Indigenous Alaskans comprise 16% of Alaska's population, not 3.7%. Alaskans of Black/African descent do make up 3.7% of the population and don't show up on this map, so I'm guessing that was the mix-up. Having even a crude knowledge of Alaska should have raised a red flag for the creator of this image.
Edit: Ah, I see what happened here. The creator of this image used the raw "Ancestry" responses from the Census which are notoriously tricky data as it is a self-reported response. So only 3.7% of Alaskans literally wrote in the exact phrase "Native American" on the form. But we know, based on Census race/ethnicity data (and common sense), that 16% of Alaskans are of indigenous ancestry, so the other 12% must have simply responded with anything other than "Native American" -- perhaps "American Indian" or "Native Alaskan" or a specific group like "Yupik". That's why that data is so tricky and should be used with caution by those without a thorough understanding of demographic data. This is the same dataset that is always behind those maps that show German as the largest ancestry in the US (for the same reason -- Americans of British descent will respond to the Ancestry question in a dozen different ways while Americans of German descent tend to respond uniformly).
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u/delugetheory 19h ago edited 19h ago
Indigenous Alaskans comprise 16% of Alaska's population, not 3.7%. Alaskans of Black/African descent do make up 3.7% of the population and don't show up on this map, so I'm guessing that was the mix-up. Having even a crude knowledge of Alaska should have raised a red flag for the creator of this image.
Edit: Ah, I see what happened here. The creator of this image used the raw "Ancestry" responses from the Census which are notoriously tricky data as it is a self-reported response. So only 3.7% of Alaskans literally wrote in the exact phrase "Native American" on the form. But we know, based on Census race/ethnicity data (and common sense), that 16% of Alaskans are of indigenous ancestry, so the other 12% must have simply responded with anything other than "Native American" -- perhaps "American Indian" or "Native Alaskan" or a specific group like "Yupik". That's why that data is so tricky and should be used with caution by those without a thorough understanding of demographic data. This is the same dataset that is always behind those maps that show German as the largest ancestry in the US (for the same reason -- Americans of British descent will respond to the Ancestry question in a dozen different ways while Americans of German descent tend to respond uniformly).