This article, based on the official census in Chile in 1907, notes its quantitative inaccuracies, reviewing the use of the category of population and its detrimental impact on the Indians, emphasizing how it erases the territorial, political and identity conflicts that traversed the tense relationship between the nation-state and the Indians. The article studies how this problematic shifted at different historical moments in Chilean institutions, showing that despite the different positions taken, it maintained the same epistemological and political configuration, compromising the implementation of public health policies in Chile. The figures of Orrego Luco, Murillo, Gonzalez y Allende are quoted in these analyses and debates.