FREEFORUM

News reaching Toronto through my cousin: this year's Kurultai decided not to let the DPI's census enumerators into the clan territories next year.

Can someone in the valleys explain? From here it looks like refusing to be counted just gives Talas the excuse to undercount you.

I was in the outer camp, not in the ring, so this is what was said in the camps.

First: the enumerators would come with Gendarmerie escorts. A man with a clipboard and a man with a rifle is not a census.

Second: the form asks each household for its livestock. The elders say the city wants herd numbers today so it can tax herds tomorrow.

Third, and the old men say this one most: in 2007 a government in Talas wrote our land down on a paper and tried to sell it. Being written down by Talas is not a neutral thing for us.

Gulya is right that they will now print a smaller number. The elders say the Chancellery counts its own herds and its own people and the number is ours. Whether Talas will ever believe our number, I do not know.

They will count the horses from a helicopter. Horses do not lie. Helicopters estimate.

Legal footnote nobody asked for: the census regulation provides for "estimation" where enumeration is "not practicable". So the refusal doesn't stop the census. It hands the DPI the pen for the ATR number. Which, to be fair, the Shepherd seems to know already.

Meanwhile in Nurzhan they did a test run. The enumerator asked my grandmother where she was born. She said Kobozev. He wrote Nurzhan. She has not recovered.

One worry from the Kara-Buura side. Women and girls in the valleys are already invisible in the Talas statistics, and the TSU survey people cannot get in either. If nobody is counted, nobody is counted.

I respect the Kurultai. I also want my sisters to exist on paper somewhere.

white_headscarf posted:

If nobody is counted, nobody is counted.

That is fair, and I will say it to my uncles. The women in the camps keep their own count, by the way. Every birth, every bride, every grave. Older than any census. But it lives in their heads, not on paper, and heads get old.

Thank you both. Best explanation I've read, including the Herald.

Here is the number: 4,626,000. See the other thread. The helicopter was tired.

On the steppe the feedlot people counted our cattle from satellite photos in one week for the contracts. People, apparently, are harder to see from space.