Vernon Livingston found his 2020 census packet strewn on the ground three weeks ago outside his home in the Navajo Nation, assuming it had been blown up after someone left it.
Livingston, who generally retrieves his mail from a post office, said he properly filled out the form and sent it in last week, acknowledging that if he had had to do it online, he might have given up. For some of his neighbors, he said, participating in the census may not seem like a priority these days.
“We don’t have good internet service here,” said Livingston, 38, who lives in a rural outpost near Window Rock, Arizona, the capital of the Navajo Nation. “That is just one of the many barriers.”
The tribe’s extensive reservation, the largest in the United States, spans the corners of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. Many of its desert communities are isolated and lack reliable electricity and internet access that would otherwise make completing a census a simple task. For census workers, physically ensuring that each household receives forms requires traveling long distances, leaving them in addresses that cannot even be recorded on a map.
And that was before the coronavirus pandemic.
Now, the work that should have been done months ago and was delayed due to the virus has proven to be a challenge among tribal nations, particularly for the Navajo Nation, where counting each person is crucial. Dee Alexander, the tribal affairs coordinator for the US Census Bureau, said a census bureau in Window Rock opened last month and began delivering census emails to homes.
“We are not in normal times,” Alexander said, adding that the office is monitoring new radio and video announcements to spread the word about the census.
COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has mistreated the Navajo Nation, which until Tuesday had registered 8,290 positive cases and 401 deaths. Tribe leaders have instituted strict public health orders and curfews to help reduce the increase. While the number of cases among the tribe is trending downward, the surge in the virus in recent weeks in Arizona, Utah, and other western and southern states that reopened their economies earlier has rekindled fears that the worst it is far from over.
In turn, the public health crisis that occurs once in a century is complicating the population count once in a decade.
Houses across the United States began receiving notices in March to complete the government survey, which is critical to determining how approximately $ 1.5 billion in federal funds is distributed and to ensuring that states have accurate representation in Congress.
Census forms were sent in mid-April to households that had not responded online or by phone. The Census Bureau had to suspend field operations, including those in tribal areas, for a month and a half due to the pandemic.
Plans to complete the 2020 count by the end of this month have been delayed until the end of October, and the office said it could send up to 500,000 workers to collect information from households that have not responded by mail, phone or internet.
Starting Thursday, pollsters will be deployed to interview those who have not responded, starting in a handful of states and regions, including Maine, West Virginia, southeastern Louisiana, and northern Missouri. Workers must comply with local public health guidelines, including wearing masks and observing social distancing. The office anticipates the need to collect responses from approximately 56 million addresses across the country.
So far, 62 percent of US households have responded to themselves.
Tribal areas have among the lowest participation numbers. The Navajo Nation has an auto-response rate of 7.1 percent; in 2010, its final self-response rate was 29.4 percent, according to the Census Bureau.
Elsewhere in Arizona, the Hopi tribe has a self-response rate of 7.5 percent, while the Havasupai, whose reserve is surrounded by the Grand Canyon and has been under an emergency shutdown, have not responded.
The White Mountain Apache tribe, whose Fort Apache reservation in eastern Arizona briefly surpassed the Navajo Nation’s COVID-19 infection rate last month, has a self-response rate of 4 percent.
The Rosebud Sioux tribe in southern South Dakota has a self-response rate of 14.8 percent; its 2010 rate was 37.7 percent, the office said. The Rosebud Sioux were among the three tribes in the state that established driver checkpoints in the spring to curb the spread of the coronavirus, triggering a dispute with Governor Kristi Noem.
Alexander said that for the tribes that have closed their borders, “we have to respect their tribal sovereignty and respect if they don’t want us on their tribal lands, but we also want to get that count.”
She said it is about partnering with tribes and determining the best logistics, such as identifying tribal escorts who can work with census takers.
American Indians and Alaska Natives living in Native American reservations have historically been the most difficult to count. In 2010, they were numbered less than 5 percent, or about 30,000 people, according to a report released in February by geographer Jason Jurjevich, an associate professor at the University of Arizona. Meanwhile, Latinos were not numbered 1.5 percent and African Americans 2.1 percent.
Jurjevich wrote that rising public mistrust in government, a digital divide, and lingering concerns about a proposed citizenship question on the form could discourage some people from participating this year.
OJ Semans Sr., a member of Rosebud Sioux who is co-CEO of Four Directions, a Native American voting rights group, said he is concerned that the coronavirus will only increase the obstacles that prevent full participation. He said he had heard little about discussions among Rosebud Sioux tribe members about how to complete the census.
“I am really very concerned that this is devastating for the Indian country,” Semans said.
But many Native Americans, he said, regardless of their tribal affiliations, understand the need for more housing and better housing conditions, a problem that has become increasingly severe during the pandemic, with people living in multi-generational housing where there is no option. away from society. The coronavirus, he said, has also made access to medical care more urgent.
Having an accurate census count can inform tribal officials as they seek federal funds for health care, housing, transportation, education, and other needs. The approximately $ 2.2 billion coronavirus stimulus package approved by Congress in March included $ 8 billion for tribal governments, divided based on its census figures.
While the delayed disbursement of money became the focus of lawsuits against the Treasury Department, the funding also raised concerns about the distribution of the money based on incomplete census data rather than the registration numbers of the tribes themselves.
Semans said he is concerned that the multitude of obstacles “will prevent us from counting accurately again.”
But Alexander, a member of Oklahoma’s Cheyenne Arapaho tribe, said there is still time for tribes and census officials to redouble their efforts and improve their participation.
“The tribes know that numbers are power,” he said.
