U.S. CENSUS BEGINS COUNT
Lizzie Chimiugak gets a hug from her granddaughter, Janet Lawrence, at her home in Toksook Bay, Alaska. Ms. Chimiugak, who turned 90 on Monday, was the first person counted in the 2020 U.S. Census.
TOKSOOK BAY, Alaska — The 2020 census officially began on Tuesday in Toksook Bay, an Alaskan village on the edge of the frozen Bering Sea where census takers hope to show they can overcome language barriers, isolation and government distrust to develop an accurate tally for minority groups who have long suffered from undercounts.
Visitors traveling to the village of about 650 must fly 500 miles from Anchorage, and then scoot into town on the back of a snow machine or four-wheeled ATV — the same ones that deliver the mail to a post office the size of a small backyard shed.
On Tuesday, a small advance team spent much of the day anxiously waiting to see whether a planeload of senior Census Bureau officials, flying in for a ceremonial early start of the once-adecade national tally, would make it through the thick winter fog.
“Counting those who are in hard-to-reach villages has been a challenge for the Census Bureau every decade since 1870,” said Steven Dillingham, the bureau’s director, ahead of his trip to Toksook Bay. “Here in Alaska, we have these very special challenges. The geography is so vast.”
The census, scheduled to get underway in most of the country in mid-March, provides a vital foundation of data used to determine everything from congressional representation to federal spending on education, health care and food assistance.
This year, there are renewed calls for special attention to minority neighborhoods and indigenous communities like Toksook Bay. In many such places, traditional methods have historically failed to count some people who may be invisible as a result of the federal government’s inability to overcome geography, language barriers or the reluctance of some residents to interact with government representatives.
The Census Bureau estimated that Native Americans and Alaska Natives living on reservations were undercounted by about 4.9% during the 2010 census, more than twice the rate of the next closest population group.