Research collaborations propel economic data in Indian Country

This article is the fourth in a series marking the Center for Indian Country Development’s tenth anniversary. See our first article for key insights from the Center’s first decade of economic research, our second article for examples of economic data innovations taking place across Indian Country, and our third article for highlights from the Center’s tenth anniversary commemoration and data summit.

As executive director of Four Bands Community Fund, a Native Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) serving residents of the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, Lakota Vogel (Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe) sees hundreds of clients every year. Often, these prospective borrowers report very low financial net worth.

“We sit on a lot of paper information about wealth,” Vogel said. “We were noticing conversations about the racial wealth gap, and as a practitioner, when I see 400 Native American clients come through in a year and fill out a personal finance statement reporting net worth at the bottom level, it seems silly for me not to want to report that somewhere.”

Even as recently as a few years ago, research on the wealth gap between Native Americans and other population groups was limited. “I kept saying over and over that we had an opportunity to shed light on the issue with the information we collect,” Vogel said.

Researchers from the Center for Indian Country Development (CICD) at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis agreed, and an ensuing collaboration yielded new insights on the wealth gap in Indian Country. For example, a comparison of data on Four Bands clients with national data on White households indicated a White-to-Native net worth ratio of 32 to 1. While not necessarily representative of Native households throughout the United States, the detailed (and anonymized) data allowed for careful investigation of wealth patterns.

In similar ways, tribal leaders, practitioners, and researchers across Indian Country are working together to explore complex research questions and address data gaps. In honor of CICD’s tenth anniversary, we asked a few of CICD’s research collaborators to share their perspectives on when research collaborations make sense and how these collaborations can advance understanding of Native economies. The examples they provided may be instructive to others considering their own research partnerships.

CICD’s work to address economic research and data gaps in Indian Country—including the research collaborations described in this article—supports the Federal Reserve System’s community development function, which helps improve economic outcomes in low- and moderate-income communities.

Bringing together research and relationships

In 2023, CICD undertook an ambitious research initiative: addressing a persistent gap in the public finance data for tribal governments across the United States. “What we now know as the Survey of Native Nations actually started as requests from tribal leaders in Montana who needed data to communicate about their tribes’ economic contributions and challenges,” said CICD Director Casey Lozar (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes). “We started hearing this need for comprehensive public finance data in Indian Country more and more, but figuring out how to do something that had never been done before was daunting, to say the least.”

Getting to the point of having a secure, vetted survey tool required considerable collaboration.

In summer 2023, CICD worked with five tribal governments in Montana on an initial survey pilot, which enabled CICD to develop and refine the survey instrument and data-use procedures with tribal leader input. In 2024, CICD staff traveled across the country to discuss the survey with leaders from 37 tribes ahead of an expanded survey pilot. Two regional Native organizations—the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians (ATNI) and the United South and Eastern Tribes (USET)—worked with CICD in 2024–2025 to offer the survey to their members as part of the expanded pilot, ahead of the survey’s national launch in October 2025.

“The seeds of the survey were planted in conversations with tribal leaders, but we wouldn’t have gotten here without extensive collaboration with many other tribes and also Native organizations,” Lozar said.

Amber Schulz-Oliver (Yakama/Wasco), ATNI executive director, was one of those collaborators. She described the different—and complementary—strengths that ATNI and CICD brought to the table. “CICD has a really strong data science shop and the secure infrastructure needed to protect tribal data. What ATNI brings to the table is relationships. We were established in the 1950s and we’re long-trusted in our communities.”

For a survey dealing with sensitive tribal revenue and expenditure information, both research expertise and long-term relationships were key. “For good reason, tribes are very protective of their data,” Schulz-Oliver said. “Between the data protection available through CICD and the trusted relationships that ATNI brings, that really helps a tribe feel a certain degree of comfort in participating in this sort of initiative.”

Strengthening research design and interpretation

In Vogel’s experience, the complementary strengths of researchers and practitioners also benefit research design and interpretation.

As a practitioner, her experiences working with a variety of external research partners and her knowledge attained from Four Bands’ own internal research have brought insights into how to measure the impact of Native CDFI services—insights that even a highly skilled researcher might not have. For example, “We’ve gone about measuring impact on quality of life in different ways during my term as executive director at Four Bands, and we’ve learned that relying on self-reported ratings about how clients feel about their financial well-being is not always a good measurement,” she said.

Vogel described her experience with survey questions asking clients whether they would feel stress if a family member asked them to contribute financially to a gift. “Even though it might actually stress their budget and they wouldn’t be able to pay for gas for the next week, people around here will never write that it changes their outlook. They just won’t answer that question that way.”

For a researcher expecting to see positive change on questions like this, practitioners can offer vital context.

Opening new research avenues

In some cases, collaborations stimulate new research pathways.

Several years ago, Randall Akee (Native Hawaiian), director of the Project on Indigenous Governance and Development at Harvard University, collaborated with CICD to research business dynamics on reservations. Akee and former CICD advisor Richard Todd applied for access to confidential U.S. Census Bureau data on business establishments so they could geocode the data to American Indian reservation geographies.

“This allowed us to ask questions about business growth and contraction over time on reservations—questions that couldn’t have been asked with public-use external data, either because the sample sizes for firms and establishments located on reservation lands were just too small or nonexistent, or because there wasn’t a longitudinal component to the data,” Akee said.

The resulting research painted a picture of the universe of business establishments on reservations—providing a starting point that other researchers could build on. “It set up the foundation for others who wanted to pursue this research and continue moving it forward,” Akee said.

Although this collaboration took place among researchers, Akee also sees partnerships with community leaders as opening important research avenues.

“Oftentimes there are community researchers or leaders who have ideas or questions that are really novel or insightful but are not seen by external researchers like myself or even people working at state or federal government agencies,” Akee said. “Having pathways for interested individuals to ask questions and seek out answers can stimulate better research, more research, broader-based research, and more compelling research—whether that means academics working with community leaders, administrators working with other government officials, or all of these parties collaborating with each other.”

In some cases, collaborations may open new research pathways simply by making them administratively easier and more cost-effective to pursue. “Longitudinal research is really hard to do because it costs a lot of money to survey people on a repeated basis,” Akee said. “Working with CICD helped me figure out ways to overcome some of those challenges through the use of administrative data available through the U.S. Census Bureau.”

Building the field together

It could be said that the ultimate measure of any research is the extent to which it’s put into action. Coming together around research can, in some cases, increase its impact.

For example, Vogel described her experience when Four Bands contributed data to a study on Native CDFI lending approaches. The study was a collaboration among CICD, academic researchers, and two Native-serving organizations that collected data from 11 participating Native CDFIs.

“As a practitioner, the questions researchers asked help me think of ways to make sure my programming is evidence-based practice. Participating in research like this helps me make sure I’m doing things that are replicable and with purpose, not just based on a gut feeling.”

For example, as part of a research study to measure the impact of their financial services, Four Bands might conduct a pre- and post-services assessment of its clients. “This forces us to be intentional about our definitions,” Vogel said. “What’s the difference between ‘training’ and ‘coaching’? It’s vernacular, but once you’re asked by a researcher, it makes you get really specific about it. That helps you be intentional about the way that you apply the intervention in your community, hoping to change outcomes.”

Partnering with an independent research organization can also help elevate awareness of promising practices in the broader field, Vogel said. “We’ve been talking about character-based lending practices for decades, and we’ve been writing about it in our own ways, but until CICD’s research lifted it up with the study the team did, the ways Native CDFIs put these principles into practice hadn’t even hit the larger finance industry.”

In this way, Vogel sees practitioners and researchers co-creating knowledge in the Native CDFI industry. “We’re field-building together. Researchers are a partner in this space, not just anthropologists analyzing us on the side. Industry knowledge is actually something we can build together.”

Research collaborations also have the potential to amplify impact by documenting experiences that extend beyond a single community. Speaking of her experience collaborating on public finance data through the Survey of Native Nations, Schulz-Oliver said, “Tribes individually are powerhouses. They’re sovereign nations. There are also a lot of issues that are similar across tribes but that tribes navigate on their own. If we can amplify those important voices and bring together the commonalities, the issues have more visibility.”

Cultivating trusted research relationships

Whether discussing the potential for research collaborations to influence research design, interpretation, or impact in the field, Vogel, Schulz-Oliver, and Akee emphasized the importance of the relationships at the heart of the collaboration.

To Schulz-Oliver, timing—in the form of taking enough time to build trusting research relationships—is key. “Especially in Indian Country, we’re so relationship-based that trying to come in, slam something through, and call it a day is never going to work. You really have to have that slow burn that brings people along,” she said. “Show up, show up, show up until people know your face. Slow down and be really intentional.”

This attention to relationship-building can set the stage for various collaborators to contribute their experiences and expertise. “One of the important components of a successful research partnership is figuring out ways to create these collaborations so everyone is heard,” Akee said. “There are parts of the economy that one of us might see and the other would not. Let’s create spaces for open dialogue and a variety of perspectives that can ultimately result in high-quality research.”

Related, Schulz-Oliver observed that spaces for open communication are particularly important around how data are safeguarded and used.

Navigating research challenges together

Research collaborations, of course, are not always the answer. There may be cases where a tribe or organization has reasons for undertaking research on its own, or where collaboration simply isn’t feasible.

But where there is opportunity, and where all partners see the potential benefit, the examples shared here may offer useful considerations in developing a research partnership.

When done well, Schulz-Oliver sees research collaborations as having the ripple effect of encouraging new partnerships among tribes, government agencies, private industry, and research organizations. “I really think that by telling our story through collaborative research, we’ll lift the shroud of mystery around Indian economic development and the powerhouses of our tribes. … I think that other potential partners might see that there’s more value if we all partner together rather than try to navigate large research questions on our own.”