American Indian and Alaska Native Populations: Envisioning the Future

Summary

American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) people continue to face disproportionate challenges in the US. Health, education, employment, housing, and wealth statistics show the disastrous results of policies and programs. Some policies and programs were meant to improve the lives of AIAN people, but many were aimed directly at dispossession, despite the extreme hardship they caused. Historically-based structural disadvantages impinge on AIAN people’s civil rights, and redressing these issues requires plausible information about the future size, age structure, and locational distribution of the population. AIAN people and Tribal Nations are also subject to statistical racism, in which their data (and thus their successes and needs) are ignored because they are relatively small populations.

Work toward equal access to resources for all Americans, including Indigenous people, has made it clear that we need to know how many AIAN people there will be in the future. Tribal Leaders require quality information about their people to effectively exercise tribal sovereignty. Data collection challenges impact AIAN people more than other groups, so traditional demographic methods of estimating a future population fall short with AIANs. To provide a basis for a forward-looking civil rights agenda, especially one focused on minor children and on people living in Tribal Areas such as reservations, this report presents population projections of the racially-identified AIAN population from the present to 2050 using a traditional demographic method that has been modified to account for net response change – one of the most significant data-related challenges.

See the Executive Summary and Report attached. 

This work is also available on eScholarship HERE.