Native Intelligence:

a column by

Jack D. Forbes

Native American Studies

University of California, Davis

This column's focus:

The Battle for Numbers and for the

Right of Self-Identification

Native Americans have generally been politically much weaker than other ethnic groups. This has led to an anti-Native bias in federal statistical policies. Since 1969 the Bureau of the Census and federal statisticians have responded to political influence and pressure from the White House as well as from Congress. This pressure led to the creation of a fictitious "Spanish origin" or "Hispanic" group and also led to increasing that group's size as much as possible. This large size has come, more often than not, by reducing the count for Native Americans.

My articles on Undercounting Native Americans (Wicazo Sa Review) and The Hispanic Spin (in preparation) review the above process in great detail. Thus, I need not go into all of it here. A few examples will, however, illustrate the anti-Native bias of the Census Bureau and of the federal committees responsible for current federal Office of Manage and Budget (OMB) requirements.

1. A 1969 Census form made it impossible for a Mexican, Puerto Rican, Central or South American person to also check American Indian (Current Population Report, Series P-20, No. 221, Series P-20, No. 213).

2. In 1970, the Bureau of the Census gave to the "Spanish heritage" group all persons with Spanish surnames in five Southwestern states, in spite of the fact that large proportions of Native Americans have Spanish surnames in those and other states. The Census Bureau also assigned to the "Spanish heritage" group "all other persons in which the head or wife reported Spanish as his or her mother tongue." This was done for the 15% sample. In the 5% sample, all persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American heritage were automatically assigned to a "Spanish origin" category, regardless of race. All Mexicans and Puerto Ricans were assigned to the white race unless they indicated specifically otherwise. ((Subject Reports: Persons of Spanish Origin, 1970. (PC(2)-1C,p.App.6).

3. On January 31, 1972 Circular A-46 was revised by OMB so that whenever a person was reported both as "Spanish Descent" and American Indian only the "Spanish descent" could be counted (Establishing a Federal Racial/Ethnic Data System, Vol. II, Appendix B, pp.B-48,49).

4. In 1974 the Federal Interagency Committee on Education's ad hoc Committee on Racial/Ethnic Definitions decided to restrict American Indians to people whose origins were in North America, without bothering to define North America or to express any reasons as to why Canadian First Nations People should be included while South American indigenous people were to be excluded. All countries from Mexico southward were assigned a new "Hispanic" category if they were former colonies of the Spanish Empire.

Still further, European Spaniards and all other persons of "Spanish origin and culture" were assigned to this category, thus revealing blatantly political objectives; to swell the numbers of the new Hispanic group and to make any studies of discrimination based upon skin color or other physical features extremely difficult since the Hispanic groups would include virtually every race on the globe, and to make it possible for Caucasians such as many Argentineans, Spaniards, Cubans, Uruguayans, etc. to qualify for affirmative action positions previously reserved for Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

The Hispanic category, as promulgated eventually by OMB, includes not only all former subjects of the Spanish Empire and of Spain itself such as Filipinos, Guamanians, Spanish Moroccans, Spanish Saharans, etc., but also Sephardic Jews. Sephardic means Spanish and there are people in Israel, Greece and New York City who still speak "ladino", a dialect of Spanish. American Indians from Belize, Surinam, Guiana, Trinidad, Dominica, Aruba and other regions subject to French, British or Dutch colonization were completely left out. They could be neither Hispanic nor American Indian.

The FICE created a situation where every Mexican, for example, was automatically "Hispanic" regardless of their race or first language. It is true, of course, that they could check "Indian, Amer" on census forms but since "Amer" would be easily interpreted as meaning "United States", few did. They would have also had to write in their "tribe", a very difficult thing for Nahuatl, Mixtec, Zapotec, Maya or Otomi peoples with nations of up to one million speakers! In short, they are native nations, not tribes.

OMB later made matters even worse by changing the original FICE definition for American Indian by adding "and who maintains cultural identification through tribal affiliation or community recognition" (This was done for no other ethnic group.) Thus, when Circular A-46 was finally finished by OMB in September 1976, it had a definition of American Indian which not only limited indigenous status to Canadian, U.S. and presumably, Greenlandic Native People, but also added an extremely restrictive qualifier designed to drastically reduce the numbers of Native Americans.

How does one define "cultural identification?" Does that mean that Christian or Mormon Indians cannot be counted since they have abandoned a key aspect of "cultural identification?" How does one define "tribal affiliation" or "community recognition?" It sounds like an open invitation for bureaucrats to "play God", especially with urban and non-reservation indigenous people. Perhaps the real motive for OMB's consistent effort to reduce the numbers of Native Americans, aside from swelling the ranks of the Spanish Empire category, was part of the long-range ambition of actually "getting rid of Indians" as was tried with termination in the 1950's and more recently with making an erroneous distinction between so-called "historic" Indian communities and "non-historic" communities.

On April 19, 1976 Harold Borgstrom of OMB addressed a long memo to "Mr. Mitchell" of OMB outlining ways in which the number of Native Americans with a special relationship to the federal government could be reduced. At this point I cannot prove that Borgstrom had any influence on OMB's restrictive approach to counting Native people, but I suspect that his memo reflects Republican sentiment in 1976 (Umatilla Journal, July 1976).

The fact of the matter is that an indigenous American remains indigenous whether he possesses an active tribal affiliation or community recognition. A Paiute, for example, living in Pensacola, Florida would still be an indigenous person even though he/she is no longer a member of say the Pyramid Lake Tribe, because of being a long-time non-resident nor is he/she involved in any First Nations community. No ethnic group I know of has ever been asked to give up their ethnicity or identity because they travel among strangers or seek economic opportunity far from home and no longer practice particular ceremonies or belong to a specific governmental entity.

The OMB is currently considering revisions of its racial and ethnic definitions. It is a chance for indigenous people to advocate the right of all native groups, including all Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders to have their chance at genuine self-identification. [ August 16, 1994 ]

[Professor Jack D. Forbes, Powhatan-Delaware, is the author of Columbus and Other Cannibals, Africans and Native Americans and other books.]

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