National statistics is a powerful tool for understanding the status of a nation and its subgroups—so much so that the US Constitution requires a full decennial census be taken and reported to Congress. The resulting statistics ostensibly allow the state, as well as researchers, reporters, and the general public, to gain a deeper understanding of its composition and variations in social outcomes, including health, education, and socioeconomic status (Kertzer & Arel, 2001; Kukutai et al., 2015). These data determine a range of crucial resource allocations and policy priorities, and they become socially significant as they are layered into “common sense” about populations and subpopulations. Put differently, who gets counted and how they are counted influences cultural narratives about the traits of racial and ethnic groups and subgroups in the United States (Kukutai & Thompson, 2015).

National-level surveys in the United States largely collapse American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) Peoples into a single category. Studies using these data, in turn, tend to focus only on those respondents indicating a single-race AIAN identity. Thus, researchers have reported, for example, that national-level statistics show that AIAN Peoples tend to have lower socioeconomic status relative to non-Hispanic Whites (Huyser et al., 2010). Specifically, AIAN persons tend to have lower levels of education