Why This is Important
The top four tribal affiliations reported by Durham County residents in 2019 were Cherokee, Chippewa, Navajo and Sioux in 2019. Durham County sits on land that historically belonged to the Eno, Tuscarora and Occcaneechi peoples, among others. Today, the Occaneechi band of the Saponi nation is active and working to buy back parts of their ancestral lands in Alamance County.
While Durham as a city was founded long after the waves of forced displacement that tore native people across NC from their land, the entire system of land ownership in the city and county still rests on that foundation of violence and theft.
About the Data
These data come from the U.S. Decennial Census and the American Community Survey. The Census Bureau categorizes respondents' race into one of 6 racial categories, one of which is "American Indian and Alaska Native," or AIAN. The census labels people's race as AIAN when they meet the definition of "a person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America) and who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment."
In the Compass, we display the "AIAN alone or in combination with one or more other races" census count, which includes a significant number of people who reported their race as white and AIAN (1,376 in 2019) and Black and AIAN (829 in 2019), alongside folks who were identified only as AIAN (375 in 2019).
Census boundaries changed in 2020. Data from 2020 are weighted to maintain the boundaries from 2010 using methodology and crosswalks from IPUMS NHGIS.
Source: U.S. Decennial Census, 2010; Source: US 2010, Census 2010 tract-normalized population data; American Community Survey (ACS) for years between each decennial Census.
Additional Resources
| Resource | Learn More and Take Action |
|---|---|
| Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation | Information on efforts to preserve the heritage of the people of the Saponi nation near Durham |
| Decennial Census 2010 | The source of information about and data from the U.S. Decennial Census. |
| US2010 | The Longitudinal Tract Data Base (LTDB) provides public-use tools to create estimates within 2010 tract boundaries for any tract-level data (from the census or other sources) that are available for prior years as early as 1970. |
| American Community Survey (ACS) | A primary source of neighborhood-level data for the whole country, provided by the US Census Bureau. |
| American Community Survey Subject Definitions | Specific documentation for the definitions used by the census to categorize folks by race and ethnicity, among other subjects. |
| Native Land | Interactive map documenting some of the native homelands of Indigenous people in North America. |
Select a base geography (depending on the dataset, different geographies may be available).
Data Distribution, 2021
Indigenous Population
