Leaders and citizens of the Navajo Nation participate in a distribution of food, water and supplies to help elderly and high-risk residents on the Arizona portion of the reservation on May 26, 2020. Photo: Navajo Nation Office of the President and Vice President

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COVID-19 hinders accurate Census count in Indian Country

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

By Kevin Abourezk

Tribal communities that have closed their borders to protect themselves from the COVID-19 pandemic are facing a new threat: being undercounted by the U.S. Census Bureau.

In an online townhall Tuesday, Census officials and tribal advocates raised concerns about the challenges facing their efforts to accurately count the first Americans. The outcome is significant, as an undercount will impact federal funding promised by the federal government's trust and treaty responsibilities, and affect how the Native people are represented, politically, at the local, state and national levels.

Tim Olson, associate director for field operations for the Census Bureau, said the agency was forced to suspend its “Update Leave” outreach efforts because of the COVID-19 pandemic. That phase of the 2020 effort involves federal workers going house to house to drop off census materials and was meant to reach rural households, including those in Indian Country.

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While most households in America have typical addresses with street names and house numbers, most Native people living on reservations must rely on post office boxes and lack traditional mailing addresses. Olson said the Update Leave effort was designed to confirm each household’s physical location and provide a special Census ID number in materials tied to those locations.

The 2020 count began that operation in March but was forced to halt it after just three days because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Olson said. But even though the Census has restarted operations in many Native communities, some reservation borders remain closed due to threats posed by coronavirus, he said.

“More than 90 percent of those 6.7 million addresses throughout rural America, on tribal lands particularly, never got an invite, never got an opportunity to respond to the census,” he said.

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The Navajo Nation is one example of a reservation that has not reopened its borders to outsiders, including census workers, Olson said. Despite having an area office in Window Rock, Arizona, the tribal capital, the Census has yet to receive the go-ahead from Navajo leaders to resume door-to-door operations, he said.

“We’re holding off that area until the tribal leadership says it is okay to resume work on our lands,” he said.

Olson also said some tribes in Montana also have not allowed Census workers to resume house-to-house operations as they continue to protect their communities from the spread of the coronavirus.

While the Census has achieved a 60.1 percent response rate from households across the country, primarily as a result of mailing forms directly to households, many Native communities have seen a much, much lower response rate, Olson said. For example, the Pueblo of Acoma in New Mexico has seen just a 9.1 percent response rate.

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Olson said he expects those low response rates within tribal communities to increase once Census workers begin visiting individual households within those communities and providing census forms and other information.

“It looks alarming, and it is alarming,” he said. “But just keep in mind that the residents have not received an invitation yet.”

But what happens if tribes, such as the Navajo Nation, don’t allow census workers to visit individual households before the October 31 deadline to submit all census information to the federal government?

“I’m not sure really honestly how to answer that,” Olson said. “From an operational perspective, we have a requirement that we complete all of our data collections no later than October 31.”

He said the Census plans to start contacting households that haven’t responded to requests for information starting August 11, but if officials and workers aren’t able to even make initial contact with tribal households within closed reservations, that could make it difficult to conduct follow-up visits, Olson said.

“We’re going to keep our fingers crossed that we can do these operations safely,” he said.

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Lycia Maddocks, vice president of external affairs for the National Congress of American Indians, said 4.9 percent of Native people weren’t counted in the 2010 Census, a rate more than twice as high as any other ethnic group.

“Although many of us have demonstrated these efforts toward a complete and accurate count, the COVID-19 pandemic has thwarted these efforts,” she said.

Indeed, the first person “counted” by the 2020 Census was a Native elder in Alaska. Olson said he visited Toksook Bay along with U.S. Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham in January to interview the first person counted.

“Out of the 330 million people, really an honor that an Alaska Native, a Native person in our nation, was No. 1 counted,” he said.

Now it will be up to Census officials to ensure Native people aren't both the first and the least counted population in America.