The role of race, ethnicity and tribal enrolment on asset accumulation: an examination of American Indian tribal nations

ABSTRACT

We analyse survey data from the National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color Project for asset accumulation in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The survey oversampled the American Indian/Alaska Native population in order to examine asset accumulation among a variety of racial, ethnic and legal status groups. We examine differences in asset accumulation across tribal members from a variety of American Indian tribes. Additionally, we make comparisons across those that are tribally enrolled to those that are not tribally enrolled. We find substantial difference across tribal affiliation in our data once we disaggregate the category of American Indian. Our research adds a new dimension to the literature examining differences in wealth accumulation by race and political status for a little-studied group. Specifically, we examine the intersection of race and legal status in wealth and asset accumulation.

KEYWORDS:

• Wealth
• American Indians
• assets
• political status
• racial wealth gap

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Corrigendum

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Ms. Mari Blyler, Eastern New Mexico University, for her extensive research assistance in this process. The authors would like to thank the Ford Foundation for their generous support the Nation Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color project, led by William Darity and Darrick Hamilton.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The term “American Indian” is used to indicate those who self-identify in U.S. Census racial categories as American Indian or Alaskan Native; however, we primarily examine only American Indian populations. The tribal groups studied are collectively referred to as “native”.

2. The six states include Arizona (5.4 per cent), Montana (8.1 per cent), North Dakota (6.4 per cent), New Mexico (10.4 per cent), Oklahoma (13.4 per cent) and South Dakota (10.0 per cent). The Alaska Native population is 19.6 per cent and Hawaii, which includes Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders, is 28.2 per cent (Source: 2012 American Community Survey, 1-year estimate).

3. Tribal government websites refer to the tribe as “Muscogee” and “Muscogee (Creek)”. We use “Muscogee” in our analysis.

4. The extreme positive skew in the data is evident by the much higher mean relative to median asset values exhibited in Table 2.

5. IDA refers to programmes designed to aid low-income families in the asset accumulation process. An IDA is usually a savings account in which funds saved by the family are matched with funds from government agencies.

6. The race, ethnic and tribal affiliation variables are constructed such that respondents who identified as native and black, white or Hispanic are identified as native and non-native respondents who identified as Mexican or other Hispanic, black or white generally were classified by the category of self-identification. Four respondents identified as black and white, three of these also identified as native, and are coded as native leaving one observation that was identified as black and white and recoded as NEC.

7. The weights used for values in Tables 2 and 3 are anchored on U.S. Census American Community Survey social economic indicators for representativeness of Tulsa metropolitan area households across all ethnic/tribal groups.

8. The “Other Hispanic” category only has fourteen observations of net worth information and is subsequently not analysed as a separate category, but rather combined with Mexicans to form the category of Mexican/Hispanic. Also, the “Cherokee, Not Enrolled” and the “Choctaw” categories are collapsed into “American Indian, Not Enrolled” and “Other Tribes, Enrolled”, respectively, since each of them on their own have less than fifteen observations of net worth values. There are 250 non-missing observations of net worth—92 whites, 45 blacks, 51 Mexican/Hispanics, 90 natives (30 enrolled Cherokee, 16 enrolled Muscogee, 23 other tribally enrolled Natives, and 23 non-tribally enrolled Natives), and 7 not elsewhere categorized respondents, which are subsequently dropped from analysis.

9. Liquid assets include all currently liquid financial assets such as unrestricted savings and checking accounts and cash. Financial assets include pension, IRA, annuities, business assets. Tangible assets include measures of household assets such as homes and automobiles. Total net worth includes the value of all types of assets and debts as provided in the survey.

10. Educational attainment (college plus education) has a large and significant relationship with all forms of asset accumulation in both the mean and median regressions. Age is also positively related to asset accumulation and statistically significant in all cases except for median regressions of liquid and financial assets (inclusion of an age-squared variable does not qualitatively change the observed results. It does, however, diminish the statistical significance of the age coefficient). Current employment is positive in all the median regressions, and significantly related to net worth; however, it was not significant in any of the OLS regressions and in the cases of liquid and financial assets is negative. As expected, the marriage indicator is positively related to asset accumulation in all cases, and statistically significant in the median regressions for tangible assets and net worth.

The models follow the literation and specify demographic and socio-economic characteristics as directionally related to asset accumulation. However, there is the possibility that asset or debt accumulation itself may influence certain demographic and socio-economic characteristics as well (see Hamilton et al. 2015 for a discussion regarding the simultaneity wealth and education and employment, for instance).

11. All members of native population groups, born in the U.S.A. are American citizens and enjoy the same rights and opportunities to participate in local, state and federal political processes as any other citizen. Official enrolment as a member of one of the 566 federally recognized tribes is akin to dual citizenship. Tribal members participate in political processes and enjoy full benefits as determined by the respective tribal government.

12. Noteworthy is a comparison of the size of the college plus coefficient for the native alone results in Appendix Table A2 in comparison to the results inclusive of all ethnic groups in Appendix Table A2. The much larger effect size in Appendix Table A2 suggests that a college degree seems to be more relevant in the acquisition of assets for natives specifically in the Tulsa metropolitan area.

13. We compiled a detailed listing of Cherokee, Muscogee and Choctaw tribal government programmes and services as found on tribal websites. We found that the Cherokee tribal government offers 94 different programmes and services, the Muscogee tribal government offers 83 different programmes and services while the Muscogee tribal government offers 114 different programmes and services. We categorized the total amount of tribal government programmes into four categories: Community Development & Individual Asset Building, Social Services, Education and Training and Tribal Cultural Enrichment. A simple count of the number of programmes does indicate differences in tribal allocations as the Cherokee government tends to have more programmes directed towards Community Development and Individual Asset building than the other two tribes. The Muscogee and Choctaw tribal governments appear to offer more programmes in the Education and Training Category.

14. The coefficients for the household characteristics of the various regressions closely resemble those presented in Appendix Table A2, so for space consideration are not included in the appendix section, but are available upon request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ford Foundation [1100-0917].