How Young Native Americans Are Using The Census To Make Their Communities Heard

By Rebecca Nathanson


For Austin Weahkee, a member of the Cochiti and Zuni tribes and Navajo Country, his activism started “basically from the day I was born.” While he was a child, his family member was piece of a campaign to prevent the construction of a road through Petroglyph National Monument, a sacred Native American site in New Mexico, where he grew up. They ended up losing that distinct battle in 2004, yet the experience far from discouraged Weahkee, who comes from a long line of activists involved in protecting sacred sites.


“It inspired us to get into politics, to move away from more customary activism to getting people registered vote, to create ensure that we actually had good policymakers and good decision-makers,” he tells MTV News. So in the lead-up to 2020 — both the presidential election and the United States census — Weahkee, right now 22, is following through on that early inspiration. He is one of a handful of young Native Residents of the United States stepping up to tackle some of the challenges that these events have long brought to their communities by raising awareness, advocating for more accessibility, and convincing their peers to fight with them.


The undercounting of Native Residents of the
U.S. In the census is a persistent, chronic ailment that almost all people acknowledge just whenever a decade although it impacts its victims each day of every year — and has for decades. In the 1990 census, Native Residents of the
U.S. On reservations were undercounted by 12.2 percent. That dropped to just 0.7 percent in 2000 before jumping back up to about 5 percent in 2010. That same year, the Black population was undercounted by 2.1 percent and the Latinx population by 1.5 percent; the non-white Latinx population was overcounted by 0.8 percent. (The census groups Latinx people under the “Hispanic” category.) Around one quarter of all Native Residents of the United States stay in what are believed hard-to-count census tracts: issues like poverty, education level, housing insecurity, along with a low-median age all come with each other to increase their risk of undercounting.


The implications of this are manifold: Census intelligence determines how funding and resources are distributed. “It affects everything in everyday life, even for our more federally funded tribal groups because a lot of their cash doesn't come from the state. It does come from federal programs,” says Weahkee, an organizer with the Native American Voters Alliance plus a 2018 Movement Builders Fellow with the Center for Native American Youth. “It affects roads, schools, Internet, healthcare... It's really a lot of resources that we’re missing out on by not making sure that everyone's counted.”


Weahkee acknowledges that including each person in the census tally is a daunting task — a potentially demoralizing task, so all-encompassing that, not knowing where to begin, some never begin at all. One challenge is accessibility: he says that in 2010, a helicopter was sent to a remote area to reach someone. Allocating the census form in Native languages would also make filling it out much less intimidating.


“We don't have to create ensure that we're counting everybody, nevertheless that we're counting everybody that we know and that we can count,” Weahkee suggests. “So really just making sure that our at-home radius is totally covered, making sure that grandma who lives a mile down a dirt road is counted.” The objective is that these efforts make sure that every household receives either a self-response census form or a visit from a census volunteer.


Voting in the 2020 election presents another challenge in the task to ease and eliminate the under-representation of Native Residents of the United States on all levels. Right considering that, they’re not immune to the voter ID laws currently impacting other minorities. In 2012, only 66 percent of eligible Native Residents of the United States and Alaska Natives were registered to vote. Voter registration and polling sites accept identification issued by tribal governments, although voters still need to have residential statistics in the form of a residence number or a street name, which those living on reservations often lack.


It isn’t simply a matter of having the correct form of ID, either: Native voters first have to know about the election. “For me, the most crucial thing is to be on the ground and present and doing what I can to make sure folks are just aware. That's one of the greatest issues, especially on the reservation because it's so rural and people live very far from one another,” says Shandiin Herrera, a 22-year-old from the Navajo Country in Utah and one of the Center for Native American Youth’s 2019 Champions for Change. “Even this past election [in 2018], a lot of people didn't even know there was an election going on. So I think my job is at the very least to create ensure folks are aware and informed and have accurate information.”


Lack of awareness is one thing — lack of interest is another entirely. The former is potentially solvable, a matter of organizing and communication; the latter is based on a widespread distrust of the U.S. Government that is only deepening with every instance of undercounting and under-representation. Herrera says that this is, at least in part, generational — a consequence of elders who were place on Earth before they had the correct to vote. In 1924, the Indian Citizenship Act guaranteed citizenship to all Native peoples place on Earth In America, however up until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned the exclusion of citizens from voting, states could still deny them their right to vote.


And however, some young folks are also reacting with disillusionment and disengagement to a lifetime of slights from the federal government. Amari McCoy, a 22-year-old member of the Cherokee Country in Oklahoma and piece of the National Congress of American Indians’ Youth Commission, believes disinterest is pervasive for several young people. “It’s actually more usual than would think, in case you just go ahead and ask, ‘Are you registered to vote?’ To have youth mention, ‘No, we're not. It does not matter anyway.’ And they're just so nonchalant, relaxed about it.”


Any time it comes to political candidates supplying specific policies or making plays for support from different minority groups, Native Residents of the
U.S. Are rarely addressed directly; some days find themselves ordered with each other with other minorities for broad-strokes initiatives, which can serve an in general good nevertheless also render the most weak people invisible. (So far, few of the over 20 major candidates from both the Democratic and Republican parties for the 2020 election have specifically asserted Native issues within their broader policies.)


As a result of this categorization, along with of undercounting, they get much less "political or justice attention" than other susceptible populations, as Janeen Comenote, director of the National Urban Indian Family member Coalition, tells MTV News. Understandably, then, several Native peoples are left with an antipathy for the U.S. Government that fails to inspire action.


As 2020 approaches, activists are focused on the hows of it all: How to change a warranted caution and reticence towards participating in U.S. Politics; how to mobilize in the face of stagnancy; how young people like Weahkee, Herrera, and McCoy can organize their peers to take advantage of the possibilities presented by the election and the census, without consideration of the shortcomings of both those events and the government that facilitates them.


“There's still a lot of resentment within our Native communities and I can absolutely understand where they're coming from,” McCoy says. “But at the same time, if we desire to have change, if we hope to move forward, we're going to have to get out and make our voices heard. Now, the perfect way for us to do that is to turn in the census and to get out and vote.”


For a community that has been subjected to erasure in numerous characteristic of the United States’s past and present, all of this is easier mentioned than done. “I think the hardest part is realizing each day that you're in this nation that doesn't think you're still here,” Herrera explains. “It's hard to feel like you don't belong although you're on your original homeland, you know? And thus the sense of belonging, the sense of community, I think that is the most challenging segment of navigating this world where you're not included at all.”


She adds: “That's why the more representation we get—whether that be local government, state government, federal—for Native youth is a chance for us to finally feel seen and to feel like these policies are going to be representative of us.”