ABSTRACT
How and why did the American Indian population more than double between
1970 and 1990? How did it manage to double again between 1990 and 2000? Are
multiracial American Indians part of this story? In this chapter, I argue that
remarkable increases in the number of American Indians in the past half-century
illustrate the kinds of social and cultural factors that underlie the “social construc-
tion” of race. Races are “socially constructed” to the extent that social or cultural
trends or experiences affect the race(s) that a person considers him or herself to be
(usually with substantial input from others).
