Orcasional Musings | Orcasian? What’s that?

First in a series of Orcasional Musings

||| ORCASIONAL MUSINGS BY STEVE HENIGSON |||

Almost 20 years ago, I was one of the supervisors who helped our federal government take the Orcas Island census. I ran a crew of about 10 census takers who spread out over the southeastern section of our island.

There were strict rules about how the census was to be taken. Several of them had to do with counting unresponsive residents. It was an escalating scale running all the way from polite but persistent visits, to employing a sheriff’s deputy to force the issue.

One of my census takers found a rustic dwelling from which the sound of an old-fashioned typewriter sounded loudly and clearly. However, repeated hammering on the door got no response. The typewriter just kept on clacking.

After a second visit, involving more door hammering and more typewriter clacking, and following the mandated protocol, the census taker took his questions to a nearby neighbor’s house. The neighbor knew the resident of the rustic dwelling quite well, and therefore was able to completely satisfy our government’s curiosity.

During working hours about a day later, I got a visit from an extremely irate citizen.

“My neighbor told me that one of your people was snooping around my house. Twice. And then he asked him some very intrusive questions about me. You people had no right…” (etcetera, etcetera, etcetera)!

His main point was that, since we’d asked his neighbor about him, how could we be sure that the answers we got were true and correct? His secondary point was that he expected us to make an appointment with him, so that he could give his own answers himself.

I explained the mandatory census protocol, which included having twice left a “contact us” notice on his door handle, and which didn’t seem to have had any good effect. But he kept angrily repeating his claim that his neighbor probably had given us incorrect information about him.

“OK,” I said, “You’re right here, right now. How ’bout we do the questions together? It’d save us all a lot of trouble.”

“No!” he angrily replied. “I want you to make an appointment. I want you to bring out the same census taker with you, and start all over again!”

So that’s what we did.

That year, the census asked several detailed questions about ethnicity, parentage, and native origins. After getting pretty standard answers to all of the standard census questions from him, we came to that section.

“What ethnicity do you consider yourself?” my census taker asked, and he read out a long list of possible choices.

“I’m a Pacific Islander,” the man replied, with a very straight face.

The term Pacific Islander was supposed to indicate a Polynesian, a Melanesian, a Micronesian, or maybe a Maori.

“Um, please explain your answer,” said the census taker.

“Well, this island we live on is in the Pacific Ocean,” the man said, “so I’m a Pacific Islander.”

“Yeah. Right. OK,” my census taker said. Since the census required a follow-up to an answer like that, he then had to ask, “To which tribe or moiety do you belong?” and he read out the entire, long list.

“Oh, I’m none of those,” the man replied. “I live on Orcas Island, so I’m an Orcasian!”

My census taker sighed and shook his head, but he wrote it down. The man dated and signed his census form, and I submitted it to my own supervisor, a nice lady who lived on Whidbey Island.

“Orcasian,” she said. “Hmmm… It has a nice ring to it. The census people won’t like it, but they’ll have to accept it because it was his answer. Maybe all of you, um, Orcasians should start using it too, from now on.”

And, you know, for a few years after that, a lot of us did.