Hyper-fecund Makah and the Salish-Shidhe Council in Native American Nations, Vol. 1 for First Edition Shadowrun
The Salish-Shidhe Council is the nation that envelops the Seattle Metroplex and gets partially fleshed out in the 1st Edition Core Rulebook.
Volume 1 primarily covers the Nations in the former United States, with Volume 2 covering Canada. I will forgive Nigel Findley and the other Shadowrun authors for not getting their demographic projections correct – it’s a game and not a sociology white paper.
What in the drek am I talking about? The Awakening, in addition to bringing back orks and dragons and fireballs, also apparently made certain groups SUPER fertile. There were 2 million Native Americans in the United States in 1990. This had grown to 5.2 million in 2010 and is currently projected to reach 8.6 million by 2050. Below are the listed populations for the 4 nations covered in Volume 1:
Salish-Shidhe Council (SSC) 10.118 million
Sioux Nation 31.810 million
Pueblo Corporate Council (PCC) 11.895 million
Ute Nation 11.658 million
This is more than seven times more than the projection. Some of that discrepancy can be explained by the tribes defined the qualifications for tribal citizenship:
>>>>>[NAN, in its early days, knew it was going to need a massive population influx because they were throwing the majority, whiteskins, out of the territory. They decided that if you could adequately prove even the slightest trace of Amerindian blood, you would be treated as a full blood.]<<<<<
-- The The (12:41:15/6-18-52)
This still, somehow, doesn’t seem to explain the difference. It gets more drastic if you look at an individual tribe, as the SSC population by tribe is:
Let’s look at the Makah – 16% of 10.118 million is 1.6 million.
The tribe, in 2050, does include the entirety of the present-day Makah Reservation:
In 2000, there were about 1400 members living there. Using the same estimated factor growth (4.3) for the total Native American population, this would put Makah population in 2050 at around 6000. Instead, they have 1.6 million. This is more than 266 times greater. So either...
The tribe had to accept so many non-Makah that full blood Makah are a miniscule minority (0.4%) in their own land, OR
Starting in 2011, Makah reproduced at a rate 62 times greater than humans typically do now, with each couple having approximately 124 children.
Yeah, that’s the face those parents would have.