Coronavirus Contributing to Slow Census Count of American Indians

One negative consequence of the tribes’ strong measures against coronavirus: potentially greater Census undercount. Rural areas that depend on Census workers to stop by in person with their headcount questionnaires are well behind in their Census response rates:

The Census Bureau will “absolutely” be able to catch up with the rural count, said Tim Olson, associate director of field operations. When work was suspended in March, only about 10% of households without city-style addresses had received questionnaires. Now, it’s at 30% two weeks into restarting door-to-door work in some places, he said.

“It’s going very well,” Olson said.

But in some tribal areas, response rates were below 15% as of mid-May.

“It’s looking like there’s a real possibility of an undercount, given the obstacles we are facing,” Ta’jin Perez, program manager at Western Native Voice, an advocacy group in Montana.

During the last census in 2010, American Indians and Alaska Natives living on reservations were undercounted by 4.9%, according to the Census Bureau, by far the highest undercount of any group.

Olson acknowledged that some tribal lands have closed themselves off to stop the spread of the virus, and census workers won’t be able to drop off questionnaires until they reopen.

“There may be some pockets that are further delayed,” he said [Mike Schneider, “Rural Areas, Tribal Lands Hit Hardest by Census Interruption,” AP via Indian Country News, 2020.05.23].

Hey, Census! If you have any cash left, you might want to hire some more tribal members to carry those Census forms through the checkpoints and help count their tiospaye!

The national Census self-response rate as of Saturday was 60.0%. South Dakota’s self-response rate so far is 59.7%, but in some tribal counties, including Dewey, Ziebach, Oglala Lakota, and Todd, the self-response rate hasn’t climbed out of the single digits.