Tribes often lack good data on their communities. This Minneapolis Fed effort aims to fix that. 

Well-informed policy and business decisions depend on trustworthy data. 

State and metro leaders can turn to scores of regularly updated sources (barring a government shutdown) from the U.S. Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics and other federal agencies. Tribal nations have never been able to count on the same level of data, though.

The Center for Indian Country Development at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve has spent 10 years working to fill those gaps.

At a celebration this week of the center’s first decade, policymakers, business owners and tribal advocates emphasized the importance of having access to the socioeconomic data collected by the research institute.

“We employ a lot of people, we have taken people off the welfare rolls, and we have provided scholarship job training,” said Melanie Benjamin, a member of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe and vice president for government relations and engagement at Blue Stone Strategy Partners, a Native American-owned consulting firm that advises tribal leaders and decision-makers.

Related: Native American public health officials are stuck in data blind spot

The center’s data allowed her to back up claims when arguing for or against policies that would affect the tribe, as well as show how crucial it is to the region’s broader economy.

At the time the Center for Indian Country Development was founded in 2015, it was well known that there were unmet economic needs among Native Americans, “but our understanding of how to tackle those needs was limited by a lack of quality research and a lack of data,” Minneapolis Fed president Neal Kashkari said.

The center’s founders “saw an opportunity” to fill that data gap in partnership with the Native American nations, he said. 

Early projects included research on early childhood development and the business environment on reservations, as well as the creation of the Tribal Leaders Handbook on Home Ownership, which became one of the most visited pages on the Minneapolis Fed’s website, Kashkari said.

The work broadened and now includes collaborative initiatives such as the Survey of Native Nations, an effort to give tribal governments the same kind of public finance data that states and municipalities have had access to from the Census Bureau since the 1950s. 

“This work is very complex for many, many reasons, not the least of which is the need to steward tribal data in the most secure way,” said Casey Lozar, the center’s director and a vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

“It simply couldn’t be done without collaboration between the participating tribes who own and who govern their own data, and a research institute like CICD with infrastructure to be able to securely store and protect the tribal data and to do the deep analysis,” he said.

Tribal governments have also made leaps forward in collection, analysis, and dissemination of data, independent of the center. Lozar highlighted the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa’s use of anonymous household identifiers and new software to reach 90% participation in its tribal census, compared to a 67% response rate to the U.S. Census Bureau’s survey. 

Related: Indian Country leaders urge Native people to be counted in 2020 Census

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed more data gaps, specifically around public health. U.S. Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minnesota, highlighted those concerns during a session at the center’s two-day anniversary event this week in Minneapolis.

“Tribal epidemiology centers were not afforded the same access to [federal] information and data as public health departments in other communities,” Smith said via a remote video feed from Washington, D.C. “That was a real problem for them as they were trying to figure out what to do to help take care of their people.”

Kashkari described the problems that insufficient data caused for tribal nations seeking emergency lending programs with the federal government.

“A lot of times, those programs weren’t necessarily optimally designed,” he said, “because we didn’t have enough information to be able to understand exactly how to design those.”

The Fed has since doubled down on closing those data gaps, Kashkari said. Despite its shortcomings, CICD data remains critical for planning health care needs, including training workers to meet anticipated needs in communities.

“I use their data to teach medical students,” said Dr. Mary Owen, associate dean of Native American Health at the University of Minnesota and a member of the Auk Kwaan Tribe of the Tlingit people. Socioeconomic factors are “the most powerful effector on our lives, in our health care,” she said, and the center provides data that paints a more complete picture of those factors.

“Every doctor in this state is going to end up treating Native patients,” Owen said, “so they need to know something about us.”

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