispanic,” on any and all data forms because they are also Mexican.
“We know now that if they mark Hispanic/Mexican and American Indian/Alaska Native that they’re not counted as Native people,” Echo-Hawk said. “They’re only counted as Hispanic which is kind of sad because it is an essential part of their identity. …
“It’s another way that we’re made invisible within the data,” she said. “We have a lot of multiracial, multi-tribal folks and we want to make sure that they’re all counted.”
And she’s right. Anecdotally, if you’re a Native person, chances are you know someone who is multiracial, from multiple tribes, both, and all the in-between. It’s also the historical and social context that is often missing in the data narrative that western science has created and applied.
Those issues are on top of the wide range of tribal citizenship criteria set by 574 federally recognized tribes, including blood quantum, lineage, needing to be born on the reservation for enrollment, matrilineal lineage, no dual enrollment, and more. Non-Native people usually don’t understand these issues unless they are allies or in conversation with Native people or tribal leaders.
Case in point, Echo-Hawk said one of her sons was in the hospital once. Being the scientist she is, she went to see how her son was identified by the hospital. They classified her son as White, which he is not. He is an American Indian, Alaska Native and Hispanic kid, she emphasized to the front desk person.
“I stood for 30 minutes fighting with the person at the front desk saying that I wanted my son reclassified as Native and she kept telling me it wasn’t an option. And I could feel my heart rate increase. I could feel my face flush,” she said. “I could feel the intensity of what it meant to fight for our identities. And I feel that every single day in this data work.”
The front desk woman told Echo-Hawk that there was no box to check, but Echo-Hawk knew the person was wrong because she had worked with this particular hospital system using data on American Indians and Alaska Natives.
“But here we had somebody who was untrained, somebody who was looking at an angry Indigenous woman and applying a multitude of stereotypes,” Echo-Hawk said. “And it became a fight, one that I was determined to win. And I did.”
As Echo-Hawk experienced with the hospital, the fight for being counted and seen can impact mental and physical health.
The same is said with her sons making the decision to not check the Hispanic box, as identity is tied to self-worth and having to prove to the federal government or an institution that they exist.
“I think it’s detrimental to their mental health,” she said. “And I really was cautious about the conversation I had with my children. I think I still didn’t do it right in the sense that I’m having to tell them that they can’t claim that they’re Hispanic, which is an important part of their identity. And I feel that struggle every single day.”
Colonial counting systems errors over time
Echo-Hawk is the latest example of how the colonial systems Native people work with aren’t working and haven’t worked since the United States started counting Native people.
First off, no one knows definitively how many Native people were in North America and the Americas pre-contact or during contact with colonial settlers.
For the Americas, that number ranges from 40 to 100 million Indigenous peoples in North, Central and South America. In what is now the United States and Canada, the pre-contact number falls anywhere between 2 and 15 million, according to scholars.
Those same scholars say that it’s because there are no written records and oral tradition was a big way to pass on knowledge. But Native people know the ancestors counted in their own ways on hides, petroglyphs, rocks, and more. Look at the Mayan Empire records.
The United States needed its way of counting its population so citizens could get fair representation in the U.S. House of Representatives. So Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution includes a provision for a census every 10 years.
Natives weren’t counted in the early decades of the census. Often the Indian census rolls took place outside of the required decennial census, and were used for removal, westward expansion, the infamous Manifest Destiny, and later, statehood.
The National Archives initially concluded that Natives were first counted in a decennial census with the general population in 1860, according to a report by ICT in 2019. In the process of digitizing its collection in 2022, however, the National Archives found specific rolls related to the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Those rolls, the Eastern Cherokee Census Rolls from 1835 to 1884, are part of the records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
“In the fall of 1835, officials of the Office of Indian Affairs were sent into the Cherokee Nation to enumerate the Indians in order to determine the number of Cherokees to be removed by the government,” as stated in the National Archives.
“Each of the Eastern Cherokee census rolls was compiled for different administrative reasons, had a different format, and contained different amounts of information. Most of the rolls were made to determine eligibility for payments due under provisions of the 1835 treaty, or were receipt rolls for per capita payments made to tribal members. Some of the rolls are copies that were used by enrolling agents to assist them in their work,” the records description states.
Some Native people did slip into the decennial census records 1790 and 1840 because they were prominent. David Moniac, Creek, who was one of the first Native Americans to attend the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, was counted in the 1830 census for Baldwin County in Alabama, according to the National Archives. Those records indicate he was the head of the household and he had “two other free people and 10 enslaved people.” Moniac was counted as a free White man. He had a grandparent who was European.
It wasn’t until 1860 that there were special instructions on how to count Native people. Count those “who have renounced tribal rule, and who under State or Territorial laws exercise the rights of citizens,” according to the National Archives.
Renouncing “tribal rule” in exchange for U.S. citizenship was commonly practiced back then. These Native people would live with the general population and be eligible for enumeration and U.S. citizenship.
When the U.S. counted Native people in 1880, they counted them as “Indians not taxed,” which meant “Indians living on reservations under the care of Government agents, or roaming individually, or in bands, over unsettled tracts of country.” Indian agents would count taxed Indians and not taxed Indians and include the totals.
Taxed Indians also included the number of people who were Indian and White. The National Archives shows that those were recorded as “HB” for half-breed or “½ I.”
The 1870 census report counted biracial as “where persons reported as ‘Half-breeds’ are found residing with whites, adopting their habits of life and methods of industry, such persons are to be treated as belonging to the white population. Where, on the other hand, they are found in communities composed wholly, or mainly of Indians, the opposite construction is taken.”
Self-identification
The U.S. Census has improved since then. Native people do not have federal Indian agents looking at them and counting them as “Indian,” “non-White,” or “copper.”
In the 2020 Census, Native people could self-identify. There was the option to check multiple race boxes and input up to six tribes. Self-identification brings its own set of problems.
Tribal identity has also changed over the decades. Nowadays, more Native people use their Indigenous name rather than one given to them by outsiders. For instance, many people use the term Haudenosaunee instead of Iroquois, which was given to them by the French. Others use Diné rather than Navajo, or Apsáalooke and not Crow. Often the English names were misinterpreted by colonizers.
“There may be other ways to identify a person’s tribe — by its general name, such as O’odham, Salish or Ojibwe or even by a specific band of the tribe, such as Miniconjou (Mnikoju) Sioux,” as stated in the the 2020 Census toolkit created by the National Congress of American Indians, the oldest and largest national tribal and political organization.
In 2023, the Biden administration proposed ways to reclassify racial data collecting. The proposals have been discarded by President Donald Trump’s latest directive to redo how the Census Bureau collects data.
Another colonial dataset often relied on for accurate data on American Indians and Alaska Natives is the American Community Survey, which falls under the U.S. Census Bureau. It’s an ongoing survey conducted annually. The results are released every year and every five years for estimates. Of course, this is also based on self-identification.
‘The federal government changed its mind about me’
In the line of historical context, another factor in gathering accurate data on Native people and how it ties into Native identity is federal recognition and the fight for it.
Republican Utah Sen. Arthur V. Watkins led the Termination Era — which stretched from the 1950s to 1970 — as chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Indian Affairs under former President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Congress passed a resolution in 1953 to “make Indians within the territorial limits of the United States subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities as are applicable to other citizens of the United States, to end their status as wards of the United States, and to grant them all of the rights and prerogatives pertaining to American citizenship.”
According to the resolution, Congress was to free tribal nations “as quickly as possible” from federal supervision and control. Another assimilation policy and no protection by the federal government. The termination policies started.
By 1960, more than 100 tribal nations had been terminated, including the Menominee through the Menominee Termination Act. “The Menominee Tribal rolls were closed as a result of the Termination Policy,” according to the tribe. Thirteen years later, President Richard Nixon signed the Menominee Restoration Act that restored the tribe’s federal status and federal services, and re-established a framework for its tribal membership.
It took years for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe to gain federal recognition in 2007. The federal register put out its notice of the tribe’s federal status three days before Robert Maxim’s 18th birthday.
Maxim is a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a think tank and nonprofit public policy organization in Washington, D.C.
“I’ve lived about half my life in a tribe that’s federally recognized and about half my life in a tribe that’s not,” Maxim said. “And the federal government for half my life effectively didn’t consider me a real Native person. So nothing about me or my ancestry changed right before I turned 18, but the federal government changed its mind about me.”
A year after he started at Brookings, the organization put out its annual demographic report of its staff. The report indicated the institution had no American Indian or Alaska Native staff. The research director reached out to Maxim and told him to check. The organization had listed Maxim under the two or more races category.
“And that was kind of one of the moments where it hit me, saying, ‘Wow, okay, so this is how Native people get erased in data,’” he said. “So that was really a big motivating factor for me to begin researching more deeply who gets considered Native and how Native people are reflected in data.”
Federal data problems
So how should the United States define Indigenous while keeping in mind the political, legal, and, perhaps, racial aspects of it, considering the lack of federal recognition for some, blood quantum requirements for some but not others, and adoptions.
Colonization is a huge factor to consider when looking at statistical challenges, Maxim said.
The federal government’s definition for American Indian and Alaska Native is the first challenge.
“When they’re collecting data, the American Indian, Alaska Native definition is inclusive of all people Indigenous to North, Central or South America,” he said. “And so that becomes a challenge because that’s a much broader definition than who the federal government offers service to and has a government-to-government relationship with, which is just enrolled citizens of federally recognized tribes.”
He continued with the second challenge: “We’re conflating two issues: one of racial identity with one of citizenship as a nation.”
One report authored by Brookings Metro and the Southern California Association of Governments was released in August.
It concluded that the federal government isn’t the place for accurate data on Native communities and that local and regional government organizations should be proactive partners for tribal nations in collecting accurate data.
“We are currently in a moment where I think the integrity of federal data is really being questioned by a lot of folks, in large part due to actions by the Trump administration,” Maxim told ICT right after the report’s release.
Trump’s actions that have affected federal data include public datasets being removed at the start of the administration, the commissioner of labor statistics being fired in August due to the employment report showing a decline in jobs during Trump’s time in office.
“This idea of whether federal data is accurate and trustworthy is really at the top of a lot of people’s minds right now. So one of the messages in our report is that tribes and Native people have always been operating in an environment where federal data doesn’t accurately represent them and their experience,” Maxim said in August.
Maxim and Echo-Hawk say the federal government’s credibility is fading.
“The U.S. Census isn’t going to get it right, right now. The federal government is not going to get it right,” Echo-Hawk said. “But our tribes, we have the opportunity to do it right.”
As Echo-Hawk emphasized, her sons shouldn’t have to decide how to be counted.
“They should have the options to be counted as all of who they are,” she said. “But because of the colonial systems that are eradicating them in the data I’ve had to train them to do that.”
Data sovereignty
The miscounting of Native people doesn’t just stop when they are missing or dead.
The missing and murdered Indigenous peoples epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic catapulted the need for data on Native people, building on work that had been ongoing for years.
“The pandemic … really brought people together around it and people not only in tribal communities, but now outside of it, members of Congress saw the need for it,” Echo-Hawk said. “At that time, the leaders in the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and the administration saw the need for the data so that we could address how prevalent the virus was … in our communities. And so COVID pushed it forward faster than it was moving before, but it was really moving across the work that had already been done. And now we see lots of pieces of federal legislation that have written into it data sovereignty.”
This health component is one of the reasons William Carson, Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, went back to school to obtain a doctorate in health behavior and health promotion. He looked at the mental health impacts of Indigenous identity.
His research gave him more insight into how data is collected on Native people in the health sector, particularly after they died from COVID-19.
“When an Indigenous person dies or passes away in the United States, they’re no longer there to check off the box to say who they were,” he said. “Very often that’s left up to coroners. It’s left up to people that work with states where if they don’t go through your wallet or they don’t see your tribal ID card or if you don’t look like what they think a Native should look like, you’re not going to be marked as a Native.”
The same is true for missing and murdered Indigenous people.
When Echo-Hawk and her team conducted the 2018 report on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, they found that law enforcement was not collecting data on race and ethnicity on victims.
“As a result of that, everything that was happening to us was being hidden,” she said. “And there was no data to take to Congress to say we need more investment in law enforcement.”
Following the report, the Not Invisible Act of 2019 and Savannah’s Act of 2020 were passed in Congress to respond to the missing and murdered Indigenous peoples cases and human trafficking. Both bills had language stressing that training was needed for law enforcement, not just tribal law enforcement but also authorities in counties and states.
Echo-Hawk said a government report in 2022 highlighted that none of those trainings were happening.
“The federal government was not fulfilling what they needed to do to ensure that we’re being properly captured in the data,” she said. “And so my team and I have been going out and doing it ourselves. We are doing it because no one else was. Now there are other folks doing it and I’m so grateful for that. But we sit down with law enforcement, we go over their databases, we talk to them about what boxes they need to have in there.”
Stepping up to conduct data collection training is one of the many ways Native people, Native-led entities, and tribal nations have been riding a resurgence of Indigenous data sovereignty.
“Indigenous data sovereignty is the right of a nation to govern the collection, ownership, and application of its own data,” according to a statement on the website of the Native Nations Institute at the University of Arizona.
From there the power is given to tribes, but that brings its own set of challenges. Tribes define their own terms for citizenship, which can take into account blood quantum, lineage, matrilineal, adoption, or more.
“There’s the same thing of naturalization, if you want to like the modern day term for adding people into your country,” Carson said. “There was adoption, there was naturalization within communities before blood quantum, before federal enrollment. But we don’t see that now.”
Blood quantum didn’t hit Carson as hard until one of his kids was born and wasn’t able to be enrolled. His pueblo, back then, required a specific percentage of Native blood to qualify for enrollment. He asked himself a lot of questions.
“So what does that mean in terms of how much do I want to be part of this community and … what will that do to him knowing that I’m going to go into this field, go into this research, go talk about this and because of things completely out of his control, he’s not going to be able to be enrolled,” Carson asked. “It did create a little bit of a crisis for me.”
Carson’s pueblo did change its policy to a modified version of lineal descent. He felt a huge weight lifted off his shoulders for his son.
Each tribe’s citizenship criteria is an entire battle on its own and receives criticism from Native people and tribal nations — and non-Native people. But that’s sovereignty.
Sovereignty, however, still does not show how many Native people exist in the United States from enrollment or the census.
Tribal nations do have enrollment data, but that’s data they do not want to give over because it has been used against them. There is also a lack of data sharing agreements between tribes and states. For example, when some tribes gave COVID-19 data to the states, the states wouldn’t give it back. And each state has either amiable or contentious relationships with the tribes.
“Tribes do have the right to govern their tribal data and how they share that, and because of the weaponizing that has happened with data,” Echo-Hawk said.
At the end of the day, sovereignty reigns, although the system must work through hundreds of tribal nations to comprehensively capture accurate data.
“When we think about how the Western world looks at the data, it’s what actually says there are Native people left, and they’ve actually used the lack of data of Native people to promote this idea, this story: there’s only a few of us left. There’s barely any culture,” Echo-Hawk said.
“For me, it [data] solidifies who I am as an Indigenous person and my responsibility to my community now, my community of the ancestors before, and for the ancestors after me,” Echo-Hawk said. “It both solidifies our existence and our ways of knowledge and being through the cultural history. And then we use that to push on this Western side.”
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