Leonard Jones doesn’t remember a survey packet on the porch or a knock on his front door during the last census count.
But that doesn’t surprise him — not out here. Only family and close friends make the dusty 16-km trek from the paved road, down dirt switchbacks lined by sandstone mesas, to his secluded home in northwestern New Mexico. There is no electricity, no running water, in the single-level sandstone structure.
“Few people know we’re out here,” Jones, who lives on the Navajo Nation reservation, said on a recent morning as his son Brett trimmed his hair. “We live in nature.” “The thought of people coming out here and making us a part of any official count seems like a
stretch, you know?”
As the 2020 census nears, concern about an undercount of Native Americans is gaining traction here and across the country.
Approximately 600,000 Native Americans live on tribal reservations, semi-sovereign entities governed by elected indigenous leaders. Here on the Navajo Nation — the country’s largest reservation, spanning portions of New Mexico, Arizona and Utah — roughly 175,000 people live in a mostly rural high desert area bigger than West Virginia.
While other reservations are smaller, most are also remote. And all are home to a longstanding distrust of the US government. Those factors help make Native American reservations among the most difficult places to canvass during the census, the once-per-decade federal effort to find and tally every resident of the US.
In the 2010 count, nearly 1 in 7 Native Americans living on a reservation was missed, according to an audit by the US Census Bureau. That adds up to 82,000 people overlooked and uncounted - equal to skipping the entire city of Santa Fe, New Mexico’s capital.
With seats in Congress and statehouses determined by population, political power is at stake. So is each reservation’s slice of more than $900 billion in annual federal spending doled out largely in accordance with census data. “If a place doesn’t get a fair count, they don’t get their fair share,” said William O’Hare, a demographer and author who has studied the effects of errors in the census.
Getting a fair share is especially important in places like the Navajo Nation, said Seth Damon, speaker for the tribal council.
Roughly 85 per cent of the reservation’s roads are unpaved. If there hadn’t been an undercount in 2010, Damon said, the tribe likely would have received more money from the Federal Highway Administration Tribal Transportation Program. “For the Navajo Nation and Indian Country,” Damon said, “the census determines whether your dirt roads get graveled or paved.” — DPA
Kurtis Lee and Ben Welsh
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