This map shows American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) population statistics across five geographic levels in the 50 states and DC. Click any feature to open a popup with population, race/ethnicity, income, and rurality figures. Use the search bar to jump to a specific native area, place, metro region, or county.
A person is counted as AIAN if they identify as AIAN alone, or as AIAN combined with exactly one other race. AIAN people who identify with two or more additional races are placed in the "Other" group, as are all non-AIAN people who report two or more races.
Counties, native areas, local areas, and metro regions can be viewed at five buffer sizes: 0, 5, 10, 15, and 20 miles. At 0 miles the geography uses its Census-published boundary. At wider buffers the boundary is expanded outward by that distance and all statistics are recomputed for the expanded footprint: population counts include every census block whose centroid falls inside the buffer, plus every block the Census Bureau already assigns to the geography itself. On the map, the original boundary remains drawn as a solid line; the dashed line marks the buffer edge. People near several geographies are counted toward each one independently, so summing across geographies will double-count overlap zones.
Two measures are not published at the census-block level, so geographies whose footprint is not a published Census unit — buffered regions in particular — need estimates:
Median household income — at the 0-mile boundary the map reports the median published by the Census Bureau for that geography. No published median exists for a buffered footprint, so we pool the ACS household-income brackets of every block group whose population-weighted centroid falls inside the buffer and interpolate the median from that combined distribution. The popup reports the household count behind each estimate.
Urban–rural class (RUCA) — the USDA publishes RUCA classes for census tracts only. Each block inherits its parent tract's class, so any geography built from blocks carries a full RUCA mix. Tracts show their published class; every other geography shows its modal class — the one where the largest share of its residents live — and the popup shows the full distribution.
AIAN share of local population — AIAN count divided by the geography's total population.
AIAN share of national population — AIAN count divided by the national AIAN total (excluding Puerto Rico and US territories). Uses a log scale because national share spans several orders of magnitude across geographies; shares are logged to emphasize relative differences between geographies.
Racial makeup — hue is the racial/ethnic group with the largest share in the geography. Color intensity scales with the size of that plurality: a place that is 100% one group reads at full saturation, while a place where the plurality is small reads as a pale tint of the same hue.
Median household income — published median at the 0-mile boundary, estimated median at wider buffers (see "Income and rurality estimates"). Coloring uses the 5th-to-95th percentile range of incomes pooled across every geography in the dataset.
Urban–rural type (RUCA) — published class for tracts, population-weighted modal class for every other geography (see "Income and rurality estimates").
2020 Decennial Census (race counts); 2016–2020 American Community Survey 5-year estimates (income); USDA ERS rural-urban commuting codes (2020); TIGER/Line 2020. Median household income comes from ACS sample estimates, which can be unreliable or suppressed at small geographies; suppressed values appear as "—" in the popup.
Census and ACS data were accessed through IPUMS NHGIS: Schroeder, Jonathan, David Van Riper, Steven Manson, Grace Cooper, Zachary Krause, Tracy Kugler, Tsu Zhu, and Steven Ruggles. 2026. IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System. Version 21.0. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS. https://doi.org/10.18128/D050.V21.0.
Developed by NR Brouwer and Alex Zhao for First Nations Development Institute.
Click any row to jump to that geography on the map.