npr:

Near the iced-over Bering Sea, parka-clad workers for the U.S. Census Bureau are gathering in a remote fishing village along the southwestern rim of Alaska to resume a U.S. tradition seen only once a decade — a count of every person living in the country.

After years of largely under-the-radar planning by the federal government and months of turmoil arising from the Trump administration’s failed push to add a citizenship question, the 2020 census is officially beginning Tuesday in Toksook Bay, Alaska — population 590, according to the 2010 head count.

The bureau’s director, Steven Dillingham, is expected to arrive by plane to attend a ceremony at the gymnasium of Nelson Island School, where community members are marking the day with traditional Yup'ik dancing and drumming.

For most households in the country — including those in the Lower 48, Hawaii and the U.S. territories, as well as Alaska’s major cities — the count is not set to roll out until March.

But since Alaska became a state in 1959, the Census Bureau has started tallying Alaska’s most remote residents in January, when the frozen ground makes it easier for the federal government’s door knockers to reach far-flung communities. To get around the country’s largest state by land area, the bureau’s workers rely on bush planes, snow machines, or snowmobiles, and dog sleds to get to villages to ask people their name, sex, age, race and other demographic information.

Along The Rim of Alaska, The Once-A-Decade U.S. Census Begins In Toksook Bay

Photos: Claire Harbage/NPR