Overview of Native American Initiatives

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) supports several projects that focus on cancer among American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) populations. The NCI’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program serves as a foundation for understanding and addressing the burden of cancer in Native communities.

A comprehensive summary of cancer among AIAN people was published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention in 2019 (Melkonian and colleagues, 2019). This manuscript was based on combined data from the NCI’s SEER Program and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Program of Cancer Registries (NPCR). This report documented considerable regional variation in cancer incidence among AIAN populations. For example, relatively high rates of lung cancer were observed in the Northern and Southern Plains, while low rates occurred in American Indians of the Southwestern United States. Compared to non-Hispanic whites, Native communities in all regions had relatively high rates of liver, kidney, and gallbladder cancers.

The NCI provided pilot funding to investigators from the University of New Mexico and the Native American Programs at the Mayo Clinic to establish the AIAN Cancer Data WebsiteExternal Website Policy. This relatively new resource is dedicated to displaying and providing cancer surveillance data for AIAN populations by geographic region of the country.

The New Mexico Tumor Registry (NMTR), a founding participant in the SEER Program, plays a significant role in cancer surveillance for AIAN populations in the United States. NMTR’s area of coverage includes the entire state of New Mexico and, in collaboration with the Arizona Cancer Registry (ACR), American Indian populations in Arizona. The combined NMTR/ACR records represent one of the largest cancer surveillance datasets for American Indians.

The NMTR has worked with several Native communities in the Southwestern United States to generate tribe-specific cancer reports that meet the specific needs of those communities. For example, NMTR worked closely with the Navajo Nation Tribal Epidemiology Center to generate Cancer Among the Navajo, 2005-2013 (PDF), a comprehensive report of cancer incidence, mortality and staging in one of the nation’s largest tribes.

The NMTR also manages subcontracts for both the Alaska Native Tumor Registry (ANTR) and the Cherokee Nation Cancer Registry (CNCR) and historically assisted with the operation of both registries. Activities of the ANTR and CNCR are summarized elsewhere on this website.

A supplemental monograph was published to provide a comprehensive description of the cancer burden in the American Indian/Alaska Native population in the United States using a combination of cancer incidence data from CDC's NPCR and NCI's SEER Program, along with record linkages and geographic factors. For more information, visit An Update on Cancer in American Indians and Alaska Natives, 1999-2004 on the SEER website. Although this supplement was compiled a number of years ago, many of the points and issues it covers remain relevant for AIAN people.

NCI’s Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences (DCCPS) supports several cancer-related projects that focus on AIAN populations through the Intervention Research to Improve Native American Health (IRINAH) Program. Information about specific IRINAH projects is available on the IRINAH funded projects page. A project entitled, “Dissemination of a Colorectal Cancer Screening Program Across American Indian Communities in the Southern Plains and Southwest United States” is supported by the NCI with Cancer Moonshot℠ funding.

Last Updated: 12 Mar, 2024