Data Ab Initio

I just finished reading An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, which was a great overview of the history of indigenous-US relations. Warning: the book is difficult to read at times, as it describes the long history of genocide against indigenous nations in America. That said, it’s important for non-indigenous, especially white, people to recognize this genocide and not look away from this history.

The brutal history of indigenous-US relations (as well as similar relations between other colonial powers and the indigenous people inhabiting the lands colonized) creates a long shadow that impacts many modern topics, including data management and sharing. This is especially the case when managing and sharing data pertaining to indigenous people, their cultures, and their knowledges of the world.

Historically, research about indigenous people, their cultures, and traditional knowledge has been exploitative, with a power differential between the [typically white] researchers and the indigenous people being studied. Researchers extracted knowledge from tribes with little-to-no benefit – and often harm – to the tribes themselves. With the rise of modern indigenous rights movements, tribes have been striving to correct such power imbalances and assert their sovereignty, including in the areas of research and data.

Indigenous data is too broad of a topic to fully cover in a single blog post (I’ll instead refer you to the book Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Policy, which is available Open Access), but at the very least we need to discuss “CARE”. We hear a lot about FAIR data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable), but the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance are equally important.

The CARE principles were developed by a global alliance of indigenous groups and are made up of 12 principles in four areas:

• Collective benefit,
• Authority to control,
• Responsibility,
• Ethics.

The Principles recognize:

• that indigenous ways of knowing are different than western scientific knowledge systems;
• that research must be conducted in partnership with tribes, from the very beginning of a project;
• that tribes must benefit from research, both in terms of individual development as well as using data for tribal governance;
• that tribes have the authority to control what happens to the data collected;
• and more.

I encourage you to fully read the CARE Principles to better understand all of the included guidance. In short, conducting research on and about indigenous people, their cultures, and their knowledge systems must be handled in a very different way than how research methodology is typically taught in U.S universities. This is because such research must be collaborative with tribes, consider tribal world views, and be disseminated in ways beneficial to tribes.

While the CARE Principles do not apply to all types of research, the ideas behind the CARE Principles are taking root in many institutions that support research using indigenous data. For example, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) sometimes funds research pertaining to indigenous peoples. When the NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy went into effect in 2023, the policy had a separate policy supplement on the Responsible Management and Sharing of American Indian/Alaska Native Participant Data, as the usual terms of the policy did not apply to this type of data. This is just one instance of how we are starting to treat indigenous data differently, and with a lot more care, than other types of research data.

If you in any way touch indigenous data, I encourage you to read the full CARE Principles and dig deeper into the ways that working with this type of data is different from how other types of data are managed and shared.