Changing Numbers, Changing Needs American Indian Demography and Public Health (1996) / Chapter Skim
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9 The Demography of American Indian Families
9 The Demography of American Indian Families
Pages 196-217
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From page 196... ...
feebler INTRODUCTION This chapter describes some key features of contemporary American Indian families and changes in these features over time. A major theme of the discussion is that a growing proportion of American Indian children reside with only one parent.
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The next section looks at some of the limitations of census data for understanding American Indian families. This is followed by a review of the various groups within the American Indian population that are examined in the ensuing discussion of selected features of American Indian families.
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These subgroups include the national population of American Indians and those people living on reservations and trust lands (shortened here to "reservations") , in Alaska Native Village Statistical Areas (Alaska NVSAs)
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199 on o .
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The reservation Indian population includes all of the first category who resided on an American Indian reservation or trust land as defined by the federal or a state government. The Oklahoma TISA population includes all American Indians who live in areas delineated by federally recognized tribes in Oklahoma without reservations (only the Osage in Oklahoma officially have a reservation)
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From page 201... ...
Previous research suggests that the characteristics shown in Table 9-1 may very well be connected with the family patterns described below. The median age, poverty rate, and unemployment rate both reflect and affect fertility, marriage, and family patterns among the different segments of the American Indian population, including the reservations.
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Among the reservations, the rate of labor force participation ranges from 29.4 percent on the San Carlos reservation to 65.2 percent in the Zuni Pueblo. SELECTED FEATURES OF AMERICAN INDIAN FAMILIES Children Living with Two Parents The data from the U.S.
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U.S. Indian Reservation Oklahoma TJSA Alaska NVSA Navajo Pine Ridge Fort Apache Gila River Papago San Carlos Zuni Pueblo Hopi Blackfoot Rosebud 82.1 76.7 68.6 62.9 70.2 54.4 48.8 65.8 60.8 57.2 35.2 55.1 35.8 37.1 53.8 47.2 42.6 53.2 37.1 SOURCES: U.S.
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In sum, then, research suggests that family structure affects the economic, parental, and community resources available to children. The availability of these resources in turn affects direct measures of child and later adult well-being, such as social and emotional adjustment, educational attainment, family formation, and labor force participation.
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From page 205... ...
A detailed examination of the factors associated with white/Indian differences in family patterns would require more work than is possible to summarize in this chapter. Moreover, such an examination would be complicated by the difficulty of examining trends over time among a population growing rapidly as a result of changes in self-identification; the lack of data on the marriage squeeze; and the lack of data on attitudes toward marriage, divorce, and childbearing among American Indians.
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From page 206... ...
The increase in the percentage for American Indians was not as dramatic in the 1970s as it was for all women, but it was larger in the 1980s than for all women. One must be very cautious about interpreting these trends because of changes in census enumeration procedures and self-identification over 4A thorough job of explaining variations in family patterns across the different Indian populations would require a careful exploration of nondemographic sources of these variations.
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Because of limitations in the published data, we shift from an agespecific rate to the general rate and look at women aged 15 and over to compare different segments of the Indian population. According to Table 9-3, a higher percentage of women on reservations and in the Alaska NVSAs have never married relative to those in the U.S.
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Also, we do not have the appropriate data to examine what accounts for the variation across segments of the national Indian population or differences among the ten largest reservations. We can speculate on some possibilities.
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The percentage of women divorced has increased steadily since then, and the gap between American Indians and whites has widened since 1960. The combination of an increased proportion of women who have never married and a higher percentage of women who have been divorced helps explain why more American Indian children reside with a single parent.
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never married, which leads in turn to a low percentage of children residing with two parents. And the Navajo reservation has a low divorce rate, is intermediate in the percentage never married, and has the highest percentage of children residing with two parents.
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Past federal government definitions of its Indian service population, which generally used one-quarter Indian blood as the minimum blood quantum, and contemporary tribal definitions of citizenship, which in some cases require demonstrated descent but no blood quantum, represent a response to this history of intermarriage. The proportion of the
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From page 212... ...
Part of this increase was probably due to the fact that American Indians who changed their self-identification to Indian during the period were more likely to be married to a non-Indian than those who kept the same identity. Our analyses with data from the 1990 public-use microdata samples show as well that younger American Indian cohorts were much more likely to be exogamous than were older cohorts of both American Indian men and women.
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Our analysis of published census data also illustrates the variations across broad segments of the American Indian population Oklahoma TISAs, Alaska NVSAs, and the ten largest reservations. Nonetheless, the data also show that the trends in marriage, divorce, and living arrangements among the American Indian population have corresponded with these trends in the general population.
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The variations in marriage and living arrangements for children across the segments of the Indian population and across the reservations are associated with different patterns in median age, sex ratios, female labor force participation, poverty, and unemployment. It is likely that poverty, unemployment, and unfavorable sex ratios on some reservations make marriages very difficult to begin and to maintain.
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In addition, tribal governments, working with private industry, state governments, and the federal government, must continue their efforts to create employment opportunities on the reservations and in traditional Indian areas in Alaska and Oklahoma. Economic self-sufficiency for many Native Americans is still an impossibility in many of the most economically depressed areas.
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1973a 1970 Census of Population, Subject Report: American Indians, PC(2~-1F. Washington, D.C.: U.S.
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Yellow Bird, M., and C.M. Snipp 1994 American Indian families.
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