UC Riverside

National surveys often overlook Native American populations because they are a difficult and costly population to sample. Even when Native Americans are included in surveys, they are often treated as a monolithic race. Indigenous scholars argue that Native American identity is generally composed of many characteristics, including tribal citizenship, connections to a tribal community and culture, and the recognition of tribes as legal entities with unique cultures and histories. This dissertation develops a theoretical framework for surveying Indigenous populations and develops an argument for operationalizing an existing theory of Indigenous identity developed by Kiowa scholar Perry G Horse. I find that controlling for ancestry and citizenship captures a diverse population of Native Americans, allowing researchers to effectively observe behavior and identity formation among all who identify having Native American ancestry.