Getting a list of zip codes in federally recognized Native American/American Indian reservations

The best I've found for this kind of thing is the LEHD LODES crosswalk file. It lists every block in the US (and Puerto Rico, I think), and for each block, for several geography types (summary levels), indicates the ID of the geography containing that block, if there is one.

The technical documentation for the files are at lehd.ces.census.gov/.../LODESTechDoc7.4.pdf
The full US file is at lehd.ces.census.gov/.../us_xwalk.csv.gz
It's about 240 MB but unzipped, it's about 5 GB. If you could get by with just selective states, you would have less data to wrangle, but of course, ZCTAs and reservations cross state lines.

Anyway, once you have one of these files, you could do this:
* select only the ZCTA (col 13) and "American Indian /Alaska Native/Native Hawaiian Area Census Code" (col 29) columns
* drop rows where column 29 has a '99999' value
* eliminate duplicates

the resulting data would show for each ZCTA and reservation which intersect. The only hitch is that there's no area data in here, so you wouldn't know how much of each geography was in each intersection.

I hope that makes sense. I've been trying to work out some ways to add in area and then generate files like what you're looking for (and other combinations) but it's been on the back burner. Given that I've been working with the files, I could probably generate what I described above pretty quickly, but not now -- i have to go catch my bus!

Hi Joe,

After the U. Missouri GeoCorr let me down, I thought that I'd finally found what I was looking for here. Unfortunately, in the above-linked crosswalk, every row in the necessary column 29 is coded as '99999' or is just blank. Column 31 - the American Indian Tribal Subdivision Code did include some valid cases, but it was nowhere near complete (e.g., the states of Alaska, California, Oregon, and Wyoming are not represented).

I also tried running some of the state crosswalks: no luck with Oregon or Wyoming, but Alaska did work and was a curious case of all values being a string of 4 digits and a final letter.

Any other ideas on a ZCTA X Reservation crosswalk before I go crawling to ESRI?

Thanks,

K

That is quite strange! In general, I've found the native american geographies confusing and hard to find documentation about.

I did find one Wyoming reservation, Wind River, which comes up in the X-walk. It seems to be the only reservation known to the Census Bureau in Wyoming based on my eyeballing this map censusreporter.org/.../

I also find 64 unique pairs for the ZCTA/TRIB columns in Oregon. (18 unique values for TRIB) Any chance there's an error in your data process?

Might be time to phone a Census Data Dissemination specialist -- they are super helpful folks.

There is, indeed, an error in my data process -- namely using SPSS to import the data. When I import the Oregon comma-delimited file directly into SPSS or when I use Stat/Transfer to convert it into SPSS, I get nothing but '99999' when opening it in SPSS. However, when opening the Oregon comma-delimited file in Excel, sure enough, there they are, 20 or so different tribal codes in column 29.

It would seem that there's something with SPSS only taking a sample of values per column to decide if a variable is a string or is numeric. To test this, I used Excel to recode "99999" to "9999X". When opening the recoded file in SPSS, it worked like a charm showing me the blocks with the tribal codes. Seems like an easy solution would be to insert a second row of data with numeric or string dummy values, as appropriate.

And I'm with you on the difficulty of using AI/AN geographies; the vicissitudes of 250 years of Federal American Indian policy and its wavering between assimilation and tribal self-determination has done a number on the uniformity of tribal geographic units.

I appreciate your help with this, Joe. Thank you.

There is, indeed, an error in my data process -- namely using SPSS to import the data. When I import the Oregon comma-delimited file directly into SPSS or when I use Stat/Transfer to convert it into SPSS, I get nothing but '99999' when opening it in SPSS. However, when opening the Oregon comma-delimited file in Excel, sure enough, there they are, 20 or so different tribal codes in column 29.

It would seem that there's something with SPSS only taking a sample of values per column to decide if a variable is a string or is numeric. To test this, I used Excel to recode "99999" to "9999X". When opening the recoded file in SPSS, it worked like a charm showing me the blocks with the tribal codes. Seems like an easy solution would be to insert a second row of data with numeric or string dummy values, as appropriate.

And I'm with you on the difficulty of using AI/AN geographies; the vicissitudes of 250 years of Federal American Indian policy and its wavering between assimilation and tribal self-determination has done a number on the uniformity of tribal geographic units.

I appreciate your help with this, Joe. Thank you.