I am trying to track the shrinking Native American Indian population,
from before Western man landed on the Western Hempisphere till 2002. I
am interested in any staticis showing how many Indians were on the
continent 350 years ago, then 250 then 100 and now.

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Request for Question Clarification by davebug-ga on 30 Oct 2002 15:54 PST

There is a difficulty in answering this question accurately due to the
subjectivity of determining what percentage Native American a person
must be to qualify.

For instance, I've found some statistics that show a population of
7-18 million Native Americans in 1500, a population of 237,000 Native
Americans in 1900, and then a population of 4.1 million Native
Americans in 2000.
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~cafamilies/population.html

As the site states, this is due to a sharp increase in people
identifying themselves as Native American on the census (who
previously identified themselves as a different race).

In any case, I think a strict classification of what a Native American
is will be difficult to come across or determine, but hopefully those
numbers and that site will give you a start towards the answer you're
looking for.

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Clarification of Question by barrys-ga on 30 Oct 2002 16:51 PST

My objective is to trace the assimalation of the Native American
Indian, into the surrounding people. Most conqured people, blend into
the dominant culture, within a few generations. I am intersted in
tracing that occurence in the Indian people. For my purposes if we
were to start with X amount of Indians in 1500 with both parents being
Indian, and then took the same criteria, both parents being Indian in
2002, that would show what I am looking for.

Dave is correct and your clarification won't help much. ie Captain
John Smith married Pocahontis almost 500 years ago. Their
child(clildren) married a caucasion. Pocahontas may have 500
descendents alive today, most of them unknown. Two or three of them
likely married a mostly Indian person but the mix is still over 50%
Caucasion. There are likely 10,000 American Indians alive today who
think they are 100% indian, but most are mistaken. Somewhere in the
thousand plus ancestors they have had the past 500 years there is
likely at least one Caucasion, illegitimate perhaps, but none the less
the biological parent. The melting pot had essentially done its job by
the end of the civil war 136? years ago. The melting was likely
essentially over in Mexico and central america even sooner.  Selected
descendents of Israel have worked hard to keep their linage "clean"
but hardly anyone else has. Confidence in genealogies before 1800 is
almost always less than 90%, and is more like 1% for American Indian
people.   Neil