Part 1 in the Indigenous Data Stewardship Series
As Indigenous peoples, we have created, held, interpreted, and used data for thousands of years. Gwen Phillips, the First Nations Information Governance Centre (FNIGC) Board representative for British Columbia, often uses a presentation slide showing a page from a journal kept in the early 1900s by her great-grandfather, a war chief:
“It contains his encrypted data that recorded all kinds of events. They are the same symbols that are found on our pictographs thousands of years old.”
Gwen ties that record-keeping to the survival of First Nations:
“You are experts in data collection and have been for thousands of years. You wouldn’t still be here if you weren’t doing that actively and had those control mechanisms in place so that the integrity of the data was protected.”
Indigenous data are information – whether they are counts, measurements, observations, experiences, or knowledge – about Indigenous peoples, communities, lands, waters, languages, cultures, knowledge, histories, resources, services, and governance.
Indigenous data live in place names, oral histories, songs, family lineage, and the round of seasonal harvesting. They include information created or collected by Indigenous peoples and records that identify someone as First Nations, Inuit, or Métis. They also include data that affect Indigenous rights, interests, governance, or decision-making.
This distinction matters because Indigenous data have also been collected and used within colonial relationships. Governments, researchers, and other institutions have collected information and knowledge about Indigenous peoples for their own purposes, often using categories Indigenous peoples did not define and retaining control over the resulting data and how they were interpreted and used. Those patterns have benefited outside institutions while leaving Indigenous peoples without access to, or authority over, data about themselves. Conventional Western data systems tend to treat data as an asset: something to be collected, secured, combined, analyzed, and used to generate economic value or increasingly to train artificial intelligence models. The starting question is often: “What can we do with these data?”
Indigenous approaches to data are more relational. The starting question is more often: “What relationships and responsibilities come with this information?” Consider a story someone tells you about their family. Once you hear it, you know it. Knowing it does not give you permission to record it, publish it, add it to a database, or pass it on. The relationship through which you received the story matters, and so does the reason it was shared.
Understanding data relationally changes the role of the person or organization holding it. Responsibility includes keeping information secure, preserving meaning and context, being accurate about what the data represent, respecting the conditions under which they were shared, and weighing the consequences of how they are used. Those responsibilities travel with the data as they move between people, projects, and systems.
Holding data does not, on its own, give an organization the authority to decide what happens to them. Gwen describes the role of data governance organizations like the BC RIGC in the same terms:
“We don’t own your data. You own your data. We’re just here to help you.”
For First Nations, these responsibilities are expressed through each Nation's own governance. The First Nations principles of OCAP® (Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession) assert First Nations rights and authority in relationships with others who collect, hold, use, or share First Nations data. Inuit and Métis have developed their own distinct approaches, grounded in their own rights and governance.
Upcoming posts in this series look at Indigenous data sovereignty and stewardship in the context of OCAP® and the distinct approaches that respect those rights.
