The race of every single person in the household will be documented along with a whole bunch of other minutiae of life (what time did you leave for work/school in the last week?) There are forms to fill out for up to SIX people in each household (if there are more, apparently some arrangement is made to report the additional folks).

Complete data is filled out for each person. NONE of these forms is identified as for the head-of-household. The instructions do states that whoever is owns, is buying or renting the house should be one of the first two people identified. If nobody in the household is renting, owns or is buying the house, then any adult can answer first.

EACH of the six forms asks for "race." You can mark more than one box if you feel you identify with more than one race. While this possibility might seem to hurt Native Americans because mixed bloods who truly are part of a tribal community might feel they should report their mixed heritage, it might also help, because people who are of limited heritage who might otherwise not feel honest about reporting themselves as Native American might claim that heritage if they could indicate it as a mixture. IMPORTANT-if you mark Native American, you are asked to identify enrolled or "principal" tribe. Enrolled is self-explanatory; principal tribe means the tribe you are not enrolled in, but "identify" with.

So each individual in your household will have an opportunity to have their heritage listed on this census.

Of course it won't be totally accurate, and of course people in poorer areas will be less carefully counted. Tribes will not be reimbursed for expenditures accrued in promoting or obtaining census responses. Given the poverty and remoteness of many tribal populations, and quite reasonable suspicion of anything having to do with the U.S. government by some tribal people, what do you think the odds might be for undercounting? And this is quite apart from the clear U.S. government interest in diminishing the numbers of tribally-identified people in this country (and since it's their test and they're making a serious issue of confidentiality, who's going to guard the henhouse from the foxes who already run the place or be able to prove the numbers are anything other than what U.S. officials say they are?).

Sadly, the more accurate numbers will most likely be for those of us who have left our traditional homes at some time in our or one of our ancestors' pasts. The relatively larger numbers of Indians off rez will show 'assimilation' working as Indians mainstream into mixed populations. The only "good" thing to come out of that is that there will likely be more of a show of providing Indian education, entertainment and recreational options as a bone thrown to what's left of our cultures.

There are two forms, a long one and a short one. The short one asks only a few basic demographic questions about name/race/age. As it turns out, I got the "long" form, which includes about 40 more intrusive questions. You might want to take a look at today's Drudge report online -- the penalty for not answering is a $500 fine, and I'm contemplating risking it along with a lot of other unhappy recipients. I truly don't think things are going to change much positively, even if we show more people of our ancestry--but I am very much afraid things could change very negatively if tribal numbers show sharp declines. I very much believe the feds would like nothing better than to "derecognize" more tribes and withdraw their lands and what benefits they now have from

Janet Smith
Yufala Star Clan of the Muskogee Creek
Owlstar Trading Post -- www.owlstar.com--