New data showcase the breadth of tribally owned businesses

Tribes are sovereign governments, and they are also economic actors. As part of its ongoing efforts to address data gaps affecting economic opportunity in Indian Country, the Center for Indian Country Development (CICD) has moved previous pilot data-compilation work—in federal contracting, for example—into a new phase. The Native Entity Enterprises Dataset (NEED) is an ambitious effort that aims to compile a comprehensive list of businesses owned by Native entities—that is, tribes, Alaska Native Corporations (ANCs), and Native Hawaiian Organizations (NHOs). Here we share first findings from a subset of the NEED focused on federally recognized tribes. This broad, novel dataset provides insights into tribally owned businesses’ core characteristics, in support of CICD’s mission to advance the economic self-determination and prosperity of Native nations and Indigenous communities through actionable data and research. We present aggregated and tribally anonymized results only, in keeping with our Principles for Research and Data Use.

Building a broader dataset

An established and growing body of research sheds light on how businesses owned by Native entities are a key means of economic development for Native communities. Native entity-owned businesses bolster local economies. Some are major local employers, creating job opportunities for tribal citizens and non-citizens. And Native entities’ business activities in sectors including gaming and federal contracting have positive spillover impacts for non-Native economies.

Further, Native entity-owned businesses play a strong role in funding public services and infrastructure. State and local governments in the United States derive fully half of their revenue from taxes,¹ and these dollars fund everyday public goods like education, workforce development, and police and fire protection. In contrast, Native political entities such as tribal governments generally lack access to typical taxation tools, relying in part on businesses as a revenue stream instead. This means that Native entity-owned firms function not only as market actors but as a tool of self-governance. Their activities and outcomes directly affect the resources available to Native political entities and the communities to which they provide services.

With their interconnected goals of financial success and community benefit—and their ownership by political entities—Native entity-owned firms are a unique class of enterprises. But a comprehensive picture of their characteristics has been elusive. Data about them are scattered, incomplete, or focused solely on gaming. For this understudied part of the U.S. economy, basic questions about overall employment impacts and industry diversification are unanswered—leaving governments, investors, and researchers alike with little beyond educated guesses.

The current version of the NEED is a snapshot in time—spanning mid-2021 through mid-2023—of businesses directly owned by the governments of federally recognized tribes. While this version does not include businesses owned by other Native entities such as ANCs, NHOs, and state-recognized tribes,² it is, to our knowledge, the most comprehensive dataset of tribally owned enterprises yet compiled. We identified firms to include in the dataset through several means, starting with combining lists of businesses from the public websites of tribes themselves and of key Native organizations. Business information such as sector, location, and employment count estimates come from the National Establishment Time Series (NETS), a subscription source with data from January 1990 through January 2022.

Through our compilation and cross-referencing processes to date (see the appendix below for more on how we built the dataset), we’ve identified 5,559 unique establishments³ owned by 344 federally recognized tribes.⁴ While this is almost certainly an undercount, we find that members of this group of tribally owned businesses are found across the United States in all major industries. Some are new, while others have been in existence for decades.

A first picture of tribally owned businesses

Business ownership is virtually universal among tribal governments in the lower 48 states, with nearly all of these tribes operating firms observable in the dataset. Of the 359 federally recognized tribal entities in the contiguous United States, fewer than 5 percent do not appear in the NEED cohort.⁵ The 344 distinct tribes represented in the NEED dataset vary widely in the number of observable businesses they each own, ranging from one to 184. The median count of businesses these 344 tribes own is nine. A quarter of the 344 tribes own four or fewer businesses, and a quarter own 20 or more. Tribes are not only sovereign governments; they are major economic players.

Tribal enterprises can be found nationwide. They contribute to local and regional economies throughout the country in rural, urban, reservation, and non-reservation geographies. In fact, 15 states have 100 or more tribally owned businesses, and five states—Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Washington—each have 300 or more. (See Figure 1.)

Tribal business holdings span all major sectors. (See Figure 2.) The Leisure and Hospitality industry—which includes casinos, hotels, and restaurants—accounts for 1,459 establishments, or more than one in four (26.2 percent) of the businesses in the dataset. This is consistent with the major role that gaming has come to play in many tribes’ economic development strategies, particularly in geographic areas in which a robust business ecosystem does not yet exist.

But in fact, tribes own nearly three times as many businesses outside the Leisure and Hospitality sector as within it, disproving assumptions that tribal businesses are solely concentrated in gaming. Beyond Leisure and Hospitality, the top industries by establishment count in the NEED cohort are Education and Health Services (1,131 establishments); Professional and Business Services (880 establishments); and Trade, Transportation, and Utilities (769 establishments).

Many businesses in the NEED are long-standing. About 14 percent of the overall cohort (766 establishments) were active before 1990, and another 19 percent (1,058 establishments) were first active between 1990 and 1999. (See Figure 3.) The mix of business ages varies by sector, with firms in the Leisure and Hospitality and the Professional and Business Services sectors having been established more recently than businesses in, for example, Education and Health Services. This pattern tracks with research documenting Native entity-owned firms’ recent growth in federal contracting as well as with trends in publicly reported gaming revenues. Among businesses in the NEED that were first active in the most recent five-year NETS period (2017–2021), the largest share is in Professional and Business Services—evidence of growing diversification. Diversification may enhance the resilience of tribal economies, in part by reducing their exposure to negative sector-specific shocks.

NEED firms come in a range of sizes, in a mix that differs from a comparison cohort of all U.S. businesses. (For more information on the comparison cohort, see the appendix below.) The vast majority of firms in both groups are small businesses, or firms with 500 employees or fewer.⁶ Using 2021 employee counts, the small business definition applies to 97.1 percent of NEED firms and 99.9 percent of all firms. But while more than four in five (82.7 percent) of the comparison businesses are very small—having fewer than five employees—among NEED businesses, it’s about two in five (39.3 percent). Some NEED businesses are sizable employers: 46 firms had employee counts over 1,000. Median employee counts among NEED businesses and comparison businesses are seven and two, respectively.⁷

The need for data to inform continued dialogue

Analysis of tribally owned businesses’ characteristics provides a richer and better-informed understanding of the U.S. economy. Tribes’ enterprise activities span decades, states, and industries, and they account for tens of billions of dollars in revenue and at least hundreds of thousands of jobs each year.

The Native Entity Enterprise Dataset is part of ongoing efforts by CICD and others to provide relevant, accessible data and research to inform Indian Country economic dialogues—in ways that are rooted in respectful stewardship. After years of careful investment in its compilation, CICD researchers look forward to sharing future work with this singular data resource.

The authors thank Gilbert Agnes, Isabella Agnes, Nitya Dandu, Cassandra Hamilton, Ben Harrington, Brandon Laliberte, Ian O’Dowd, Joshua Sadler, Amani Samuels, Sara Schuster, Vod Vilfort, Laurel Wheeler, and William Zeng for their contributions to the creation of the NEED.

Appendix: About the data

The current version (2025Q1) of the NEED, which focuses on federally recognized tribes, reflects a milestone in a multiyear effort to compile a comprehensive research dataset of businesses owned by Native entities. Primary data collection began in May 2021 and ended for this version in August 2023, with later adjustments based on data validation and cross-checks. The result is a snapshot list of 5,559 businesses owned by 344 federally recognized Native entities.

Where constituencies of a tribe (for example, bands) operate independently, we followed the conventions of the tribes themselves and of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Tribal Leaders Directory and conceptualized them as distinct entities for the purposes of the NEED. This supports the accuracy of the dataset as a reflection of various tribes’ distinctive political, legal, and economic structures.

CICD has consulted many different data sources to build the NEED. The general operation was to identify businesses and substantiate their ownership links to one or more Native entities. No single source provided this information comprehensively, so we relied on a combination and documented the source(s) of information for each business-entity pair.

To begin, we systematically reviewed the websites of Native entities and of key Native organizations, as both often maintain business directories. Next, we searched Native entities’ publicly available annual reports and the websites of the secretaries of state or departments of commerce of individual states. The resulting businesses’ websites often provided information about any subsidiaries. We included both the original businesses and the subsidiaries in the NEED. Additionally, we cross-referenced with the National Indian Gaming Commission’s public listing of gaming locations. Native entity-owned businesses directly identified through these means were considered definitively Native entity-owned without further vetting.

Businesses identified through more general sources required deeper investigation before we included them in the dataset as Native entity-owned. Public governmental data sources including the System for Awards Management and the U.S. Small Business Administration Dynamic Small Business Search provided information about self-certified Native entity-owned businesses that have registered to provide goods or services to the federal government. Specialty private data vendors and aggregators were sources for potential Native entity-owned businesses in specific sectors. We found additional businesses by using an Internet search engine with terms such as “[Native entity name] enterprises,” “[Native entity name] businesses,” or “wholly owned by [Native entity].” For additional supporting evidence of Native entity ownership, we reviewed Internet sources such as news outlets and businesses’ websites for announcements of new or acquired Native entity businesses. In cases in which relevant websites were no longer operational, we relied on an Internet archive service.

After substantiating a business as Native entity-owned, CICD collected its DUNS (Data Universal Numbering System) number: a unique, widely used identifier enabling linkage to its business information in NETS (the National Establishment Time Series), a subscription source with data from January 1990 through January 2022. We used corporate hierarchy information available through NETS to identify additional parent and subsidiary businesses and link them to Native entities. Finally, with the aim of excluding tribal government agencies such as police and fire departments, which we would expect to behave in an economic sense in ways that differ markedly from businesses, we dropped establishments coded in NETS as “Public Administration”—that is, having North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes starting with 92. Before doing so, we used key search terms to identify a small number of 92-coded establishments that seemed to have been obviously misclassified, which we manually adjusted to an appropriate NAICS code. We further grouped establishments using U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics supersectors. To compare NEED businesses with all businesses, we assembled a comparison group of all non-92-coded NETS establishments active (that is, NAICS-coded) in 2021 or 2022. This comparison group consists of 38,278,137 businesses.

CICD has reached a significant milestone in compiling a universe of Native entity-owned businesses. We are confident that there is much to learn from the NEED, and that insights from this work help enhance understanding of a long-standing yet undercharacterized part of the U.S. economy. However, this version of the dataset has limitations. Most notable is its focus on businesses directly owned by federally recognized tribes. This focus excludes businesses owned by ANCs (Alaska Native Corporations), NHOs (Native Hawaiian Organizations), and state-recognized tribes. While some tribes in Alaska do directly own businesses that appear in the dataset, the primary sources of business revenue for Alaska Native communities are the activities of ANCs. ANCs are distinctive corporate entities that can be made up of dozens of subsidiaries. ANCs’ breadth and structural complexity put them out of scope for the time-intensive manual compilation required for this version of the NEED. Separately, NHOs serve as the unique, not-for-profit corporate-political entities for the Native Hawaiian community—but as of this writing, we’ve been unable to identify a definitive, publicly available list inclusive of all NHOs doing business. Finally, American Indian communities that have a political relationship with a state government instead of the federal government, for reasons including the Termination Era of the 1950s and 1960s, do own businesses for revenue-generating purposes like other tribes do, but they experience economic forces differently. The scoping of this version of the NEED to federally recognized tribes is not reflective of sovereignty or of acknowledged trust responsibilities beyond these communities.

Further, this dataset is a snapshot in time. It is unlikely that we have succeeded in identifying every Native entity-owned business that currently exists or has ever existed. Tribes engaged in commerce for centuries or millennia predating the Internet-based sources we rely on. Some businesses have likely been created, bought, sold, merged, and dissolved without being recorded accurately (or perhaps at all) in our sources. While requesting a DUNS number can facilitate access to credit and was formerly required for any business seeking to serve as a vendor for the federal government, a business can exist without one. These businesses without DUNS numbers are unobservable for the NEED. The exclusion of Public Administration-classified establishments likely removes some revenue-generating activities tribal governments perform, such as public services provided for a nearby non-tribal municipality on a contract basis. Further, we erred on the side of omitting a business when, after consulting all sources, there was uncertainty about its linkage to a Native entity, and these omissions likely further drove an undercount. Though businesses that are wholly or majority-owned are more likely to be detected through our search methods than those that are not, a Native entity’s ownership percentage of a business would be known only to that entity, which means that we are unable to comment on ownership stakes of NEED businesses. We also have not attempted to indicate the hierarchy of companies within the NEED, based on observations that these relationships change frequently and information about them would be fully reliable only when provided by Native entities themselves.

CICD actively works to address data gaps affecting economic opportunity in Indian Country and generally views data as a public good. The NEED was assembled in large majority from public information, with the remainder from sources that can be freely purchased. However, Native entities vary greatly in their preferences about public transparency, particularly regarding business activities, and CICD does not currently plan to release the raw NEED as a public data resource.

Endnotes

1 Authors’ calculations using U.S. Census Bureau 2022 State and Local Government Finance U.S. Summary and State Estimates Tables.

2 For a discussion of why this analysis focuses on federally recognized tribes in the lower 48 states instead of all Native entities, see the appendix.

3 NETS’ unit of observation is an establishment: a specific business operating at a particular address and having a unique identifier called a Data Universal Numbering System number. Establishments may or may not be part of a larger parent company, which is indicated in NETS. Throughout, we use “business,” “enterprise,” “establishment,” and “firm” interchangeably.

4 “Tribes” in this analysis refers to independent political entities that in some cases may be constituent bands of a federally recognized tribe that operate businesses independently. These entities are listed in the Bureau of Indian Affairs Tribal Leaders Directory, which is based on the “Indian Entities Recognized by and Eligible To Receive Services From the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs” notice published periodically in the Federal Register. See the appendix for further detail.

5 Notably, because this version of the NEED does not include ANCs and their many subsidiaries, very few of the well over 200 Alaska Native entities are represented. For further discussion, see the appendix.

6 We follow the U.S. Small Business Administration convention of 500 employees as the dividing line between small and large businesses.

7 We note that these differences may be an artifact of data availability or of any one of the three estimation methodologies NETS uses, the accuracy of which cannot be well-assessed using publicly available sources of information. Only about a third (30.4 percent) of employee count information came from directly reported data.