Lots of government surveys you hear about on Marketplace do not share data about how American Indian and Alaska Native people are faring. The data typically exists but is excluded from published reports due to methodological limitations.  

That includes the Federal Reserve’s annual SHED, or Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking report. But a new analysis from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve’s Center for Indian Country Development aims to fill that data gap. 

According to the Fed, random sampling for the SHED survey doesn’t capture enough Indigenous-identifying respondents relative to other groups to make robust comparisons or draw conclusions with statistical certainty. 

To overcome that, the Center for Indian Country Development pooled and analyzed nine years of unpublished SHED data. 

“The take home of our analysis is that pretty much whatever way you slice it, American Indian and Alaska Native identifying households are reporting greater financial stress and lower security than other households,” said data director Vanessa Palmer. 

Even controlling for factors like age and education level, Palmer said those respondents were 20% less likely to report doing at least “OK” financially between 2014 and 2022. In response to the SHED’s famous “$400 question,” Indigenous respondents were a third less likely to say they have the cash to cover a $400 emergency bill. 

Palmer said the analysis gives policymakers a clearer picture of American Indian and Alaska Native-identifying households’ financial health. 

“[The Fed’s] aim is promoting an economy that works for everyone, and an economy can’t work for everyone if whole swaths of the population are left out of the data,” Palmer said. 

But even that unburied federal data has limitations, according to Robert Maxim, a fellow with the Brookings Institution. 

“Over 60% of American Indians and Alaska Natives are multiracial,” Maxim said, compared to about 10% of Black and white Americans who check a second box on the U.S. Census. 

That means many Native respondents get lost in the “two or more races” category on many federal survey reports. Meanwhile, the “American Indian/Alaska Native” category comprises less than half of Indigenous Americans. 

“It’s not just that Native people are being excluded, but the data about us is not even that high quality,” Maxim said. So, when it comes to Native consumers and tribal economies, federal and tribal policymakers “don’t have the full picture of what that looks like.” 

Maxim added that the federal government could get more clarity by oversampling Native people in surveys and providing funding to empower tribal nations to gather their own economic data.