American Indian Culture and Research Journal

American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) tribes need access to quality data and information to make informed decisions concerning their communities, economic development, land and resource management, and other sovereign governance decisions. Federal agencies also need access to quality data to ensure that they are delivering effective services to AI/AN tribes to meet tribal needs and deliver on federal responsibilities. However, various statistical and collection issues often negatively affect the quality and availability of federally collected AI/AN data. As a preliminary step to identifying gaps and improving the quality and accuracy of AI/AN data in federal datasets, this article provides an inventory and preliminary analysis of current AI/AN in federal data collections. This inventory identifies 448 unique data collections from twenty-one federal agencies. These datasets were identified in 2016. One hundred and ninety-four (43.3%) of these datasets are publicly available, and seventy-nine of the publicly available datasets include data at the tribal or reservation level. An analysis of tribal/reservation level datasets by agency show that there are data gaps at the reservation/tribal level on businesses, the financial sector, tribal governments, labor markets, and education.