Our revised race standards still fall short for Indigenous Americans

This March, the White House Office of Management and Budget published new standards for race and ethnicity data to help policymakers and researchers collect more accurate statistics on underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. The largest changes create a new category for individuals of Middle Eastern and North African descent, and combine the confusing separate questions for “race” and Latino or Hispanic “ethnicity.” 

These changes are a positive development, but they don’t go far enough to solve the most significant data issues facing another group: American Indians and Alaska Natives.  

As my colleagues and I previously argued, we need to decouple Indigenous identity from race in federal data for two reasons. 

First, American Indians and Alaska Natives are the only “race” that’s also a political identity; no other racial or ethnic group maintains treaties with the U.S. government or has the legal power to define who is a citizen. This distinction allows tribes to operate Indian Health Service clinics, run their own court systems and maintain hunting, fishing and land rights. 

Second, American Indians and Alaska Natives — as well as Native Hawaiians, who are also Indigenous — are disproportionately multiracial and multiethnic. American Indian and Alaska Native identity isn’t defined by race but by pre-colonial ancestry in the Americas, tribal citizenship and kinship ties, so it’s possible for an individual to be multiracial and Indigenous. 

Because the ill-fitting paradigm of “race” is forced onto Indigenous people, the current system can lead to three-quarters or more of American Indians and Alaska Natives being classified as a different group — most commonly Latino or Hispanic and “two or more races.” 

For example, in California, nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of American Indians and Alaska Natives are Latino or Hispanic, and over one-quarter (26 percent) are multiracial. That means in some data sets, just 11 percent of American Indians and Alaska Natives in California are classified as such. 

Source: Brookings analysis of Census Bureau data 

This can have a negative impact on data quality. For example, the Department of Education doesn’t collect the racial breakdown of Latino or Hispanic and multiracial students, meaning that three-quarters of American Indian or Alaska Native students are likely classified in other categories. 

This can significantly affect how students are represented in institutional data, and which schools qualify for federal programs such as the Native American-Serving Nontribal Institutions Program. 

Given these shortcomings, the U.S. should follow the lead of Canada, Australia and New Zealand by including a separate question on Indigenous identity. Doing so could delink Indigeneity from the concept of “race” and create a more comprehensive count of American Indians and Alaska Natives. 

Instead, OMB’s new standards move to a single question about race and ethnicity, meaning many American Indians and Alaska Natives will continue to be aggregated into other groups. More Americans of all racial and ethnic groups may also fall into the “two or more races” category, with a smaller proportion of people in each individual category. 

In other words, other groups may soon experience the same data challenges that American Indians and Alaska Natives have faced for years. 

Perhaps anticipating that challenge, the OMB standards recommend three different approaches for presenting data on race and ethnicity. 

“Approach 1” allows agencies to report race and ethnicity data for all individuals identifying as that group alone or in combination. “Approach 2” allows agencies to report all detailed combinations of race and ethnicity they collect. “Approach 3” is the current default in many data sets: publishing single-race individuals from each group, alongside a catch-all “two or more races” category. 

Federal, state and local agencies, as well as research organizations, should shift to publishing race and ethnicity data using the more inclusive Approach 1 or 2. That could begin to solve the underrepresentation problems for American Indians and Alaska Natives, and help people better understand the full scope and diversity of Indigenous people in the U.S. 

The imperative for ensuring comprehensive and accurate data on American Indians and Alaska Natives goes beyond record keeping. Many federal programs that provide funding to tribes and services to tribal citizens — thus forming the basis of the federal government’s trust and treaty obligations — rely on data federal agencies collect. To best meet these obligations, the federal government must ensure the data it collects is as accurate as possible. 

Even with these changes, agencies will need to take additional steps to improve the quality of data on American Indians and Alaska Natives and make that data more accessible to tribes and Native people themselves. 

If implemented broadly and enthusiastically, however, these new approaches to presenting race and ethnicity data can provide important new avenues for research while increasing awareness of the ongoing data challenges for Indian Country. 

Robert Maxim is a citizen of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and a fellow at Brookings Metro.