Did I ever tell you about the four years I spent in prison back in the late 1990s?
Well, actually, it was just two hours on Thursday afternoons as a volunteer with the Native men’s group at Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln, Nebraska.
I could gussy up the experience and say I was teaching inmates. But mostly I was just hanging out. Many prisoners, particularly those who’ve been in a while, are starved for new faces and happy to get some fresh conversation.
Sometimes I’d talk to people about serious issues. Other times we’d just shoot the breeze. One day while inside, I was talking to a guy. Nothing serious. I don’t even remember about what. He asked something of me. I said, “You got it, chief.”
Now here’s the thing. Growing up in New York City, “chief” was (and still is) in the same class of words as “boss” and “buddy.” They’re all informal monikers one man might casually give another if you don’t actually know each other’s names, or as a temporary nickname even when you do. It’s a sign of modest respect and affection in the moment. In a typical New York City context, they’re all completely harmless words and have zero racial connotation.
But the moment “chief” slipped out of my mouth in prison, I immediately remembered that of course this particular word has a very heavy connotation for Native people, particularly men.
His entire demeanor changed in a heartbeat. We’d been happy, joshing around. Now he stared right through me.
“Don’t you ever call me that again,” he said quietly, anger flashing in his eyes.
Instantly, I realized my New Yorkese had led me astray in the rec room of a prairie prison. Flustered, I didn’t have the wherewithal to explain all that. So instead, I just feebly apologized.
I remembered that episode the other day as I read the Washington Post article about the more than 500 American Indians the paper interviewed, and how 70% of those people have absolutely no objection to the word “redskin,” 80% wouldn’t mind if a non-Indian called them “redskin,” and 90% are not offended by the Washington Redskins team name.
My personal experiences with Indian people in places ranging from that Nebraska prison, to academic conferences, on reservations, and at urban Indian centers, make it inconceivable to me that those numbers are correct. So what could explain these results?
I respect the Washington Post. I dismiss accusations of conflict of interest (perverse polling to help out hometown Washington Redskin team owner Daniel Snyder?). And I sincerely hope that complaints of deteriorating standards now that the Post is owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos are misplaced; surely this shoddy work isn’t a sign of things to come.
But either way, this poll represents shoddy work.
There’s really no need to be conspiratorial. The mundane truth is that it’s very easy to royally screw up a poll like this, because polling anonymous American Indians by phone on any subject, much less one this loaded, is very difficult.
Why? For starters, polling in general is going through a very rough time here in the early 21st century. The main culprit is the rise of cell phones and decline of land lines. There are a lot of reasons why that transition is skewing results, sometimes badly. I won’t go into all the details here; instead, I’ll simply point out that just two years ago, none other than the Washington Post wrote an entire article about it.
Since the “redskins” poll was conducted by phone, there are already general traps. Beyond that, polling American Indians across the country by phone is exceptionally difficult. To understand why, we need to look at the census.
From 1790-1950, U.S. census takers were responsible for determining the race and ethnicity of the people they counted. Sometimes they asked the people they were counting, sometimes they didn’t, but either way, it was the census taker’s decision to make. Beginning in 1960, the strong hand of Uncle Sam eased off, and Americans were free to self-identify their race and ethnicity.
Ever since, the American Indian population has increased in every census, and by numbers so large that they cannot be accounted for simply by birthrates. Additional factors include: improved transportation and communications technologies that make it easier to reach people in remote rural areas; allowing Indian people who live in largely white communities, and might accidentally “pass” for white, to self-identify; and changing racial attitudes in America that make racial minorities more willing to openly self-identify instead of “passing” for white on purpose.
Of these, that last reason is perhaps the most complicated. During the first half of the 20th century, American culture almost always disparaged Indigenous peoples and cultures as savage. Government policies, public and private institutions, and the mainstream American culture, all directly and indirectly pressured Native peoples to abandon their Indigenous cultures and adopt white norms.
However, during the 1960s, such attitudes began to change. Best selling books and blockbuster movies glorified Indians as unjustly wronged victims of U.S. expansion. Counterculture hippies and pop culture icons alike began celebrating (often cartoonish versions of) Indian cultures instead of deriding them.
By the 1980s and 1990s, the New Age movement had elevated vague (and often racist) conceptions of Native spirituality to new heights of respect among mainstream Americans.
All of this contributed to a higher rate of Native self-identification in censuses beginning in 1960. As the mainstream American culture became more accepting of Native peoples and societies, it was easier for Indians to publicly self-identify.
Beyond that, however, changing mainstream cultural attitudes also contributed to the widespread growth of a new American fashion: non-Indian people claiming to be Indian.
There’s a very long history of non-Indians pretending to be Indian. Philip Deloria’s 1998 book Playing Indian is a good place to start if you’re interested. But beyond the already somewhat common spectacle of white people dressing up as Indian for play purposes (think Boy Scouts or old Hollywood movies), another phenomenon gained popularity during the late 20th century: reverse passing, in which non-Indians attempt to pass themselves off as Indians not as a form of redface, but as their actual ethnic/racial identity .
To measure just how widespread reverse passing has become, we can once again turn to the census, which underwent another major change in 2000. Beginning with that year’s national population count, Americans got to check more than one census box under race and ethnicity.
Up through the 1990 census, Americans had to pick just one race: black or white or Indian, etc. But at the start of the 21st century, the census bureau allowed Americans not only to self-identify their race and ethnicity, but to identify as many races and ethnicities for themselves as they liked.
This change was an acknowledgment that many Americans are in fact multi-ethnic. I myself am half New York City Jew and half North Carolina WASP. Prior to 2000, I would have to choose between my two ethnicities. Now I could list both if I were so inclined.
However, what this census change means for counting New York City Jews and North Carolina WASPs is marginal. What it means for counting American Indians and Alaskan Natives is profound.
In 1990, the last census when Americans could pick only one race, 1.95 million people self-identified as American Indian or Alaska Native.
In 2000, the first census when Americans could pick more than one race, 2.5 million self-identified solely as American Indian or Alaska Native, and 1.6 million as mixed, Indigenous and something else.
In 2010, 2.9 million people self-identified solely as American Indian or Alaska Native, and 2.3 million as mixed, Indigenous and something else.
The increase on Indigenous-only people from 2000-2010 was very high: 16%. The increase of mixed people, however, was an eye-popping 43%.
If you think that figure is impossible to explain by anything other than people changing their minds, then you’re right.
Some of that increase is due to birth rates. Some of that increase is mixed people continuing to add all of their family history to the new census. And some of that increase, simply put, is from non-Indians pretending to be Indian.
And so while self-identification might be an improvement for the census’ larger goals of employing more nuance to count all Americans, it’s a peculiarly knotty issue for Indigenous peoples. Because while there aren’t that many people of non-African descent claiming to be black, for example, there are actually quite a lot of non-Indigenous people claiming to be Indian.
The myth of Indian descent is very prominent among both European-American and African American cultures, ie., among the two groups that are likely to have ancestry in North America stretching back several centuries. Indeed, non-Indians claiming to be Indian is so commonplace that Indian people have a derisive nickname for the “tribe” of would be Indians: Wannabes
This is a good spot in the essay to make something very clear.
I am not Indigenous, and in no way whatsoever am I taking it upon myself to declare who is Indian and who is not. Number one, it’s not my place. Number two, even if I were that kind of asshole, I am in no way qualified to make any such judgments.
There are many Indigenous people of mixed Indigenous/non-Indigenous descent, and I am certainly not impugning any individual’s Indianess, whether they identify as fully Indian or mixed.
However, there is also a broad social phenomenon of non-Indians pretending to be Indian, and it seems the Washington Post failed to take that into account when conducting it’s poll.
How many Americans are pretending to be Indian? It’s difficult to come up with a hard number. But loose figures can be teased out of the census since it moved to the self-identification model in 2000.
Between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, millions of Americans changed their racial and ethnic designations. In other words, in the year 2000, millions of people said they were one thing (or combination of things), and then in 2010 they said were a different thing (or combination of things).
How many people did this? An analysis of 168 million census forms found that more than 10 million of them had changed.
However, the rate at which they changed Indian identity far outpaces any other racial category.
Among that wave of 10 million racial hoppers, more than 775,000 changed either to become or stop being mixed American/Indian/white.
That would be nearly about 7.5% of all people who shifted their census racial identity, even though in the 2010 census, people of mixed Indigenous descent (Native and something else) are barely two-thirds of one percent of the total U.S. population.
Another way to think of it is this. A little more than 1 out of 17 Americans changed their racial identity from 2000-2010. During that same time period, for people of mixed Native descent it was about 1 out of 3.
What’s more, we also know which tribes are most frequently claimed by non-Indians pretending to be Indian. Far and away the most common is Cherokee.
As far back as 1969, Native scholar Vine Deloria, Jr. wrote about the weekly phenomenon of white people showing up at his office convinced they had an Indian ancestor, usually a Cherokee (Deloria himself was Sioux).
There are about 300,000 people enrolled in the Cherokee nation.
In the 2010 census, nearly 820,000 people claimed to be Cherokee or part-Cherokee.
The Washington Post poll focuses on Cherokees and Navajos.
Historically, the census has been lousy at counting Indigenous Americans. For a long time it didn’t really bother. Then, for decades, there were massive under counts. For the past half-century there have been over counts through self-identification, and those numbers have exploded since the advent of multiple box-checking in 2000.
So who’s Indian and who’s not? That’s actually a pretty complex question.
Identity issues are complex for all Americans, but they are exponentially more complicated for American Indians due to a host of factors, including: tribal enrollment; federal treaties; federal recognition of tribes, rancherias, pueblos, and Alaska Native villages; federal programs that apply only to Indians; and shifting, convoluted cultural attitudes among both Indians and non-Indians, to name just a few.
There is no easy way to accurately count Indigenous people of all stripes. But as the history of the U.S. census shows, it’s certainly not as simple as asking people to choose for themselves and then marking down those who respond “I’m Indian.”
Which is what the Washington Post did for its poll.
Do all Native peoples in the United States take umbrage at the term redskins? It’s actually more complicated than a simple Yes or No.
Like any other ethnic group, Native peoples are not monolithic. Indigenous Americans comprise hundreds of different ethnic groups, bound together by little more than a shared history of colonialism and racism. There’s incredibly wide variance in things like language and religion. So Indian people from different parts of the country have far less in common with each other than do, say, African Americans or Jews from different parts of America.
Some Indians abhor the word redskin. Some use redskin (or more commonly skin) in context with each other. But that’s entirely different than a non-Indian using it.
And yes, ethnic groups sometimes use words meant to insult them, but very differently than outsiders do. The way some black people use the word nigga isn’t an exact parallel to Indian people using skin, but it’s not a completely unrelated phenomenon either.
Do all Native people take umbrage at the word redskin, or the Washington Redskins team name? Of course not. But among the very many who do, the who, when, and why of it are complex.
But is the percentage of Indian people who have no problem whatsoever with the Washington Redskins team name really just 9%, as the Washington Post survey claims.
Not a chance.
The Washington Post botched it, and botched it very badly.
Why? For reasons that I’ve outlined above, and for many others that I’ve not discussed here but which scholars, bloggers, and social media mavens are talking about.
For example, here’s what the Native American Journalists Association thinks of the poll. Here’s a top Native bloggers’ thoughts. Here’s another. And of course there’s the twitter hashtag #IAmNativeIWasNotAsked and accompanying poll, which is running numbers almost exactly opposite as the Post poll.
But hey, if you’re inclined to believe the Post article contains good polling data, then you can figure it out for yourself. Just go around a reservation, or to an urban Indian center, and casually fling that word around. See where it gets you.
Of course, if anyone gets upset, you could always just pretend to be Cherokee.
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Update, May 25. While my piece focuses on how difficult it is to do a poll like this, Jacqueline Keeler at The Nation does a really great job of breaking down the the Washington Post’s polling methodology. She explains why this poll is every bit as shoddy as I accuse it of being. And remember, a bad poll isn’t like a bad doughnut; I’ll still eat half a bad doughnut and smile. A bad poll is an utterly worthless poll. There are no wrong doughnuts, but there sure are wrong polls, and this poll is very, very wrong.