Chapter 10: The Educational and Career Values of Native American Adolescents: Dispelling the Myths

Over the last decades, there has been a change in the demographics of Native Americans, both in terms of the percentage of population they represent, and in terms of the distribution of where they live and work across the country. Native Americans are becoming a more visible part of the American landscape. In the 1960s, there were 552,000 Native Americans, including Eskimos and Aleuts, in the U.S. (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2002). They comprised only 0.28% of the U.S. population, and for the most part, they lived in segregated communities on reservations and in tribal towns. Approximately 30,000 to 60,000 Native American people also lived in lower socioeconomic neighborhoods in cities where they had been relocated by the federal government (Turner & Pope, 2009). By 1970, one-third of the Native American population lived in cities. By 1990, two-third’s did (Fixico, 2000).