About

Data sovereignty has emerged as a particularly pressing issue for Indigenous leaders, scholars, and communities, especially when viewed against the troubling backdrop of inequity and exploitation that has historically characterized Indigenous-Settler research relations.  

The misappropriation of cultural knowledge and problematic usage of Indigenous research data has spurred Indigenous peoples, communities, and their allies to advocate for the development, application, and implementation of principles, protocols, and best practices as a means of establishing and rigorously reinforcing ethical standards in Indigenous research data management.

The global movement for Indigenous data sovereignty (IDSov) affirms the inherent right of Indigenous peoples to control how information about them is managed, accessed, and preserved (Carroll et al., 2020; FNIGC, 2014). Indigenous data sovereignty is an assertion of Indigenous jurisdiction over all data about First Peoples, especially information held by non-Indigenous governments and institutions.

Indigenous peoples have developed various protocols to guide the implementation of Indigenous data sovereignty, including the OCAP® Principles and CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. The Indigenous data sovereignty movement also includes international networks such as the Global Indigenous Data Alliance (GIDA) and intellectual property initiatives such as Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Biocultural (BC) labels. First Peoples across the globe recognize and acknowledge the fundamental role of data sovereignty in sustaining the following three pillars of a healthy government:

1. Power (authority to act: constitution, laws, customs)
2. Resources (natural, human, financial, information, knowledge, technology)
3. Legitimacy (the ability to support and maintain public confidence in a government) (First Nations Centre 2005).

Access to and control of community data is more than just a matter of asserting rights of ownership over cultural materials; it represents the strong and dynamic connection between empowerment, cultural continuity, social cohesion, and resilience. There are distinct implications for social scientists working in collaboration with Indigenous communities in managing control of, access to, and possession of their research data.

The Goal of the Workshops

The goal of the workshops was to engage peers, experts, practitioners, and students to explore the application of the OCAP® principles and other Indigenous protocols in a critical examination of research conciliation processes in the social sciences.

​We welcomed participants into a range of conversations about the responsibilities of the social sciences researcher in Indigenous research data sovereignty and management. By exploring these issues, we hope to cultivate a critical awareness of social scientists’ responsibilities to the communities and individuals with whom we work including best practices in data collection and management. How, in other words, are social scientists applying principles such as OCAP™ in the management of qualitative data? And more specifically, how are we working with Indigenous research partners in the data sovereignty process?

Please click here for a link to the Workshop Summaries.