Native American Tribes Regex Table • regextable

Introduction

This vignette demonstrates how to use the regextable package to extract references to Native American tribes from text. It showcases the core extract() workflow using a lookup table of tribe names and name variants.

Install and load the package:

library(regextable)
library(kableExtra)
library(googledrive)

Regex Table of Native American Tribes

The following table contains tribe names and regex patterns used for matching. Each row represents a tribe and includes possible spelling variations or alternate names used in text.

This lookup table includes the following columns:

Name
Strings
Source
Website
Notes
Type
Emphasis

googledrive::drive_deauth()

googledrive::drive_download(
  googledrive::as_id("1_946hi1zXeRvlGWIztrZDKJEcPM2jUY0"),
  path = "tribes_regex.csv",
  overwrite = TRUE
)

tribes_regex <- read.csv("tribes_regex.csv", stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
kable(head(tribes_regex))

Name	Strings	Source	Website	Type	Emphasis
Ahahui o Hawaii (at William S. Richardson School of Law)	Ahahui o Hawaii	Comments for Hawaii Rulemaking	http://www2.hawaii.edu/~ahahui/about-ahahui-o-hawaii.htm	Center within University	Law
American Indian Business Association (University of New Mexico)	American Indian Business Association	https://www.ncai.org/tribal-directory/tribal-organizations	https://aiba.unm.edu/?fbclid=IwAR3d-ys6QaMLfpf_HzVWHUuvDA1FGswcUX9Oh8ZiAizYwn_eNSusQsoOwOY	Center within University	Business
American Indian Policy Institute (Arizona State University)	American Indian Policy Institute	https://nativeamericatoday.com/political-organizations-and-advocacy-groups/	https://aipi.asu.edu/	Center within University	Governance/Advocacy
Center for Indian Law and Policy (Seattle University)	center for indian law and policy	Unmatched Commenters List	https://law.seattleu.edu/centers-and-institutes/center-for-indian-law-and-policy/	Center within University	Law
Center for Indigenous Research, Science, and Technology (Kansas University)	Center for Indigenous Research	Googling other organization	https://ipsr.ku.edu/cfirst/	Center within University	Research
Center for Native Peoples and the Environment (State University of New York)	Center for Native Peoples and the Environment	https://biamaps.doi.gov/resourceguide/tribes/index.html	https://www.esf.edu/nativepeoples/index.php	Center within University	Environment/Resources

Gathering Sample Data

To demonstrate extraction, this vignette collects tribe names from the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) Tribal Directory. The directory provides publicly available information about federally recognized tribes. The scraping example uses the rvest, dplyr, purrr, tibble, and stringr packages for HTML parsing and iteration. The code is included for reference only and is not evaluated in this vignette.

The following code can be run to scrape the live directory directly from the website:

max_page <- read_html("https://www.ncai.org/tribal-directory") %>%
  html_elements(".Pagination_numberButton__vLhpm") %>%
  html_text() %>%
  as.numeric() %>%
  max(na.rm = TRUE)

all_pages <- paste0("https://www.ncai.org/tribal-directory/page/", 1:max_page)

tribes_df <- map_df(all_pages, function(url) {
  message("Scraping: ", url)
  html <- read_html(url)
  cards <- html %>% html_elements("article.TribeCard_tribeCard__UJcdx")

  map_df(cards, function(card) {
    tibble(
      Region = card %>% html_element(".TribeCard_regionLabel___OVFL")
        %>% html_text(trim = TRUE)
        %>% str_remove(" Region"),
      Tribe = card %>% html_element("h2") %>% html_text(trim = TRUE),
      Recognition = card %>% html_element(".TribeCard_federal__bQB0g")
        %>% html_text(trim = TRUE),
      District = card %>% html_element(".TribeCard_generic__MLwRU")
        %>% html_text(trim = TRUE)
        %>% str_remove("Congressional District ")
    )
  })
})

Live web scraping may take a long time to complete and is sensitive to changes in website structure. For reproducibility and convenience, a pre-scraped version of the dataset is available for download at:

Tribes data frame

For this example, a smaller sample of the full dataset is used:

googledrive::drive_download(
  googledrive::as_id("1y4PwIYBdXoW6RmlGUeA9Qk3Josp0P0dl"),
  path = "tribes_df.csv",
  overwrite = TRUE
)

tribes_df <- read.csv("tribes_df.csv", stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
kable(head(tribes_df))

Region	Tribe	Recognition	District
Southern Plains	Absentee-Shawnee Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma	Federally Recognized	OK-05
Alaska	Agdaagux Tribe of King Cove	Federally Recognized	AK-01
Pacific	Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians	Federally Recognized	CA-45
Western	Ak-Chin Indian Community	Federally Recognized	AZ-07
Alaska	Akiachak Native Community (IRA)	Federally Recognized	AK-01
Alaska	Akiak Native Community (IRA)	Federally Recognized	AK-01

Extracting Tribe Names from Directory

This example demonstrates how to use regextable::extract() to parse and standardize the Native American tribe names found within the scraped Tribal Directory data (tribes_df).

The extract() function searches the Tribe column using the regex patterns located in the Strings column of tribes_regex. When a match is found, the function returns the original tribe name along with metadata from the regex table, such as the source reference.

tribe_directory_df <- extract(
  data = tribes_df,
  regex_table = tribes_regex,
  col_name = "Tribe",
  pattern_col = "Strings",
  data_return_cols = "Tribe",
  regex_return_cols = "Source"
)

kable(head(tribe_directory_df))

row_id	Tribe	Source	pattern	match
1	Absentee-Shawnee Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma	Federal Register (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/01/12/2023-00504/indian-entities-recognized-by-and-eligible-to-receive-services-from-the-united-states-bureau-of)	Shawnee Tribe	Shawnee Tribe
1	Absentee-Shawnee Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma	https://www.werelate.org/wiki/Cherokee_Heritage_Project	Nee Tribe \| Nuluti Equani Ehi \| Near River Dwellers	nee Tribe
2	Agdaagux Tribe of King Cove	Federal Register (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/01/12/2023-00504/indian-entities-recognized-by-and-eligible-to-receive-services-from-the-united-states-bureau-of)	Agdaagux	Agdaagux
3	Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians	Federal Register (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/01/12/2023-00504/indian-entities-recognized-by-and-eligible-to-receive-services-from-the-united-states-bureau-of)	Agua Caliente	Agua Caliente
5	Akiachak Native Community (IRA)	Federal Register (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/01/12/2023-00504/indian-entities-recognized-by-and-eligible-to-receive-services-from-the-united-states-bureau-of)	Akiachak	Akiachak
7	Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas	Federal Register (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/01/12/2023-00504/indian-entities-recognized-by-and-eligible-to-receive-services-from-the-united-states-bureau-of)	Coushatta Tribe	Coushatta Tribe