Not Counting Indigenous Americans: What Is Missed and What Can Be Done about It

Margo Anderson, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

The decision by a state or private researcher to collect, process, publish, and/or analyze a phenomenon, i.e., to create “data infrastructure,” involves a host of issues. They include administrative capacity to do it; cost of the enterprise; functions the enterprise is supposed to serve; the authority to do it, to name a few issues. The decisions not to collect something are equally important. The paper will explore these issues in the decisions and practices of the U.S. census to “exempt,” or “exclude,” “Indians not paying taxes,” or “Indians not taxed” from the US constitutional mandate to count the population every ten years. These decisions and practices have bedeviled historians and historical demographers trying to understand US population history. American Indian communities have railed about the racism and genocidal policies that unfortunately were reflected in the outputs of the federal statistical system. They’ve also produced workarounds that attempt to produce the missing data. It’s a big issue, with implications for standards for what ethical and humane historical data infrastructure can and should be.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 151. Beyond the Census--Adding What's Missing and Aggregating What's There