Jourdan Bennett-Begaye
ICT
WASHINGTON — The federal government is not the best place to get data for Native communities.
A new report released Monday afternoon by the Brookings Institution and the Southern California Association of Governments looks at the inhibitors, insights, and opportunities of collecting solid public data for Native people and tribal nations after talking with tribes, tribal leaders, and government officials.
It found that local and regional government organizations, and states, could be more proactive partners for tribal nations for accurate data than the federal government.
“We are currently in a moment where I think the integrity of federal data is really being questioned by a lot of folks, in large part due to actions by the Trump administration,” Robert Maxim told ICT, who is Mashpee Wampanoag and a fellow at Brookings Metro. The Brookings Institution is a think tank based in Washington, D.C.
The president’s actions that have affected federal data include public datasets being removed at the start of the administration, the commissioner of labor statistics being fired in the last month due to the employment report showing a decline in jobs during Trump’s time in office, and the president’s latest request to redo how the Census Bureau collects data.
“This idea of whether federal data is accurate and trustworthy is really at the top of a lot of people’s minds right now. So one of the messages in our report is that tribes and Native people have always been operating in an environment where federal data doesn’t accurately represent them and their experience,” said Maxim, who is one of the authors of the report.
Even though the timing is aligned with what is happening nationally, the work for this project began during the Biden administration, which Maxim said even “the idea at the time was that even when the federal government is well intentioned, there are still a lot of shortcomings,” he said.
Maxim and the Brookings team collaborated with the Southern California Association of Governments, a metropolitan planning organization that works with six of the 10 counties in southern California, to identify how regional organizations can work in addressing the data challenges that Native people and tribes face.
“The big takeaway we had from our work is this idea of a government-to-government relationship is not thought about as much on especially the local and regional level, as it is on the federal level,” Maxim said. “And it’s a real mixed bag of a state level. California actually does a pretty good job with it in a lot of ways. And so that was one of the reasons we were interested in thinking about California for this.”
Brookings and the organization visited eight tribes in the 16 reservations in the organization’s jurisdiction. They talked with government officials and leaders of the seven tribes that are federally recognized and one that is non-federally recognized.
The analysis uses southern California as the case study because the Southern California Association of Governments’ region has 33 federally recognized tribes and multiple non-recognized tribes; it has a large and diverse Native population, including urban people, and it includes places of cultural significance; and Los Angeles was a city used for a relocation program and Riverside is home to Sherman Indian High School, a boarding school that opened in 1892. The Southern California Association of Governments is a regional partner that approached Brookings and is an example of a local and regional partner who wants to do better. The region is economically powerful.
“In California, we found there was a really proactive set of governments that are interested in getting this relationship right,” Maxim said.
The report also highlights the problems facing Native communities in finding accurate data: samples that are too small to accurately reflect the people and their communities; difficulty in obtaining data because of remote reservation areas; data that considers Native people as a race rather than recognizing tribal governance and Native identity; and data sets designed without tribal input.
The report also found after talking with tribal leaders and government officials that a lack of understanding about tribal sovereignty contributes to the misunderstanding of tribes as governments.
“Many current government processes and structures struggle to support Tribal data capacity,” the report states.
The other findings of the report affirmed what many tribal leaders, tribes and Native people experience, such as how they engage with data, collecting other types of data, and sample size limitations.
Based on the findings, the analysis looks at opportunities for local, regional, and state partners which include working with tribes and tribal leaders to implement data strategies, investing in tribal data capacity, supporting tribal sovereignty and self-determination, and making sure that the data is relevant and accurate to tribal nations and Native people.
Working with tribes and Native people with Indigenous-led solutions was key in the report and showed that this type of collaboration is possible as it is done in New Zealand already with the country and Iwi, New Zealand tribal nations.
Iwi and New Zealand approach data with Māori data sovereignty, where the data suits the needs of the Māori people. It’s rooted in the Treaty of Waitangi, a document that sets the state-Iwi relations for tribal self-determination.
“In modern interpretations of the treaty, data on or about Iwi and Māori people is increasingly seen as a ‘Taonga,’ a treasure of tangible and intangible value, and is guaranteed explicit protections,” the report states.
Maxim said the approach can be helpful for others.
“One of the things that I think is really powerful about this tool set up by New Zealand is that tribes have so much autonomy over what data that they want to make public and what data that they want to keep private,” Maxim said. “Tribes have a lot of autonomy and a lot of co-equal power over what the story that their data is telling, both to the public, but also what access they have to data about themselves and their lands and citizens.”