Buried in the Ledger: How the U.S. Erases Native Death

Erased in Death: The Statistical Disappearance of Native Life

On June 18, 2025, the Los Angeles Times reported on a groundbreaking study from Boston University School of Public Health, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study exposes what Native communities have known for generations: U.S. official records have systemically undercounted the deaths and diminished the suffering of American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) people. According to the findings, life expectancy for AI/AN communities is not just lower—it’s catastrophically misrepresented due to racial misclassification and bureaucratic neglect.

The article itself, though seemingly sympathetic, fails to place this in any historical or political context. It describes the problem as an unfortunate oversight, a matter of undertrained coroners or poorly worded census forms. But this is no accident—it’s a continuation of the settler-colonial project by other means. To erase the reality of Native life and death is to erase the very claim to sovereignty, reparations, and self-determination. This is the digital afterlife of blood-quantum laws, Dawes rolls, and tribal-termination policies—19th-century ledgers of conquest reborn today in dropdown menus and CDC spreadsheets. And that is the unspoken function of this statistical violence: disappearance not just from the land, but from the data, the policy debates, and the collective memory.

Consider the mechanics: 41% of AI/AN deaths are misclassified, most often as “white.” This erasure inflates white life expectancy and deflates Indigenous suffering. It reframes the U.S. as a more equal, post-racial society than it is. It protects state legitimacy while actively obscuring genocidal neglect. The original study found the true mortality rate among Native people is 42% higher than previously reported by the CDC. That is not a rounding error—that is a structural weapon.

And this weapon is deployed across every institution. From public health to education to housing, Native existence is miscounted, misnamed, and misfiled—if it is recorded at all. This isn’t just the failure of data infrastructure. It is the intentional refusal of the settler state to acknowledge the full human cost of conquest, occupation, and broken treaties. What they call “data misclassification” is in fact an epistemological act of war—a denial of personhood in life and peoplehood in death.

Meanwhile, cabinet secretaries perform outrage while signing Indian Health Service budgets that sit at barely 38% of per-capita federal prison spending. They propose trainings for coroners and better checkboxes on forms. But the root of this erasure is not ignorance—it is policy. It is genocide by spreadsheet, death by administrative omission. And the Los Angeles Times, for all its liberal concern, dares not say this. It will document the effects but never indict the system. That’s why their article, like so many before it, is not journalism—it’s management. Managing visibility. Managing outrage. Managing the settler narrative.

What is erased in the morgue reappears in the budget. Fewer Native deaths means fewer Native lives that need funding, services, or redress. Less disease recorded means less care allocated. Less suffering documented means less guilt for the empire. This is how a genocidal state keeps its hands clean—by disappearing the dead before the data is even compiled.

The real scandal isn’t the study. The real scandal is that it took until 2025 to be published and taken seriously. The real scandal is that Native people have been shouting this for decades, while journalists and academics nodded politely and filed their findings in footnotes. And the ultimate scandal is that even now, as the numbers are exposed, the system responsible remains untouched.

The Bureaucracy of Genocide: Statistical War on the Native Dead

The statistics are not neutral. The erasure of Native life from U.S. mortality data is not a clerical mistake—it is a policy tool. What the Los Angeles Times reports as “misclassification” is in fact the statistical arm of settler colonialism. Racial data on death certificates is collected, verified, and processed by hospitals, funeral homes, coroners, local registrars, and state governments before making its way into the CDC’s National Vital Statistics System. At each juncture, Native identity can be erased, overwritten, or ignored. This is not an aberration of state function—it is the intended logic of empire, a digital evolution of analog policies that once quantified Indigenous disappearance to legalize land theft.

The JAMA study dismantles the fantasy that AI/AN health disparities are minor. The researchers found that Native life expectancy is not 2.5 years below the national average, as the CDC claims—but 6.5 years. This is a staggering indictment of federal healthcare priorities, especially when coupled with the fact that the Indian Health Service (IHS) remains chronically underfunded, understaffed, and dependent on third-tier infrastructure. In states like South Dakota, this data distortion has enabled up to $23 million in Medicaid funding cuts to Native clinics—a direct transfer of public health resources from the colonized to the colonizer. What the state calls a “health gap” is in fact the outcome of structurally racialized abandonment.

Misclassification doesn’t just happen. It is produced by design. On official forms, Native people are regularly listed as “Other,” “White,” “Hispanic,” or “Unknown.” In urban settings like Los Angeles, misidentification is rampant due to both racial ambiguity and bureaucratic indifference. The California Consortium for Urban Indian Health has long documented how Native identity is flattened into broader “Indigenous” categories, masking both tribal specificity and legal status. This flattening is not incidental—it is a form of soft erasure that denies Native nations their distinct histories, treaty rights, and sovereign claims.

This is how medical redlining is concealed in plain sight. The paper trail disappears, so the funding does too. Programs for chronic illness, maternal health, addiction recovery, and suicide prevention get choked out of budgets because the “data doesn’t justify the expense.” Meanwhile, Native people die young, suffer silently, and vanish statistically. This is death by misclassification—a bureaucratic warfare that turns the vital records office into a frontline of colonial rule.

This structure also protects whiteness. When Native deaths are re-coded as white, the illusion of white health supremacy is preserved. The life expectancy of white Americans appears higher, their mortality rates lower, and their suffering minimal. Each misclassified corpse props up a fraudulent baseline that reinforces racial hierarchies in health policy and coverage distribution. Statistical whiteness is not just an identity—it’s an ideological weapon used to justify disproportionate healthcare access, insurance coverage, and life-extending medical interventions.

These findings are not just “new data.” They are confirmation of an old war. Native elders have long warned that to be miscounted in death is to be erased in policy. Their warnings went unheard because they threatened the entire machinery of settler legitimacy. To admit the depth of Native mortality would require reckoning with centuries of land theft, disease warfare, broken treaties, and racist neglect. It would undermine resource allocations, disrupt extraction projects, and invalidate settler claims to “abandoned” Indigenous land under Bureau of Indian Affairs heirship policies. So instead, the state chooses statistical amnesia.

The study’s conclusion is clear: accurate data is political. It is a battlefield. It determines who gets counted, who gets cared for, and who gets cut out. And when it comes to Native life, the U.S. has made its choice clear. It would rather preserve the numbers than preserve the people.

Counting Corpses, Erasing Nations: Reframing the War on the Counted and the Countless

The Los Angeles Times article may read like an exposé, but its framing is laced with liberal innocence. It treats the misclassification of Native deaths as a tragic oversight rather than what it is: the statistical logic of settler domination. This is not about bureaucratic failure—it is about maintaining the illusion that the settler state has outlived its genocidal origins. In reality, genocide did not end. It adapted, moved from muskets to mainframes, and now marches under the banner of “evidence-based policy.” One-click erasure in a database does what boarding schools and termination acts once did with ink and bayonets.

The CDC isn’t just undercounting Native deaths—it’s overcounting white life. This distortion doesn’t merely obscure the scale of Indigenous suffering; it reinforces the lie of settler benevolence. The United States projects itself as a land of universal healthcare access and racial progress, yet its foundational policies are calibrated to vanish Native peoples from the record entirely. Meanwhile pharmaceutical firms use those rosy life-expectancy baselines to exclude Native bodies from clinical trials, shielding themselves from liability while charging Indian Health Service patients $1,200 per vial for “orphan” diabetes drugs. Data erasure, in other words, has a profit margin.

When the state decides who is counted as Native, it also decides who is seen, who is funded, who is protected, and who can die quietly without triggering alarm. And when Native death is rendered uncountable, Native life becomes ungovernable—not in the sense of sovereignty, but in the sense that no program, budget, or policy will be structured to address it. That is the consequence of epistemic erasure. No data means no diagnosis. No diagnosis means no intervention. And no intervention means extinction by spreadsheet. Nick Estes (Yankton Dakota) calls this “the ledger as the first weapon of conquest”—a weapon now upgraded to cloud storage.

This is why the colonial state can celebrate Juneteenth while deleting Black maternal deaths from policy reports. Why it can acknowledge tribal land acknowledgments while underfunding the Indian Health Service. Why it can talk of racial healing while collecting death data that flattens every Native identity into “Other.” The empire wants the appearance of care with none of the accountability. It wants to claim the optics of inclusion while continuing the project of erasure. Canada’s much-lauded 2024 “Indigenous Data Sovereignty Act” is the cautionary tale: reconciliation rhetoric that still routes every spreadsheet through Crown databases.

Our framing, then, must reject the liberal posture of “closing data gaps” or “improving classification protocols.” The problem isn’t just technical. It’s historical. It’s structural. The racial categories baked into U.S. vital statistics systems were never neutral—they were born out of conquest. The logic that classifies Native people as dead, white, or invisible is the same logic that classified them as savages, wards, or terminated tribes. The spreadsheet is simply the ledger of empire, updated for the digital age and subsidized by federal grants.

That’s why this study, while important, must be read in revolutionary terms. Not as a call for better data, but as evidence of colonial continuity. Not as a wake-up call to bureaucrats, but as a weapon for organizers, land defenders, and healthcare workers to demand a new system entirely. One in which Indigenous people are not just seen—but counted on their own terms, in their own languages, under their own governments, and through their own systems of care. The Navajo Nation’s COVID mortality registry and the Mni Wiconi Clinic’s community suicide tallies show what data sovereignty can look like: a refusal to let the settler state hoard the numbers that justify its neglect.

To reframe the narrative is not to beg for inclusion—it is to indict the system. The real story is this: the settler state still decides who gets to live, who gets to die, and who gets remembered. Until that power is taken from its hands, every count will be a miscount, every statistic a distortion, and every “public health study” an imperial record dressed up as reform. Beware the reconciliation trap: inclusion in the master’s spreadsheet is still captivity.

From Miscount to Mobilization: Weaponizing the Data of Disappearance

To fight a war of erasure, we need more than corrections—we need confrontation. The exposure of racial misclassification in Native mortality is not just a statistical footnote. It is a political weapon. Every “error” is a revelation of how the settler state continues its quiet war: not through bullets, but through bureaucracy. Not through massacre, but through metadata.

So what do we do with this knowledge? First, we reject the liberal impulse to see this as a technical glitch in an otherwise salvageable system. The public health establishment is not neutral—it is an institution of empire. Its tools, methods, and categories reproduce the logic of conquest. Reform within that framework will only sanitize genocide, not stop it.

The task is not to close data gaps, but to close ranks with Native-led movements that refuse to be miscounted or domesticated. This means defending Indigenous health clinics from closure, funding urban Native organizations without paternalistic oversight, and resisting every attempt to collapse diverse nations into the census fiction of “Other.” It means organizing within settler institutions, not to improve them, but to expose them—and where possible, to sabotage their erasures with truth.

Organizers must frame every death misclassified as “white” as another act of genocide. Every funding model that relies on false data must be delegitimized. Every state and federal agency that operates on faulty numbers must be forced to confront the fact that it is operating on lies. If the CDC can’t count Native people accurately, then it has no claim to govern their health. If state governments can’t record Native deaths honestly, they cannot be trusted with Native lives.

And beyond exposure lies reclamation. This is not just about dismantling empire’s spreadsheet logic—it is about building systems of life. Systems that count Native people by their own definitions, in their own territories, governed by their own principles of care and accountability. That requires struggle. That requires sovereignty. That requires solidarity from non-Native revolutionaries who understand that our shared enemy is a system that measures life only in service to capital and empire.

In the end, this is not a battle over data—it is a battle over existence. To be counted is to resist erasure. To resist erasure is to make empire tremble. Let the statisticians quake. Let the policy-makers panic. The miscounted are coming for a reckoning.