At first, the plan to locate nearly 4,000 people in order to count them in a dry run for the 2000 census doesn’t seem too difficult, even amid the hardwood forests in northeastern Wisconsin.
But when the people being counted are American Indians, wary of anyone from the government, and the people doing the counting represent the federal government, the difficulty becomes apparent.
“Our people are extremely suspicious, extremely hostile to federal agents,” said Apesanahkwat, chairman of the Menominee nation.
“Federal agencies mean criminal investigations. They mean nothing but heartache and financial woes to tribal members, that’s what they represent,” said Apesanahkwat. “So the census comes along and right away the shades go down and the doors lock.”
The sprawling Menominee reservation is one of three sites across the country where the U.S. Census Bureau is trying out different methods of conducting the next nationwide head count.
The Census Bureau has become embroiled in political controversy because of a proposal to use a disputed method to account for some of the very people who refuse to come out from behind locked doors, whether on the reservation or in major cities such as Chicago.
The Clinton administration wants to use statistical sampling, a way to estimate the small fraction of the population that doesn’t return the questionnaires or open its doors to census takers. Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, are opposed to sampling, saying the Constitution calls for an “actual enumeration,” or count. At stake are House seats and perhaps control of Congress.
Conventional wisdom holds that sampling would help Democrats because more minorities, often Democratic voters, would be counted, while a traditional census headcount would undercount minorities, helping Republicans.
The outcome of the census also affects how billions of dollars in federal spending are allocated, a point that Verna deLeon, who heads the census committee on the reservation, made to neighbors at a potluck supper last week.
“It’s estimated the federal government spends $3,000 per person on reservation residents for various programs like Head Start and care for the elderly,” deLeon said. Because in 1990 an estimated 400 people on the reservation were not counted, that’s “$1.2 million we did not get in our fair share of funding,” she said, or $12 million over 10 years. “We all pay taxes. We deserve to get something back for them.”
The Census Bureau is testing sampling on the Menominee reservation and also trying different methods to get past the suspicions in an attempt to get the most accurate population count possible. Sampling also is being tested in Sacramento, while a traditional census is being conducted in Columbia, S.C.
In the 1990 census, the first census considered less accurate than the preceding one, Indians on reservations fared the worst of all Americans, with an estimated 12.2 percent of their numbers undercounted. The undercount on Menominee reservation approached that level.
Around the nation other minority groups also were undercounted: 5 percent of Hispanics and 4.4 percent of African-Americans were missed, according to the Census Bureau studies.
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The Census Bureau hopes a $100 million advertising campaign, the first paid media campaign in its history, and other changes will help it get a more accurate count.
Part of that campaign was visible on the reservation: a large billboard urging people to complete Census forms with the message, “This is your future. Don’t leave it blank.”
It is the occasional target of stones thrown by Indian children, who, like kids everywhere, know a tempting target when they see one.
The problems the Census Bureau is encountering here are not unique to American Indians. The suspicions of the Menominee are held by many other people, including immigrants, especially undocumented ones who try to avoid any contact with the government.
Furthermore, many Americans are skeptical of the government’s intentions, and even Americans who aren’t overly suspicious have heightened concerns about their privacy in the current era of proliferating personal computers and information databases.
In the three sites chosen for the dress rehearsal, Census workers for weeks have canvassed neighborhoods to double check their address lists and drop off questionnaires, which recipients are supposed to mail back by Saturday. After that, the plan is to send enumerators into the field to follow up on those addresses that did not return the questionnaires.
Certain changes since the last census have helped the Census Bureau develop better specific information about where people live. A 1994 change in federal law, for instance, permits the bureau to share its address information with local government authorities, like planning officials.
That helps the bureau pick up new housing developments that might otherwise be missed by mailings and enumerators, thus contributing to undercounts.
The concept of an “address” takes on an abstract quality in a place like the rural, 235,000-acre Menominee reservation, which lacks regular addresses. On the reservation, which is 95 percent forested, when census workers go into the field to update their maps or figure out where to drop off questionnaires, they often rely on means of identifying locations other than traditional street addresses.
“Some of the descriptions will say `yellow trailer with brown trim, or `the house at the second fence on (Highway) Double A,’ ” said Marlene Weisrock, an Oneida Indian who heads the Census Bureau’s efforts on the Menominee reservation.
Figuring out whether a location is habitable and should be included on the maps the enumerators use to follow up on non-responses can be tricky. “You have to go up to the house or trailer, walk around, see if all the windows are in, then you include it,” said Henrietta Long, a Menominee census worker.
But when the veteran of the 1990 census recorded just three trailers on a site with seven, she was sent back out by Weisrock, who had an inkling all seven could be inhabited, a hunch which on further inspection appeared true.
It is also not for the fainthearted. Census workers were recently chilled by the discovery of a murdered woman’s body on the reservation. “You can’t bring somebody (a non-census worker) with you,” because of Census Bureau privacy rules, said Long, who remembered thinking as she canvassed a remote area: “What if somebody would jump out here? I’m in the middle of nowhere. It did bother me.”
It is too early for census officials to know much about how the dress rehearsal will turn out. Tallies aren’t expected until the end of the year.
Though officials say the dry run is proceeding well, there are some concerns. Low unemployment, for example, makes hiring staff more difficult. In Menominee, the Census Bureau has had to offer about $13 an hour to compete with the local casino.
There are also indications that the bureau’s advertising campaign aimed at reducing suspicions and getting the most participation is falling short.
For instance, in discussing the uses of census data, Apesanahkwat stated that many Indians fear the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which leases many of the homes on tribal lands to residents, would raise rents if it knew how many people actually live in particular households.
He then stated as a matter of fact, but incorrectly, to recent visitors that information about individual households gathered by the Census Bureau was not confidential and could be obtained through Freedom of Information requests.
When told he was wrong, that the household information was indeed confidential by law, he said, “You can understand as somebody who’s worked with Washington and the bureaucracy as long as I have, that I wasn’t aware of that, then what do they (the average tribal member) know? . . . These are grass-roots reasons why people aren’t going to cooperate and they’re very fundamental. But they can be overcome.”
Jonathan Thompson, associate director of the census, sounded somewhat exasperated when he heard that the bureau’s message about the strict confidentiality of the data had been lost on the tribal chairman and presumably many others.
“It’s something we need to work on more,” Thompson said. “Although we have done some research that showed that it’s a difficult message to convince laypeople, in general, that the federal government doesn’t share data. Nevertheless, there are other ways to get that message out. Most of it is working at the local level and educating people like the chairman that it is confidential.”