Indigenous data sovereignty concerns Indigenous Peoples’ authority over data about their peoples, languages, territories and knowledge. In my work, it is a responsibility expressed through the decisions made with a community, throughout a project.
Community authority
Begin with relationships
and permission.
A recording is part of relationships among speakers, families, communities, knowledge holders and rights holders. Decisions about digitization, storage, interpretation and reuse must account for those relationships.
My role as a settler collaborator is to provide technical and research support within the authority and expectations established by Indigenous partners.
Purpose
What should this work support?
Clarify the community’s priorities, expected benefits, responsibilities and the people who may direct the project.
Permission
Who can authorize each use?
Identify the relevant speakers, knowledge holders, rights holders and community authorities, including any cultural restrictions.
Continuity
Who will care for it over time?
Plan skills, documentation, stewardship responsibilities and resources for continuing the work.
First Nations governance
The First Nations
principles of OCAP®
OCAP® refers to ownership, control, access and possession. These are specifically First Nations principles; each Nation determines how they are understood and applied to its information.
For First Nations projects, this means working through the Nation’s own governance, permissions and stewardship decisions. A vendor’s security features or a researcher’s good intentions do not themselves establish that a project meets the Nation’s requirements.
OCAP® is a registered trademark of the First Nations Information Governance Centre (FNIGC).
From principle to practice
Decisions that shape the workflow.
- Collection and purpose: identify what may be digitized and the uses the community wants to support.
- Custody and storage: agree where originals and digital files will be held, who administers the systems and what backup arrangements are appropriate.
- Access: document public, community, family, classroom or other restricted access as directed by the relevant authorities.
- Derivatives: distinguish preservation masters from edited, restored, transcribed or aligned versions and record the processing.
- Third parties: review proposed hosting, transcription and AI services before sending materials to them.
- Handover: provide agreed files, metadata and workflow documentation, with responsibilities for continuing stewardship made clear.
Local workstations, restricted servers and other hosting arrangements can be considered according to the community’s requirements and resources. The design of a specific system belongs in a project agreement.
AI & speech technology
Every new use
needs its own authority.
Permission to record, digitize or create a ReadAlong does not automatically authorize model training, synthetic voice creation, public distribution or commercial reuse.
Before adopting a tool, a team needs to understand where data is processed, what the provider retains, whether materials may be used for training, and how outputs will be checked. The relevant community authorities decide what uses are appropriate.
Further resources
FNIGC: the First Nations principles of OCAP®
Global Indigenous Data Alliance: CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance
CARE addresses collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility and ethics. It can inform wider Indigenous data-governance conversations alongside the distinct laws, protocols and decisions of each people.
Plan the technical work around the community’s decisions.
We can begin with the collection’s purpose, the people responsible for it and the authority that will guide its care.
