In a historic first for two government entities, the U.S. Census Bureau and the Osage Nation signed a memorandum of understanding to share information as an opportunity to improve the quality of their data in a nation-to-nation agreement.
Officials from the Census Bureau joined Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear for a ceremonial signing of the MOU at the Pawhuska Osage Casino & Hotel on Sept. 24. The MOU signing comes nearly three months after the ON Executive Branch released the inaugural Osage census report containing demographical data from responses submitted by constituents who participated in the census survey last year.
A second Osage census report with more statistical data from the 2023 survey – administered both online and in paper form upon request – is forthcoming at a later date. The federal officials applauded the Nation’s initial tribal census efforts at the MOU event, which included ON Secretary of Administration Susan Bayro, who worked on the census while she was a strategic planning analyst at the time.
Charles Tippeconnic, a U.S. Census tribal relations specialist, said “a little over a year ago, we became aware that Susan was heavily involved in completing a tribal census for the Osage Nation and that piqued my interest because that’s what we do as a federal agency – we do surveys, we collect data, information to support communities and in my job: tribal communities … I commend (Bayro) for that because it’s quite a monumental task to do a survey like that.”
Leading to the MOU development, Tippeconnic said “We asked if Osage Nation would be interested in a pilot project with the Census Bureau to share some of that information that you collected last year in your tribal census. And so, under the leadership of Chief Standing Bear, you have agreed.”
Standing Bear applauded the census administering efforts by the Strategic Planning Office, where Bayro worked with Director Candy Thomas and other staff, noting about 3,900 Osage responses were reflected in the first census out of the most recent Osage total enrollment count, which is nearly 25,000.
“This data we have, as you all know, supplements our strategic plan and our strategic plan is something we send out to our people and ask for their views on what we’re doing,” Standing Bear said. “But the way the census information comes in is much more specific, it covers areas we do not cover in strategic planning, and it will augment the plan, it is something we can take to our legislature (Congress) in supporting documents and it leads to our funding and our relationships such as this MOU.”
Census Bureau Director Robert Santos joined Osage officials for the occasion, noting “we come in the spirit of cooperation, we come in the spirit of building and nurturing relationships and trust, and we come here today to better serve the Osage Nation. You believe in our public service mission and that is why we are here.”
“With this (MOU), we will be able to better serve the Osage Nation by improving the quality of the data that we can provide to Osage people,” Santos said. “We very much appreciate being able to access the Osage Nation’s aggregated population counts on such topics as military service, education, household type, employment. Those are very valuable for us to be able to improve, it’s our statistics. We’re always striving to improve our programs to better represent and serve you, as well as all of our country’s diverse communities.”
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the agreement is effective for five years and does not include individual or household level data. It complements ongoing efforts related to outreach and partnership to encourage active participation in current and future Census Bureau surveys.
“We’ll, of course, continue to protect the confidentiality of tribal members’ responses as we are required to do under Title 13,” Santos continued. “This agreement marks an important milestone – a nation-to-nation agreement designed to better serve tribes and the people of Indian Country. The resulting improved statistical data will further enable the Osage Nation in its public health planning, in economic development, in community needs assessments and any other important purposes. We believe the achievements of this day will show the way that we can better serve the people of Indian Country.”
Bayro said: “When I started this project, you never know exactly how far it’s going to take you, where it’s going to take you, people have asked me ‘Susan, did you foresee this when you started?’ Absolutely not, we were happy to get it done and get it out there to have a tool and resource we can use to help further our departments, our Executive Branch and our legislation to make decisions, understanding the policy in where we’re at.”
“Collaboration has been the theme throughout this entire project, once we knew we were going to start on the census, I called (Tippeconnic), saying ‘this is what we’re doing, just giving you a heads up.’ Then he took it to a tier I never even thought was possible,” Bayro said of the MOU. “This is just the beginning for us, there’s a lot more places we can go with this, places to take it that we haven’t even thought of.”
The 2023 Osage Census took place as a result of the ON Congress passing bill ONCA 22-30 (sponsored by Congresswoman Alice Goodfox), which put into Osage law the mandate for a tribal census to be conducted every five years. With the bill’s passage, the census project was assigned to Bayro’s former department for development and administering.
Bayro said she then reached out to the Nation’s government branches and 50-plus departments “and I made sure every single one of them provided me a statement” to formulate questions. “From there, we had over 160 questions for the census, and we had to dwindle it down because nobody was going to take it! And so, we brought it down to the 86 (questions) that we used for the form to be sent out,” she said.
As the census development took place, Bayro notified Tippeconnic of the progress because “from the very beginning, he could see that we were going to get farther ahead than most tribal nations, definitely in Oklahoma, and throughout the United States because it’s a monumental task trying to just collect the data, pick the categories and all of that, it’s very time consuming.”
As a result of the census project, discussions about an MOU started with the Census Bureau, including the Nation’s control of what data to submit for the federal census officials. “At the very beginning, I let them know ‘we’re going to tell you guys what data we’re sharing’ so we have more control of our sovereign data that we’re dictating and telling our story the way we want to, and they were fully on board with that,” Bayro said.
Osage census information shared as part of the MOU includes demographic data, but “nothing specific to tribal members,” Bayro said. “The language and culture questions we asked, the data we collected from that, we’re not sharing with them because they don’t really need it. So, it’s basically cumulative data for housing information, income levels, education levels.”
As for the next steps regarding the Osage census, Bayro said a Phase 2 report is in the works with “a lot more detailed information based off zip codes that we’re going to be comparing by state and by county.” Bayro said she didn’t have a completion date for the second report, noting that formatting the report is a challenging process.
To read the inaugural Osage census results, visit https://www.osagenation-nsn.gov/media/1153/download?attachment
