We developed a dataset of Indigenous land dispossession and forced migration that compares historical tribal lands to present-day tribal lands. Our data collection effort was motivated by the fact that there existed no aggregated dataset pairing the historical and present-day locations of Indigenous nations in North America. We knew of many different piecemeal sources and individual nations’ histories that provided a small window, but none comprehensive enough for a reliable, large-scale aggregate analysis to make broad statistical comparisons. Such a data collection effort is not a straightforward scientific exercise because the mapping of these locations raises significant analytical difficulties and ethical concerns.

The settler colonial practice of delimiting strict westernized boundaries on Indigenous nations has had devastating consequences on Indigenous traditions, practices, and cultural continuity. Yet at the same time, it is because of this violent legacy that today it remains critical to improve our scientific understanding of the impacts of land dispossession and forced migration, which, despite serious obstacles and limitations, requires assembling the myriad historical locations in which tribes lived, moved through, and at times settled. And not just for posterity’s sake, but to begin to establish a new dataset to broaden knowledge about the path-dependencies that continue to shape the day-to-day lived experiences of Indigenous peoples, and the factors that fostered contemporary inequities and future risks.

Our primary analysis of the dataset focuses on land characteristics between the historical and present day periods that are either durable over long time periods or not heavily impacted by the human land use. We also include proximity to U.S. federal lands because it is mutable across time, allowing us to test hypotheses concerning the potential social and political consequences of present-day tribal lands’ proximity to these federally managed lands. We divide the characteristics into four categories: climate, mineral resource access, agricultural viability, and federally-managed lands. The set of climate characteristics consist of: number of extreme temperature days, drought, precipitation, and a measure of wildfire hazard potential. The set of agricultural viability characteristics include: elevation, ruggedness, and very tentatively, soil organic carbon. Our main mineral resource access variable is subsurface oil and gas basins. We supplement this with politically mutable variables consisting of oil production and gas production. Finally, we assess the proximity of historical and present-day land to federal-controlled lands.