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Data and Trends

In this session of the workshop, C. Matt Snipp (professor, Stanford University) and Emilia Simeonova (professor, Johns Hopkins University) presented information and perspectives on intergenerational poverty and mobility among Native Americans. The objectives of this session were to inform the committee on

• key historical and structural factors that have shaped economic opportunity and mobility for Native Americans;
• empirical dimensions of the intergenerational poverty and mobility of Native American populations in the United States; and
• high-priority gaps in the data that need to be filled to help develop effective policies for reducing intergenerational poverty among Native Americans.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Not long ago, began C. Matt Snipp, Native Americans were economically self-sufficient. However, during the 19th and 20th centuries, they went from economic self-sufficiency to a conditioned welfare dependency. Throughout the history of the United States, there has been a so-called “Indian problem,” said Snipp, which began as a military and national security issue. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was originally housed in the War Department, he said, and descriptions of Native people from the 19th century reflect the “same sort of demonization” that is used today in descriptions of Al Qaeda or ISIS. However, in the late 19th century, the problem evolved. Native people were

extremely close to extinction, with the population having plummeted from about 7 million in 1492 to 228,000 in 1890. Both observers and Native people themselves believed that American Indians would disappear entirely at some point in the near future, said Snipp. The Indian problem went from a military issue to a question of how to “humanely facilitate” the extinction and “gradually ease Native people into the dustbins of history.”

A two-pronged approach was adopted to facilitate extinction, with one prong aimed at children and one at adults. For children, a system of boarding schools was established around 1879; it was designed to force the assimilation of Native people and to provide them with vocational training that would allow them to assimilate into mainstream society. By 1893, the system reached its apex with 156 schools and about 14,000 students. In hindsight, said Snipp, it is clear that these schools were enormously harmful. They contributed to language extinction, family disruption, and a historic antipathy toward schooling, with Native Americans viewing boarding schools and the people who ran them as the enemy. Children were sent to boarding schools and forbidden from speaking their language; Snipp said that some returned home years later and could not converse with their parents due to the lack of a mutual language.

For adults, said Snipp, the main vehicle of assimilation was land allotment.¹ Native individuals were given a tract of land, with a deed and a title, and whatever was left was sold to White settlers. While the hope was that Indian people would take pride of ownership in their land and become farmers, the result was massive land losses and “reservation checkerboarding,”² a pattern of ownership that continues to serve as an impediment to planning and development on the reservation. Snipp presented a map of the Lac du Flambeau reservation, which depicted a checkerboard pattern with tracts of land divided into land belonging to the tribe, privately owned land (likely held by non-Indians), and lands that are held in trust. This trust land, said Snipp, has so many heirs connected to it that it is “basically impossible” to convert it into either tribal land or privately owned land. Before land allotment, Native people collectively possessed roughly 156 million acres. By the end of the allotment era in 1930, this had shrunk to 30 million acres. Snipp shared an anecdote from his own family history. His grandmother received an allotment that was in a different county from where she and her husband lived, and the allotment was two tracts of land separated by 10 miles. Ten miles was a long distance in

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¹ For more information, see Akee, 2020.

² Native lands that were alienated as a result of the General Allotment Act of 1887 were sold or transferred to non-Native parties but remained within reservation boundaries. As a result, trust lands, fee lands, and lands owned by tribes, individual Natives, and non-Natives are mixed together on the reservation, creating a checkerboard pattern (https://iltf.org/land-issues/issues/).

19th century Oklahoma, he said, a time when horses were the fastest form of transportation.

During the early part of the 20th century, the land allotment policy ended and the boarding school curriculum was revised to be less oppressive, although the focus remained on assimilation. After World War II, the U.S. government implemented a new approach, known as Termination and Relocation; one member of Congress described this approach as a way to get the government “out of the Indian business.” The new policy, said Snipp, called for the unilateral abolition of tribal lands. Many reservations—including the Menominee Reservation, the Klamath Reservation, and 23 California reservations—were dissolved in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1977, however, the reservations were restored, and in 1986 a federal lawsuit resulted in the restoration of these reservations in perpetuity. Relocation, said Snipp, had moved Indians into areas where they were supposed to get job training and resettlement assistance. There were over 100,000 participants in this program, which was “generally deemed a failure.” Snipp described the program as taking “poor, uneducated, unemployed Indians on reservations” and moving them to cities where they were “poor, urban, uneducated, unemployed Indians.” Discrimination and union obstructions played a role in limiting the effectiveness of relocation, he said.

The election to the White House of Richard Nixon brought about another shift in policy; Nixon’s administration pursued a principle of Native self-determination. As mentioned earlier in this proceedings, in 1975, Congress passed the Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act, also known as “the 638 Act” based on its Public Law number. ISDEAA mandated the devolution of BIA oversight in the 1970s and 1980s, said Snipp, and relocation programs were formally ended in 1981 by Ronald Reagan.

A SNAPSHOT OF THE DATA

With the historical perspective provided by Snipp in mind, Emilia Simeonova’s presentation focused on the available data on intergenerational mobility among Native Americans, and identified areas where more research or data collection is needed. She began by noting that the Native American population is not a monolith, and that there are tremendous differences between rural and urban populations and among different tribal affiliations. Simeonova shared data from the 2016 American Community Survey (ACS; Table 3-1). The majority of people who identify as American Indian or Alaska Native (AIAN) live off the reservation, and a great many live in urban settings. In addition, there are more people who identify as AIAN in combination with other races than people who identify as AIAN

alone. There are no data on who is tribally enrolled or in which tribes, said Simeonova. While there are some self-reported data on tribal affiliation, these data are not cross-checked with any other source. As a result, policies and interventions that are implemented on the tribal level are difficult to evaluate.

Compared to the U.S. population as a whole, those who identify as AIAN are less likely to be college educated and more likely to be unemployed, and they have a lower median income. Unemployment rates are far higher among AIAN on the reservation, compared to those who live off the reservation.

Data on American Indian children, said Simeonova, show that around 30 percent of children who do not live on the reservation live in poverty, and close to half of children living on the reservation live in poverty (Table 3-2). While the percentage of those living in poverty on reservations declined between 1990 and 2015, Simeonova said it is still “staggeringly high.”

MEASUREMENT ISSUES AND DATA GAPS

Simeonova identified a number of factors that create challenges for collecting data on AIAN populations. First, she said, there is a lot of distrust due to prior discrimination and exploitation of Native American subjects by researchers. There is a history, particularly in medical research, of

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^aFor more information on ACS 5-year data see https://www.census.gov/data/developers/data-sets/acs-5year.html

“helicopter researchers” showing up in a community, collecting data, and never reporting back or sharing what was learned with the community. The second issue, she said, is that data availability for small groups is very poor. For example, if a researcher is interested in the health of Native American children, even a big national survey such as the National Health Interview Survey may have only 120 to 150 observations of AIAN populations. Such small numbers do not allow a researcher to get a sense of what is happening in the population, said Simeonova.

A third issue is limited data connectivity across different datasets and across generations. Simeonova said that this issue has become more prominent lately, as researchers have begun linking data across different sources. For example, self-reported, detailed race information is not available in Census data before 2000. Conducting research on intergenerational mobility requires having data on at least two generations, said Simeonova, but alternative data sources would be needed for information on individuals prior to 2000. Even the 2000 data can be problematic, she said, due to differential mortality. For example, if a researcher is examining income for people born in 1990 compared to income for people born in 1950, differential mortality due to income could result in selection bias, because those at the bottom of the income distribution were more likely to pass away by the year 2000. These are the types of challenges that arise when there are no reliable racial identification data in large datasets, she said.

Another challenge in research on AIAN populations, said Simeonova, is that racial self-identification can vary by time, across generations, and by context. Variation can occur both within individuals and within families, and it is affected by factors such as the awakening of racial identity over time and the prevalence of Native American children growing up in nonNative households. This variation has substantial implications for the measurement of intergenerational mobility; researchers must decide whether

and how to assign race to individuals based on their children’s or parents’ racial identification. Finally, another major data challenge in this area is that tribal affiliation is not available in any large data source, including the Census Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Research on Native American Mobility

Despite these challenges, said Simeonova, some research has been conducted on Native American economic mobility. The research falls into two major strands, one that utilizes surveys and one that uses large, restricted-use datasets (Chetty et al., 2020). Simeonova told workshop participants about her work using survey data to study the impact of unconditional cash transfers from casino operations. Using data from the Great Smoky Mountain Study of Youth, a longitudinal survey on one tribe, Simeonova and her colleagues found that providing tribal members with cash has a number of positive benefits, including

• reduced criminality for both parents and children;
• improved relationships between parents, and between parents and children;
• improved high school graduation rates;
• improved personality traits in children up to age 16, and
• decreased prevalence of mental health issues for adolescents; and
• improved economic well-being for children, particularly those who suffered from worse mental health (Akee et al., 2010, 2013, 2018, 2020, 2022).

Simeonova highlighted one particular finding from this research: unconditional cash transfers are associated with higher levels of civic participation among children, measured by the probability of voting in any election as an adult. It appears, she said, that children who grow up in environments that are less financially constrained are more likely to participate in our civic institutions, which gives them the opportunity to affect their own long-term well-being through the political process.

Next, Simeonova shared an example of research on Native American mobility that uses large datasets. Akee et al. (2019) used IRS data to examine income mobility within a generation. The study found that Native Americans, relative to other racial groups, were more likely to experience downward income mobility between 2000 and 2014. Another study used IRS data to examine the impact of tribal casino operations (Simeonova et al., 2021). The study found that Native American wages and income increased substantially after casinos began operating, and that children who

resided on reservations at the time had higher future earnings. Simeonova noted that due to the lack of data on tribal affiliation, tribal membership was assigned based on geography for this study; this method was the best available but does have drawbacks.

Potential Solutions

When considering how to impact intergenerational mobility, it is important to examine whether the levers and programs that have been used elsewhere will be effective for AIAN populations, said Simeonova. Several types of general approaches are used in this area: programs targeted at young children, programs targeted at the family, conditional transfers, and unconditional transfers (e.g., universal basic income). Simeonova encouraged the committee to consider which of these approaches would be appropriate and effective in this population. Another issue to think about, she said, is whether the policies are being designed and executed by the federal government, the tribal governments, some combination of the two, or another entity. The political, historical, and institutional context of AIAN communities is complex, and the nuances of tribal sovereignty are often poorly understood. While gaining understanding of this context is costly, she said, any intervention or data collection effort in this community must be designed and conducted in a way that is sensitive to the context and identities of these populations that have historically been mistreated.

Given the challenges related to studying mobility among Native Americans, Simeonova offered several approaches for improvement. First, Native American households could be oversampled in established data sources in order to collect sufficient data points. Second, linkages between existing data sources could be improved; for example, Medicare and Medicaid data could be linked to Indian Health Service data. Third, racial identification could be improved in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid data. Finally, said Simeonova, it is critical to inform, consult, and involve tribal communities in research. Using tribal advisory boards and tribal institutional review boards should be the gold standard for data collection, she said, and there should be more opportunities for Native American students to get involved in research. Involving students would be a “natural channel” for improving knowledge, as well as increasing interest in research among the entire population.

DISCUSSION

Following the presentations, Greg Duncan moderated a question-and-answer session with the panelists, taking questions from committee members and the audience.

In your opinion, what federal policies and programs would be most effective for reducing intergenerational poverty among Native Americans?

History shows that “federal meddling has been enormously damaging” to Native Americans over the course of the 20th century, said Snipp. The best thing that happened in Indian Country in the 20th century, he said, was the devolution of federal involvement in the management of reservations, and the acknowledgment that Native people themselves know what is best for them. Snipp emphasized that whatever the federal government does, it should work collaboratively and directly involve tribal governments. One approach may be to provide additional funds for economic development projects on reservations; Snipp noted that since the passage of ISDEAA, a number of reservations have been successful in business development. Tribes own casinos, banks, and shopping centers, he said, and some tribes are the largest employers in their region. The federal government should enable and support tribes in economic development “without trying to direct them,” he said. In addition, more support for schools, particularly tribal colleges, is needed. Funding and supporting businesses and schools benefits not only the reservation but also the surrounding area, said Snipp. For example, a tribe may provide jobs to non-Indians, and in some areas a tribal college is the only post-secondary school for hundreds of miles.

Simeonova agreed that whatever the federal government does should be done with tribal involvement and collaboration. The most effective approaches, she said, are those that give people resources and the freedom to use them as they see fit. For example, one provision of the Gaming Act allows tribes to distribute cash directly to tribal members. Different tribes have enacted this provision differently, but in general they provide unconditional cash transfers, which have been shown to have positive effects on both children and parents.

Given the history of land loss among Native Americans, what is happening today?

Tribes have been trying to restore the lands that were lost through allotment, said Snipp. A number of reservations are reacquiring privately owned land. However, there are two obstacles that stand in their way. First, when land owners realize that the tribe wants their land, they may increase the price. Second, state and local governments may obstruct the process because there is a loss to their tax base when privately owned land is put into trust. For Native Americans today, said Snipp, the major issue is not land loss at present but obstructions to land reacquisition from previous land loss.

What can the federal government do to promote better data collection in this area?

One approach that should be prioritized, said Simeonova, is improving the ability to link data across different sources. It would be “wonderful” if researchers could access data from different sources that would provide multiple levels of cross-referencing in order to give a better sense of intergenerational mobility. In addition, she said, it is critical to consider how racial data are collected and categorized, because those activities can have major consequences for research findings. She noted that the sample size of people who self-identify as Native American alone is quite small, but that the number increases significantly if an individual’s second, third, or fourth racial category choice is included.

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