Census Bureau Will Strive to Ensure That County’s Indians Get Fair Count in 1990

It may not be readily apparent, but San Diego County has one of the largest Indian populations in the nation, living on 18 reservations and in its cities.

As a result, officials from the federal Bureau of the Census expect to make a special effort to make a more accurate head count of tribal members concentrated here when the census is done next year.

Mary Cleghorn-Vann, a community awareness specialist with the federal bureau, said analysis of the 1980 census indicated that certain ethnic groups were “under-counted” by as much as 6% a decade ago. It is Cleghorn-Vann’s job to see that doesn’t happen again for the Indian population in 13 California counties, including San Diego.

Her offensive began early this year, more than a year before the census questionnaires will be dropped into the mail on March 21, l990. A meeting of Indian leaders and representatives of organizations serving urban Indian groups drew a group of 30 and started the ball rolling to apply peer pressure on Indian families to stand up and be counted.

Next month, she will return to conduct a training session for tribal delegates from each of the reservations on how to accomplish the task of having everyone living on the reservations counted. Although the census is again being conducted by mail, as it was in 1980, tribal rolls will aid in checking to see that all receive the questionnaires. Follow-ups by the trained tribal helpers will assure that all questionnaires are returned.

“The big problem is in the urban areas,” she said. “The task will be most difficult.” There Indians and other of the under-counted groups blend in and are hard to ferret out for follow-up visits from census enumerators.

She is enlisting the aid of organizations serving Indians: churches, athletic associations, social services departments, community-based groups of all kinds to pass the word that Indians must step forward and be counted if they expect to obtain the political power and government aid they deserve.

The 1990 census is the basis for reshaping federal, state and local political districts and the basis for distributing $37 billion in federal aid, she explained.

Susan Decker, bookkeeper for the Pauma band of Mission Indians, believes that the participation of tribal members in the census will help ensure a full count and a fair share for Indians.

Distrust of Government

“Native Americans tend to distrust the government, especially the Bureau of Indian Affairs,” she explained. Indians must realize that the tribes will not “get the things we need” if their numbers are diluted.

In the last census, 83% of the nation’s households returned their census questionnaires without prompting, Dan Conway, San Diego spokesman for the census bureau, said. Follow-ups by trained census workers brought the return rate up to 98.5%, but that still left at least 3 million Americans uncounted.

“This time we are trying for the ripple effect, to get the word out to every group and to have each participate in the process,” Cleghorn-Vann said.

She acknowledges that she probably does not have the hardest task in the bureau.

Census officials dealing with other minority groups, such as blacks, among whom an estimated 20% of young males went uncounted last time, newly arrived Indo-Chinese still struggling with the language barrier, illiterates, Latinos with many illegal immigrants among them and street people with no permanent addresses will have more problems, she said.

Plan Rejected

The Census Bureau had planned to use a sophisticated sampling system to recapture the uncounted Americans in 1990, but the Reagan Administration rejected the plan, and it became snarled in litigation by states and cities.

California, which has the largest percentage of minority populations most likely to be “under-counted” in a census, has filed suit in an attempt to have the new estimating technique reinstated in time for the 1990 count. In contrast, other states are challenging the counting of illegal aliens.

Cleghorn-Vann said that the old-fashioned door-to-door method of conducting the U. S. census might resolve some of the problems faced by the mail census, but added that the cost is too great to be justified.

“A questionnaire costs 22 cents to send out. A census enumerator probably costs about $25 a household,” she said. “We must count on the follow-up visits to make up the difference.”