American Indians in decline

 

After three decades of sharp decline, American Indians now have the lowest fertility rate of all ethnic groups in the U.S. The trend is real and is not due to sub-fertile Whites self-identifying as American Indians.

 

 

The pandemic has reduced the American birth rate. According to data from 2020 and early 2021, almost all ethnic groups have taken a hit, but the magnitude has been greater for some than for others.

 

Asian Americans took the biggest hit. At first thought, this makes sense. Asians, especially East Asians (who make up a majority of Asian Americans) tend to take infectious diseases more seriously. They are generally more willing to wear masks, practice social distancing, and wash their hands, and it seems logical that they would also be more willing to postpone childbearing.

But that's not the whole story. The pandemic has accelerated an ongoing fertility decline among East Asians at home and abroad. With the exception of North Korea, East Asia was already a zone of ultra-low fertility—about one child per woman. When the pandemic is over, I predict that East Asian fertility will not return to pre-pandemic levels. The decline will continue. The pandemic has merely acted as a social accelerant (Frost 2020).

 

This view is strengthened if we return to the above graph and look at the group that took the second-biggest hit: American Indians and Alaskan Natives. Their fertility rate has likewise been declining. It was still high in the 1980s, but sometime around 1990 it began to plummet, falling below the fertility rate of any other ethnic group in the U.S. by the early 2000s.

What's going on? Is the decline real? Or is it a statistical fluke? Perhaps sub-fertile Whites are self-identifying as American Indians in growing numbers. This hypothesis was tested by Cannon and Percheski (2017):

 

Concurrent with this decline in estimated TFRs, the self-identified AI/AN population enumerated in the decennial US Census increased in size, largely because of changes in the racial categories and in the wording of racial identity items on the census forms.

 

The increase in the census counts of the American Indian population means that there are several possible explanations for the decline in American Indian fertility rates published by Vital Statistics. First, the decline could be a mechanical artifact of differential changes in racial identification between the two data systems Vital Statistics used to calculate fertility rates. Second, the decline could be driven by compositional changes in who identifies as American Indian. Third, there may be real changes infertility behavior that are unrelated to changes in who identifies as American Indian.

 

To control for these differences in definition and self-identification, Cannon and Percheski (2017) used a single data system (the American Community Survey) for the period 1980 to 2010. They also examined the fertility decline on the basis of three definitions of American Indian/Alaskan native: 1) women who identify as AI/AN only, 2) any woman who identifies as AI/AN, whether identifying one or more races, and 3) women who list a specific tribe or American Indian for the ancestry question. The second definition seems to be the one most vulnerable to "ethnic reassignment."

 

Cannon and Percheski (2017) found that all three definitions showed a fertility decline, particularly the first one. The decline was steepest among younger women. However, there was no indication that lower fertility at younger ages was being offset by higher fertility at older ages. The authors concluded: "This finding of declining TFRs estimated within a single data system is evidence against the explanation that fertility declines are merely artifacts of data collection changes or incongruences."

 

So what is the explanation? The main cause seems to be the declining marriage rate: "fertility rates among married and unmarried women have remained fairly stable, while the share of women ever married has declined across birth cohorts. Thus declines in fertility rates seem to be linked with changes in marriage for this population."

 

In this respect, American Indians are more vulnerable than most other ethnic groups in the U.S. Their women seem to prefer having children when a man is in the home. As the authors note, "other population subgroups in the United States who have experienced substantial declines in marriage have not experienced such drastic declines in fertility levels" (Cannon and Percheski 2017, pp. 8-9). 

 

Anthropologists have long noted that the Indigenous peoples of the Americas still retain many "Arctic" adaptations in their anatomy. Could the same be true for their behavioral predispositions? Some 12,000 years ago, their ancestors lived in northeast Asia and Beringia. In that environment, women had almost no food autonomy and could not raise children on their own. Perhaps their female descendants are still making a half-conscious link between having a baby and having a male provider.

References

 

Cannon, S., and C. Percheski. (2017). Fertility change in the American Indian and Alaska Native population, 1980-2010. Demographic Research 37: 1-12.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/26332188

 

Frost, P. (2020). An Accelerant of Social Change? The Spanish Flu of 1918-19. International Political Anthropology Journal 13(2): 123-133.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4295574

 

Hamilton, B.E., M.J.K. Osterman, and J.A. Martin. (2021). Declines in births by month: United States, 2020. NVSS Vital Statistics Rapid Release. Report no. 14, June

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr014-508.pdf

Adoption and parental investment

It has long been known that children are likelier to be abused, neglected, or murdered by stepparents than by birth parents. This kind of genetic discrimination seems consistent with kin selection theory: parents are expected to care more for children who share kinship with them, as opposed to a purely legal and social relationship (Daly & Wilson, 1980).

If stepchildren are mistreated because they are not kin, we should see the same mistreatment of adopted children. To test this hypothesis, Gibson (2009) surveyed parents with at least one genetic and one adopted child over the age of 22, the idea being to compare the two groups of children for total parental investment. Contrary to expectation, the parents invested more in their adopted children than in their own:

This study categorically fails to support the hypothesis that parents bias investment toward genetically related children. Every case of significant differential investment was biased toward adoptees. Parents were more likely to provide preschool, private tutoring, summer school, cars, rent, personal loans and time with sports to adopted children (Gibson, 2009).

Why? One can imagine the parents making no distinction, but why would they discriminate against their own children? The answer seems to be that the adopted siblings made greater demands.

Adoptees were more likely than genetic offspring to have ever received public assistance, been divorced or been arrested. They also completed fewer years of schooling and were more likely to have ever required professional treatment for mental health, alcohol and drug issues.

… The current study may demonstrate cases where “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” Summer school and private tutors are often remedial, and the fact that adopted children were more likely to receive them suggests they required them more often than genetic ones. The same can be said for rent, treatment and public assistance. Adoptees may have more difficulty establishing themselves relative to genetic children, and the fact that they divorce more often suggests they also have more difficulty staying established. Addiction and divorce may put adoptees in situations that require more parental investment. Parents provide more for adoptees not because they favor them, but because they need the help more often. (Gibson, 2009)

For many behavioral traits, adoptees seem to differ genetically not only from their adoptive parents but also from the general population:

This supports other research showing that, compared to genetic children, American adoptees have a higher overall risk of contact with mental health professionals, specifically for eating disorders, learning disabilities, personality disorders and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder … They also have lower achievement and more problems in school, abuse drugs and alcohol more, and fight with or lie to parents more than genetic children …

… Adoptees may be genetically predisposed to negative outcomes at higher rates than the general population. Genetic factors clearly contribute to alcohol and drug addiction, as well as to some mental disorders like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and schizophrenia …. An association between nonviolent criminality has been found between European adoptees and their genetic parents … Furthermore, research with Swedish adoptees suggests 55-60% of their educational performance is explained by genetic factors, and that the number of years of school adoptees complete is significantly related to how many years their genetic mothers completed ... (Gibson, 2009).

All of this may explain why parents invest more in adopted children than in their own. But why do any parents adopt? Doesn’t such a decision, in itself, contradict kin selection theory?

The contradiction may be more apparent than real. Most adoptive parents have fertility problems and cannot have children on their own. Their only other option is to remain childless.

It may be that adopting fulfills a common instinct to reproduce and parents do it because it produces positive emotions. When people cannot have children biologically, adoption gives them a way to fulfill the “drive” to parent, maladaptive or not. (Gibson, 2009)

References

Daly, M., & M. Wilson. (1980). Discriminative parental solicitude: A biological perspective. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 2, 277-288.

Gibson, K. (2009). Differential parental investment in families with both adopted and genetic children, Evolution and Human Behavior, 30, 184-189.