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.

Tribal self-sufficiency and self-government depend in part upon a tribe's ability to raise revenue and regulate its territory, and the power to tax plays an essential role in both. Taxation authority in Indian country, however, has been one of the most litigated issues between tribes, states, and local governments. Until Congress enacts legislation clarifying jurisdictional questions, intergovernmental tax agreements can provide some level of certainty while safeguarding against costly litigation. As seen in Montana, agreements can be crafted in mutually beneficial ways that respect tribal sovereignty, making them an effective, if temporary, solution to the ongoing taxation competitions between sovereigns.

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.

Much contemporary science fiction urges us to focus on eco-activism and sustainable futures in order to prevent environmental catastrophe. From a critical Indigenous and anticolonial perspective, however, the question becomes “for whom are these futures sustainable”? Set in a nondescript desert dystopia, George Miller's film Mad Max: Fury Road 2015 alludes to the westerns of yesteryear and the Australian “outback”—spaces coded as menacing in their resistance to being tamed by settler-colonial interests. This article charts how Miller's film, while preoccupied with issues pertaining to global warming and ecological collapse, replicates and reifies settler replacement narratives, or what Canadian literature scholar Margery Fee has referred to as “totem transfer” narratives (1987). In these narratives, ultimately the “natives” transfer their knowledges and then disappear from view, helping white settlers remedy the self-created ills that currently threaten their worlds and enabling them to inherit the land. In the second half, I also consider how Indigenous futurist texts offer decolonizing potentials that refute the replacement narratives that persist in settler-colonial contexts. In particular, I examine how Indigenous cultural production emphasizes the importance of the intergenerational transfer of Indigenous knowledges and refuses the hermeneutic of reconciliation that seeks to discipline Indigenous futures in the service of a settler-colonial present.

The 1998 Navajo Local Governance Act (LGA) expands local control over local matters for the 110 community-governed chapters across the Navajo Nation. The expectation is that decentralized decision-making, planning, program implementation, and funds management may improve effectiveness and efficiency across all levels of Navajo government. This paper examines the viability of this approach to locally governed communities, describes obstacles experienced by aspirant LGA communities that struggle to meet Navajo Nation-established standards in financial management and administration, and argues for continued education and training to help realize local empowerment for the Navajo people.

This paper outlines an ongoing unlearning and relearning journey: my lifelong transformation from a Western scientific researcher to a relational and participant-oriented researcher. This transformation has made me aware of my responsibility to share my stories about how I have changed. In this commentary I situate my lifelong research training as a metaphor for unlearning, learning, situating, and reclaiming my research methodologies and methods. Specifically, this commentary poses and answers questions such as, “how has my Western science-oriented research training been challenged through my relationships with research participant communities? How did my methodological transformation (decolonizing and reclaiming of relational/participant orientation) start? And, how did my transformation empower me and create my sense of belonging in regards to who I am and what I should do?” I conclude by outlining the implications of my methodological transformation processes for future research.