Boozhoo News River Readers,

News River Express is back this week with three resource rich links.  

The first is a guide to  Indigenous Data Sovereignty written for researchers co-written by Dr. Jane Anderson, Co-Founder and Council Vice Chair of Local Contexts and Vanessa Smith, JD/MBA Candidate at UCLA. 

Second, we’ve linked to an academic article where they uncovered that, “A review of 115 studies found that models with 100% Indigenous ownership and control were more likely to improve health and wellbeing by fostering self-determination, strengthening cultural identity, and promoting healing.” The authors specifically  call out Indigenous Data Sovereignty as a real tension in this work. 

And lastly, we have a report from the Center for Indian Country Development's data summit. 

Curated Articles

Data Do's and Don'ts: A Primer on Indigenous Data Sovereignty

Local Contexts

If you've ever wanted a starting point to hand a researcher, this is it. Dr. Jane Anderson of Local Contexts and UCLA's Vanessa Smith wrote a short, well-illustrated guidebook on Indigenous Data Sovereignty, published out of the NSF Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science. It's built for researchers across any discipline who want to get the basics right before they collect a thing.

Channeling ancestral knowledge into production

Frontiers in Public Health

In 1938, an expedition took 25 pounds of curare - an umbrella term for certain extracts of tropical plants with paralytic properties  - and generations of Canelos knowledge out of the Ecuadorian Amazon. This data reshaped modern anesthesia. The Canelos got nothing. Esteban Ortiz-Prado uses that history to argue for a different model, one where benefit-sharing, community-owned production, and collective trademarks keep the value with the communities who hold the knowledge. The authors conclude with a powerful statements:

“Only when ancestral knowledge is translated into genuine economic sovereignty can we truly say that we have honored and preserved Indigenous wisdom.”

Through data governance, tribes protect "digital land" and build tribal economies

Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

At the Center for Indian Country Development's data summit, tribal leaders talked about data the way they talk about land. Traci Morris of the American Indian Policy Institute called it exactly that:

“Getting tribal data sovereignty right is as important as protecting the land. It's the digital age, and data is our territory. It carries our people, our languages, our future generations.”

Michaeal Running Wolf echoed that point, “We’re in a moment now where it’s like 1998, and the Internet’s about to be big. We can invest ourselves in AI, or we can let AI bypass Indian Country and not participate in the new economy. We have an opportunity here to be early.”