American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION In contrast to the exhaustive ethnographic and ethnohistoric literature on American Indian life generally, there has been, until the last decade, limited ethnographic description of the quality of life and possible career paths available to Indians in old age. The dearth of research findings that describe what it means to be old in contemporary American Indian society is due, in part, to the relatively small size of this subsection of the ethnic group. In 1980, 1.5 million American Indians lived in the United States. Of this number only 116,606 were over 60 years of age. This figure represents a considerably smaller proportion (7.6 percent) of the total American Indian population when compared to the 16 percent of the general population who are over 60 years of age for the nation as a whole. Those findings about American Indian old age which have been developed in the last decade can be broadly divided into six categories: demographic profiles, definitions of Indian old age, condemnation of the current deplorable state of the older Indian, needs assessments with their findings and recommendations, ethnographic descriptions of roles and functions of elders in nineteenth-century Indian societies, and ethnographic descriptions of positive and enhanced status and roles for contemporary Indian elders vis-a-vis their ethnic community.