Tribes innovate economic data practices based on tribal values

This article is the second 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.

Every year since 2021, the Center for Indian Country Development (CICD) has brought together leaders from across Indian Country for a virtual event focused on economic data gaps and innovations in Native communities. Tribal leaders, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers participating in CICD’s annual data summit have shared community-led advancements in data collection, use, and governance. While gaps remain, these data stories illustrate new ways tribes are leveraging data—on their own terms—to serve their communities.

As CICD marks its first decade of economic research and data work, this article shares a few of the many economic data innovations taking place in communities across Indian Country. Offered by tribal leaders from Arizona to Oklahoma to Wisconsin, the following stories provide concrete examples of tribes using economic data to set up tribal programs for success and target services to community needs.

All of our research and data work in CICD, including our focus on addressing long-standing economic data gaps in Indian Country, supports our mission to advance the economic self-determination and prosperity of Native nations and Indigenous communities through actionable data and research that inform public policy discussions. This mission is grounded in the Federal Reserve System’s community development function, which gives us responsibility to help improve economic outcomes in low- and moderate-income communities.

Driving tribal transit decisions with vehicle-registration data

It’s hard to think of a program providing in-person services that doesn’t involve transportation in some way. Whether it’s a food shelf, health program, or educational opportunity, people need a way to get there. Particularly in rural areas, a program’s success may hinge in part on transportation considerations. On the plains of western Oklahoma, the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes have taken this lesson to heart.

“Any time you submit grant applications, they want to know the whole story of the tribe or the people you’re trying to assist,” said Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes Governor Reggie Wassana (Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes), who is a member of CICD’s Leadership Council.

To tell the transportation side of its story, the tribal government identified a new use for an existing source of data: vehicle registrations. When tribal citizens register or renew their vehicle tags with the tribe, they provide information on the vehicle’s age, make, and model, as well as the owner’s address. Overlaid with tribal enrollment or county population data, vehicle registrations can yield powerful insights.

“If we look at heavily populated areas—say we have 300 elders in one particular area—we can go to the vehicle-registration data and see that there are maybe 60 vehicles registered to tribal members in that area. We can probably deduct that there’s not very many vehicles per household,” Wassana said.

Data insights like this help the tribal government support members in accessing tribal services. “We have our own small transit system that picks people up at locations and drops them off at locations. They’re usually traveling to our clinics or other service-related facilities. We know we need services in certain areas simply because we know that there aren’t enough vehicles in those communities,” Wassana said.

Because vehicle-registration data include personal information such as home addresses and identifiable vehicle information, Wassana emphasized the importance of data confidentiality. Within the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, vehicle-registration data reside within the office collecting the information, and other departments request statistics from that office absent of any identifying information. For example, another unit of government might request the total number of vehicles in a particular county.

“It wouldn’t be any personal information,” Wassana said. “It would be really generic numbers.”

Beyond tribal transit routes, Wassana sees the potential for vehicle-registration data to inform a wide variety of tribal government decisions—from locations for the tribe’s food-distribution program to sites for business development. “We have to understand where our people are and how they can get places.”

Matching business supply and demand with consumer-behavior data

Stretching across parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, the Navajo Nation spans 27,000 square miles—roughly the size of Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut combined. Matching supply and demand for goods and services across such a large geography can be tricky, but Navajo Nation Division of Economic Development Economist Alisha L. Murphy (Diné/Navajo), who is a member of CICD’s Leadership Council, is working to provide the tribal government with the business and consumer data needed to make that match—and to do so at increasingly local levels.

Soon after assuming her role in 2021, Murphy helped lead the Navajo Nation Hardship Consumer Impact Survey to learn about the industries from which Navajo citizens bought goods and services and whether they purchased those goods and services on or off the reservation. With an influx of pandemic-relief funding, tribal leaders wanted to understand where community members were spending their money. “We were still in COVID times,” Murphy said.

Given social-distancing measures, her division conducted the survey entirely online. Schools and community organizations such as chambers of commerce helped promote the survey, and prominent community members including comedians and motivational speakers helped spread the word through their personal social media accounts.

“We actually got volunteers—now they call them ‘influencers,’ but we called them our ‘Navajo celebrities’—to promote the survey on social media and share the message that we’re trying to gather information during this critical time for businesses,” Murphy said.

With more than 5,000 responses, the survey provided the tribal government with insights on consumer behavior within the nation’s geography. “One of the outcomes of that survey was learning that nearly 60 percent of Navajo Nation residents who had an influx of COVID-relief funding spent it off the nation, so our tribal businesses were losing out on economic opportunities,” Murphy said.

Survey data also shed new light on information the tribal government had previously collected on small businesses in the nation. When the Division of Economic Development administered pandemic-relief funding to small business owners, it logged and learned from the grant applications and related business registrations. “Business owners had to apply for the grant in our office, and all of our staff had to check their applications, make sure their business was legitimate, and register their business,” Murphy said. “We learned that we have over 6,000 Navajo small businesses and artisans.”

Taken together, the business and consumer data can help the tribal government consider how to map the nation’s business environment and educational offerings to the services in demand.

“Automotive care was one of the biggest demands to emerge from the consumer-behavior survey, and I think we have only a handful of auto care shops or mechanics licensed on the nation,” Murphy said. “And we have Navajo Technical University that has a lot of vocational programs, including in automotive technology. These data can help us connect students to the actual needs of our consumers.”

Asked what insights she would share with other tribes looking to advance their data use, Murphy advised building relationships across tribal departments to learn what data already exist and explore possibilities for data-sharing. “When you want quality data, it’s not going to be fast, and it’s not going to be cheap. We need to take the time to build relationships and collaboration.”

Translating tribal census data into housing developments

Moving northeast across the United States, to where Wisconsin meets Lake Superior (Gitchigami), the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa uses tribal census data to chart its services to tribal citizens. In 2018, the tribe contracted with a data-management consulting firm to help conduct its first census. With the firm’s support, the tribal planning department led focus groups with other departments across the tribal government to seek their input on the survey questions that would inform their decision-making.

“Our tribe wanted accurate data to reflect our community instead of just going off of the U.S. Census,” said Liz Boyd (Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa), project manager for the Red Cliff Band and homeowner program manager for the Red Cliff Chippewa Housing Authority.

According to Boyd, the survey’s success hinged on knowing the community. “It’s important to understand your community and get tribal census staff who relate to the community members vs. having an outside source try to ask tribal members survey questions,” Boyd said.

The tribal government identified field staff who were tribal citizens and lived in the community to visit every household on the reservation and let them know the census was starting. In advance of the visits, the government posted photos and brief background information about each field staffer to the tribal website so tribal citizens “already knew who was going to be coming around to their houses,” Boyd said.

At every household, field staff left a door hanger that provided information about the census and listed the household’s unique four-digit survey code. A representative from the household could complete the survey online, over the phone, or—of particular interest to elders—in-person with field staff.

Regardless of a survey’s completion method, the four-digit code enabled the tribal government to track responses without requesting identifiable names or addresses on the survey form. “The software system we used to manage the census had different codes for every household on the reservation so you could track if a survey had been done,” Boyd said. “When the pinpoint on the map turned green, it meant that survey was completed, and you didn’t have to go back to that household.”

The most recent census, completed in 2023, garnered a 90 percent response rate. The Red Cliff Band repeats the census every five years and feeds the data into the tribe’s comprehensive plan, which guides decisions in areas from housing to transportation to economic development and community well-being.

For example, based on data from the tribal census and a housing needs assessment, the tribal government determined that more than 10 percent of households on the reservation were overcrowded, and that more than 200 additional housing units were needed. As a result, the tribal government developed plans for new housing projects which, once completed, will add two eight-unit apartment complexes, two 12-unit elder-living apartment complexes, and new rental and single-family homes to the reservation.

Even with such targeted insights, Boyd noted the importance of keeping census data timely. “Don’t just do it one time and stop,” she said. “The needs and data of your community change so often that you’ll want to see your progress by continuing to do a census.”

Mapping data infrastructure

Based in southcentral Oklahoma, over 100 miles east of the headquarters of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, the Chickasaw Nation governs what Mari Hulbutta, Chickasaw citizen and the Chickasaw Nation’s inaugural director of data stewardship, describes as a vast amount of data.

“We’re a sovereign nation with over 82,000 citizens, over 14,500 employees, and an economic portfolio comprised of over 100 diversified business entities operating across various industries,” said Hulbutta, who is also a descendant of the Seminole and Muscogee (Creek) Nations. “As a result of our sophisticated structure, we’re entrusted with a vast amount of sensitive data on a regular basis.”

The first step in managing that data well and in alignment with the Chickasaw Nation’s mission to enhance the overall quality of life of the Chickasaw people is knowing what’s out there. “We’ve been working on mapping our internal data ecosystem to identify our various data domains and key data custodians,” Hulbutta said.

“This endeavor involves taking stock of all of the different forms of data that we have—whether that’s financial information related to our business entities, health information from our clinic and hospital patients, demographic information about our citizens, census information, or climate information collected through our environmental services team. In collaboration with key internal stakeholders, we’re creating a comprehensive map detailing where and with whom in the organization different categories of data reside and identifying current practices for managing that specific data.”

Hulbutta foresees this data inventory as, among other things, opening new possibilities for the tribal government to enhance services for its citizens. “We’re envisioning ways to make it easier for us to connect our citizens to our programs and services,” she said.

One initiative under development is a phone app that would enable Chickasaw citizens—wherever they live around the globe—to apply for a variety of tribal services from a single location. “You could use an application on your phone through which you set up a profile one time, and from that point forward your basic information pre-populates on every application,” Hulbutta said. “In addition, we envision the app as having the capability of automatically telling you which programs you’re eligible for based on the information you provide in your profile.”

Hulbutta’s colleague Chris Shilling (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma), the Chickasaw Nation’s undersecretary of technology and innovation, said the comprehensive data inventory helps the tribal government focus data conversations on the overarching needs of tribal citizens vs. the needs of individual programs. “We’re going from program-centric data to citizen-centric data.”

Like Murphy of the Navajo Nation, Hulbutta and Shilling envision tribal citizens benefitting from growing data collaboration. “I’m really excited for the next five years with increasing data alignment and collaboration,” Shilling said. “Each vertical sector had its own growth phase, whether that was health or gaming or tribal services or environmental services. We all grew aligned but in our own worlds. In the next phase, I believe we’re going to leverage data to be the lens through which we transform our services to our citizens in a much more cohesive and collaborative way.”

A collective commitment to evidence-based decision-making

Tribes are richly varied in their approaches to data, but these and other examples of data innovations shared during CICD’s annual data summits illustrate a collective commitment to designing tribal services based on the best information possible—and in ways that are rooted in tribal values. New data resources, such as CICD’s data tools, can support these efforts by providing access to publicly available economic data that complement tribes’ own data collection.

Although advancing data practices can seem daunting, Shilling said tribes already have the most important knowledge to drive the process: “Technology is going to evolve. The way we consume data is going to evolve. It’s okay to not have all the answers all the time. What you need to know is yourself [as a tribe] and your values.”

The 2025 CICD Data Summit takes place on October 9, 2025, as part of a two-day event commemorating CICD’s tenth anniversary. Sign up for CICD email updates for more information later this summer on how to participate.