Historically-based structural disadvantages impinge on AIAN people’s civil rights, and redressing these issues requires plausible information about the future size, age structure, and locational distribution of the population. AIAN people and Tribal Nations are also subject to statistical racism, in which their data (and thus their successes and needs) are ignored because they are relatively small populations. This report presents population projections of the racially-identified American Indian and Alaska Native population from the present to 2050 using a traditional demographic method that has been modified to account for net response change – one of the most significant data-related challenges.

Who has which job? When this answer differs by race group or sex, inefficiencies such as labor market discrimination or suboptimal investment in education may be impeding productivity and sustaining inequities. We use US Census data to analyze the occupational structure of American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) workers relative to non-Hispanic white workers. Relative to white workers, AI/AN workers are generally overrepresented in low-skilled occupations and underrepresented in high-skilled occupations, especially men and single-race AI/AN workers. AI/AN occupational dissimilarity does not appear to have declined substantially since 1980. Sex-specific multivariate analyses do not remove the significant inequalities in observed occupational outcomes.