The liberatory power of cultural knowledge as data
An exploration of what we might learn from being in solidarity with Indigenous Data Sovereignty, a movement to reclaim Indigenous data from colonial systems.
Happy summer! Since I last wrote, I soft-launched the People’s Data Project, an initiative spreading data rights education for the movement. I’ll be providing updates on the project through Dispatches from the Data Garden, but you can also sign up for the mailing list to be notified about upcoming events at our website.
As a social entrepreneur and founder working in grassroots contexts, I am relying on multiple small-scale funding channels to support my work. One way you can support my work is by becoming a paid subscriber on this newsletter! I hope to continue publishing 4-6 well-researched articles on the foundations of data rights per year. Starting this summer, I’m also offering data strategy consultations for anyone interested in ways to implement data rights principles. Thank you for supporting public research!
Since I started writing about data rights, I’ve been really attuned to noticing the different ways that people describe our rights to our data. Some people talk about “data privacy,” which exists in a policy and legal context and speaks to individual privacy. Others talk about “data security” which implies a technical lockdown and summons ideas of cybersecurity.
Whether it’s either of these or data protection or data governance, all of these popular terms occupy a space where data rights should be. None of them draw attention to the fundamental function of data, or acknowledge its essential role in our lives, which is the role that data plays in connecting us and helping us build understanding with one another.
Data is like water that runs through us and connects us. It’s a medium for communication that at its most basic function helps us communicate our perspectives and build a shared reality. Data, which carries information, knowledge, or even wisdom, exists in the same realm as stories, helping us weave together a human fabric.
I’ve come to see this reframe from data as resource to data as medium as one of the most trippy and paradigm-shifting lessons of my research. Because if we can see community data as the digital representation of our communal well of knowledge, maybe we can also see that exploitation is when corporations and systems of power try to extract the water for goals that don’t serve the community (like privatizing the water or using it to power a nuclear facility).
The more I’ve delved into these ideas, the more I’ve realized that I am far from the first person to arrive here. Indigenous scholars from around the world have been fighting to defend Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty over their cultural knowledge and data by working to define the many ways that Indigenous data is extracted toward harmful ends. It’s only within Indigenous Data Sovereignty that I’ve found expanded definitions of what data can be, and meaningful exploration of the powerful social fabric that communal data maintains.
In this installment, I’d like to share what I’ve learned so far from IDS movements with acknowledgement that Indigenous scholars are first and foremost defining these concepts and that this just an attempt at synthesis as a guest in these spaces. I welcome any additions or corrections to this analysis.
Through the framework of Indigenous Data Sovereignty, tribal communities around the world are fighting to reclaim agency over collection, storage, interpretation, or use of their data, ultimately to protect their people and sovereign lands from the destabilizing forces that threaten all of our global ecological systems. Learning about Indigenous Data Sovereignty has helped me understand the true power of data rights, and I believe that it can reorient all of us to a different way of understanding data’s role in our own communities.
The new paradigm of data protection must center land-based community knowledge.
“Indigenous peoples have always been data warriors. Our ancient traditions recorded and protected information and knowledge through art, carving, song, chants and other practices. Deliberate efforts to expunge these knowledge systems were part and parcel of colonisation, along with state-imposed practices of counting and classifying Indigenous populations. As a result, Indigenous Peoples often encounter severe data deficits when trying to access high-quality, culturally-relevant data to pursue their goals but an abundance of data that reflects and serves government interests regarding Indigenous Peoples and their lands.”
In their article in Indigenous World, Carroll, Kukutai, and Walter lay out the foundations of Indigenous Data Sovereignty as well as some organizations and principles guiding the IDS movement today. Their goal is for institutions to not only support Indigenous Data Sovereignty but to also enact it in how they handle data, especially within the private sector.
Indigenous Data Sovereignty emerges naturally as an extension of the sovereignty that Indigenous peoples have over their respective ancestral lands. As Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear writes, Indigenous tribal communities have spent generations developing systems of knowledge and passing down information about how to survive.
“Contrary to colonial narratives of savagery and unsophistication, indigenous peoples were relentlessly empirical with advanced systems of knowledge. For indigenous peoples, data were everywhere, and survival was often tied to one’s ability to gather, analyse and share this knowledge. The winter counts by the Plains Indians are an example of the meticulous and methodological nature of indigenous data. The Lakota, Blackfeet and other Plains tribes recorded winter counts on animal hides to enumerate important aspects of their world. These detailed counts included numbers of tribal citizens, allies, enemies, wild game, lodges and so on: histories and assemblages of data that were instruments of survival.”
Rodriguez-Lonebear goes on to explain that their own tribe, the Northern Cheyenne, facing pressure to develop lucrative coal and natural gas deposits on their land, cite an oral history as a data point strongly influencing the tribe’s decision never to extract these deposits. “The Cheyenne prophet Sweet Medicine, one of our most powerful figures, foretold that the Cheyenne would one day encounter a black stone beneath our lands. Sweet Medicine warned that this stone was to be left alone if the Cheyenne were to remain Cheyenne… Cheyenne oral history remains a critical source of data as we grapple with contemporary issues. It directly challenges the idea of data as products of modernity with little relevance to indigenous lived experiences or traditions.”
Indigenous cultural knowledge is passed down through generations of storytellers and culture bearers who maintain complex, highly intentional systems of managing the flow of information to younger generations. When corporations and governments use data to make the case for forced displacement or land use that harms tribal communities, they are claiming a supremacy over data that rejects these communal ways of knowing.
While these “data management” practices are unique to different tribal communities and specific to Indigenous ways of knowing, I believe we can learn from the ways different Indigenous communities treat data, especially to help us repair the global ecological instability that is affecting all of us and grows more dangerous each year. In order to protect data rights and heal our own communities, we need to be in solidarity with movements for Indigenous Data Sovereignty.
The same systems that extract Indigenous data for harmful purposes are extracting data from Black, immigrant, and trans communities to the same ends. We all need data rights.
One of the harmful ways that systems of power often use community data is to create unjust data narratives. These unjust data narratives reinforce stories about our communities that do not reflect lived experience but instead serve to justify policy decisions and systems that fail to address the root causes of the challenges that our communities face.
Palawa sociologist and IDS scholar Maggie Walter has already named this phenomenon the “5D Deficit Narrative,” in the Australian social work context. In her essay “The Voice of Indigenous Data: Beyond Markers of Disadvantage,” she describes how data collection about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people without their meaningful consent or participation has led to reproduction of multiple common deficit narratives.
The five “D’s” of the deficit narrative are disparity, deprivation, disadvantage, dysfunction, and difference. As Walter writes, these deficit narratives identify the Indigenous individual as the “problem element” and go on to inform policies that may negatively affect Indigenous families and communities by attempting to remove these “problems.”
This understanding of deficit narratives may also be a framework for understanding how our governments use data to create narratives that negatively affect Black American families and neighborhoods.
The public school system, the prison system, and the social “safety net” are all systems where Black Americans are overrepresented and highly surveilled; where data that are collected consistently reinforce deficits and lacks instead of representing the goals and narratives that Black communities might identify for themselves in order to better address the root causes of the issues that they face.
When I used to work on government-funded community development programs, I consistently saw policymakers use labels like “at-risk”, “truant”, and “recidivist” to describe people, always in the context of data points that supposedly proved these labels to be true.
Indigenous communities everywhere face the same type of pressure from colonial governments as a result of extraction of their data. At the same time, immigrants are increasingly under the microscope of the current administration which is mining any and all data to perpetuate unjust narratives about criminal affiliation and delinquency. And our state government here in Texas is scouring driver’s license databases to identify and target trans Texans. We are stronger when we recognize the commonalities between these experiences and situate ourselves in the landscape of data extraction.
In addition to supporting Indigenous scholars, we can learn about the CARE principles and best practices to enact them.
Published in 2016, “Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Towards an Agenda” gathered Indigenous voices to illustrate the history and present-day challenges of Indigenous knowledge collection to propose new paths forward. Since then, the Global Indigenous Data Alliance (GIDA) has developed a series of principles that “seek to shift data relationships from regulated consultation to value-based dialogue that forefronts Indigenous cultures and knowledge systems within data ecosystems.”
Convened by Maggie Walter and Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear, GIDA was formed at a workshop bringing together participants from seven nation states including representation from the Maiam nayri Wingara Collective (Australia); Te Mana Raraunga Maori Data Sovereignty Network (Aotearoa New Zealand); and the United States Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network. GIDA’s CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance are: Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics. You can read more about these on GIDA’s website.
Beyond these global definitions, it’s important to note that different tribal communities might have different practices related to data and knowledge management. This position paper on Indigenous AI developed through a series of workshops in 2019 “illustrates how different visions of how AI might be built according to values articulated in Anishaabe, Coquille, Kanaka Maoli/Blackfoot, and Euskadun epistemologies” and suggests prototypes that might put these unique value systems into practice.
These cultural articulations of value systems applied to data management and knowledge exchange are I think the most radical and liberatory frameworks that exist for taking back control of our data from the people operating powerful systems that are harming the world.
And while my work does center “data rights,” this research has made me feel like I need to double down on the difference between data rights and data sovereignty, because I believe that true data sovereignty belongs to Indigenous peoples.
So how can we play a role? That’s what I hope we’ll figure out together. We can practice protecting our own data rights so that we can be in solidarity with Indigenous communities when they demand theirs. We can explore value systems within our own communities, or ways that our own ancestors may have passed down land-based cultural knowledge that we need to protect. We can start to build community data systems that carry the stories, omens, and lessons that will help us survive and build a new future.
LINKED THINKING
“Indigenous Peoples Breathing Data Back” - Talk by Dr. Stephanie Russo Carroll for TEDxUArizona on ways to bring “databack” and the power of IDS
“Indigenous led innovation: Aligning Technology with Community Values” - Episode of the Info Matters podcast with Jeff Ward, CEO of Animikii, an Indigenous-owned technology company
Traditional Knowledge labels - A product of Local Contexts, an initiative addressing intellectual property issues of Indigenous communities
I want to extend a special thank you to researchers and public intellectuals who publish their work for free with open access. My work would be impossible without you :)