Census undercount short-changes Indian Country

Since at least 1851 treaties that served as constitutions for American Indigenous were broken and are still being rewritten for political expediency. Despite the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples American Indians are subject to at least four overlapping jurisdictions making tribes the most regulated people in the US without representatives serving in Congress. 

Today, attorneys are gathering evidence that the Trump Organization committed crimes against humanity in all of Indian Country not only by slow-walking resources to reservations during a pandemic but by undercounting Indigenous populations during the 2020 Census. Trump killed the White House Tribal Nations Summit because he loathes Native Americans.

“I thought they were congratulating themselves for a lot of work that Native orgs (organizations) had been doing,“ Native American Voter Alliance (NAVA) Education Project director Ahtza Dawn Chavez, said. “And you know, we still have an undercount in the country, especially in New Mexico.” “We know that the 2020 census was grossly underfunded due to the administration that was leading the census,” Chavez said. She said when coalition members saw the resulting data, “they commented that they’re off by hundreds in some communities, and then like on the Navajo nation by thousands, tens of thousands in terms of an undercount.” “And when you think about in the state of New Mexico, even just a 1 percent undercount of the population with all of the tribes that we have in the state, that's about a $43 million loss left on the table – just for a 1 percent undercount,” Chavez said. The states with the highest American Indian and Alaska Native alone are: Alaska (15.2 percent), New Mexico (10 percent), South Dakota (8.8 percent), Oklahoma (8.4 percent), and Montana (6.2 percent). [Indian Country Today Media]

Learn more about the investigations of ethnic cleansing and genocide perpetrated by the Trump White House linked here.

ip photo: a tiny pueblo dancer moves to the beat of drummers during the 2012 Santa Fe Indian Market.

When Thoreau was a student at Harvard a group of Penobscot set up camp in Harvard Yard, claiming the college as their land. It was one of the first campus sit-ins. They were treated abusively by many of the students & teachers–thus setting a trend for the future of the college.

— Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch (@JeffreyStClair3) November 6, 2021