Native American Population Growth, Explained

What’s driving the surge in American Indian and Alaska Native census numbers?

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(Picture via Getty Images)

The nation’s Native American population has skyrocketed in the last two decades. From 2000 to 2022 the American Indian and Alaska Native population surged 77 percent, per a recent Axios analysis of census data.

This population growth perplexes Rogelio Saenz, a professor of demography at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a member of the U.S. Census Scientific Advisory Committee. “You’re talking about an American Indian/Alaska Native population that has very low fertility and no immigration for the most part,” he tells The Dispatch. It also has high maternal mortality rates. Those trends typically correlate with a demographic bust, not a boom.

Which raises the question: What’s driving this staggering population growth?

‘The way people themselves identify is fluid.’

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    Very interesting

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  2. Jim.H

    Maybe a lot of them are acting like Sen. Elizabeth Warren. :)

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    Joel Stewart

    I've always checked the box, even though the only native ancestry I'm sure about is from just before the Trail (we have some Elizabeth Warren-esque stories about my great-grandparents, but who knows?). My kids, in line with what the article says, are Hispanics with a heavy dose of Maya from their abuela. My wife, on the other hand, never thought to check the Native American box even though she knew about her family heritage in Central America. So there you have it: a very white guy and his Hispanic kids who check the box, and a Maya mom who doesn't. The Census Bureau can only do so much with people like that!

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  4. Avatar photo
    CynthiaW

    "By allowing respondents to specify" - but not have to prove - "their native origin, more people may be inclined to identify as Native American who otherwise would not."

    Indeed.

    Not much meat in this article, in my opinion. There may be people who would think the 77% increase in "natives" meant an actual demographic change, rather than a self-classification change. There may also be people who didn't know that "Hispanics" can be of any "race."

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    Paul Beltman

    I usually write in 'Human' on those forms.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Phil H

      I do as well. Given the use of census race data in drawing Congressional and state legislative districts, I do not wish to contribute to an arguably unconstitutional use of race.

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      CynthiaW

      I self-identify as an Earthling.

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      1. Avatar photo
        DougAz

        I'll take Earthling over Human for $10 please 😊🐇🐇🐇🐇🐿🐿🐶🐾🐾🐾🦨

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          CynthiaW

          Us and all those animals.

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  6. Trichwages

    So, basically, the counts in previous years was not as detailed. Makes sense to me. Informative. Thanks.

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  7. R. James

    The phenomenon is known as Elizabeth Warren Syndrome.

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  8. Misterharban

    It appears that we have reached the point where we are applying the “one drop rule” in reverse.

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  9. Stormer93

    I have lived most of my life in areas that have high Native American populations. I never got the sense that their demographic group was growing any faster than others. Tribal affiliations are more of less keeping with population trends in the broader country for instance. Personally I find these racial classifications to be almost meaningless, especially since the rates of cross-racial marriages have skyrocketed in the past few decades. The only problem is how do you put someone with parents of different races into a single box? Maybe we should all identify as "mixed race" and be done with this silliness.

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  10. Avatar photo
    Mudskipper

    In my area of California, many members of the local tribes chose to adopt Hispanic surnames and pass as Hispanic in 19th and early 20th century because of there was less stigma attached to being Hispanic than being Native American. (California infamously paid scalp bounties on Native Americans in the 19th century, forced many natives into involuntary servitude, and placed children in boarding schools to "assimilate" them. So "stigma" is a bit of an understatement.)

    That tactic worked in a sense. As a white girl in the 1950s, I grew up in largely unaware that there were Native Americans in our midst. The good part of that was that by that time most people had no prejudices against them since they were vanquished figures from the past. You don't learn to hate what doesn't exist . In fact, I and my fellow Californians were shocked when we attended a company conference in Tempe Arizona in the 80's when one of our Arizona colleagues went off on a rant about drunken Indians.

    In the past several decades, members of the local tribes have come out of the Hispanic closet, as it were. Turns out they were here among us all along.

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    1. Jfan

      "Scalp bounties"? This is too terrifying to check.

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      1. Avatar photo
        Mudskipper

        Well. Will you look at this:

        https://online.ucpress.edu/ch/article-abstract/100/2/4/196102/The-California-Indian-Scalp-Bounty-MythEvidence-of

        A recently published article that seems to debunk the idea that scalp bounties were ever paid by the state itself. Instead:

        "Although scalping itself was widely practiced by state militiamen and volunteer “Indian fighters” like the infamous Jackson Farley and Hi Good, the taking of corporal trophies in California’s genocidal frontier wars did not result from the pursuit of financial reward. Indeed, the remarkably small number of documented cases reveals that Indian scalp bounties remained extremely rare in gold rush California and were seldom offered anywhere except in a scattered handful of isolated and unincorporated rural communities."

        Still not good.

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