The Slow Integration of Indians into US Population Statistics in the Nineteenth Century

This chapter discusses the integration of Native Americans into the US census. Since its creation, the census separated the inhabitants of the territory controlled by the United States into three broad categories: free (presumed white, citizens, and taxpayers); slaves (property, reduced by the calculation of apportionment); and Indians, pushed back to the margin of the territory and excluded from the census because they did not participate in any of the mechanisms on which it was based: not citizens, not taxpayers, and not property. With growing numbers of Indian living among the general population appearing in the census returns from 1850, the Census Office had to adapt, and to decide how to classify mixed people. The question was even more complex in the first and second American censuses of Alaska, in 1880 and 1890.