The infrastructure question beneath good ethics
Why protocols alone can't address Indigenous data sovereignty
Boozhoo News River Readers!
It’s been a noisy few weeks across Turtle Island with elections, referendums, and conversations at the federal level dominating the news cycle.🗣️
A gentle reminder that the more than human communities surrounding and supporting us are entering their slower, darker season. Choosing to take a quiet moment to ourselves in our day or work week aligns us with that seasonal rhythm, especially as schedules fill to the brim between now and the end of the calendar year. 🌧️ 🍂 ❄️
This week we’re featuring a new Insights article over at Animikii.com. And watch for travel and event updates as Jeff Ward begins a marathon of speaking appearances starting this week in Japan! ✈️
New Insights article: the infrastructure question beneath good ethics
The Big Picture: Community-based research with First Nations, Métis, Inuit and Tribal partners runs on some of the most carefully built ethics in the academy. A research ethics board reviews the study before the first interview is recorded, and in Canada, Chapter 9 of the Tri-Council Policy Statement sets out the obligations to Indigenous participants and communities.
Why we think it matters: The protocols that come out of that review are specific: who may open the raw data, how it is encrypted and where, how participants receive copies of their own interviews, and how de-identified records are kept apart from the master list. By agreement with the community partner, research teams handle data responsibly, and the review process makes sure of it.
The layer beneath the protocol: A team can decide, within its protocol, exactly who opens a transcript. What no protocol can decide is where that file physically lives, which company holds it, what law reaches it, and what happens to it when the project ends and the data goes home to the community. Those are infrastructure questions, and in a study built with a First Nation, Métis, Inuit or Tribal community they are the questions Indigenous data sovereignty turns on.
- it includes resources for research teams about repositories, institutional guidance, as well as jurisdiction and the cloud.
More curated reads
AI: Energy, Environment & Community
AI infrastructure is being rapidly planned and built across Canada, and the federal government is promising billions in support for sovereign compute. This unprecedented surge in a new industry has global-scale implications for climate change, the environment and communities where the physical buildout of AI is taking shape. It’s resulting in both new economic opportunities and a widely accelerating backlash. This panel event will bring together experts to tackle the impacts and opportunities of Canada’s AI datacentre buildout and ask what, if any, are the conditions that will decide social license to operate? You'll hear from Paris Marx (Tech Won't Save Us, Hyperscale), Sean Mullin (Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy), Kate Harland (Canadian Climate Institute), Jeff Ward (Animikii Indigenous Technology) and moderator Isaac Phan Nay (The Tyee). The event will include a moderated audience Q&A. Can’t attend in person? You can register for a free livestream ticket.
‘Stolen Relations’ project wins American Studies Association award
On Oct. 14, the American Studies Association awarded research project “Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas” with the Digital Humanities Caucus’s Legacy Project Award. Led by Professor of History Linford Fisher and the Center for Digital Scholarship, the community-centered database project aims to compile artwork and stories related to the history of Native American enslavement. The project grew from a core database that catalogued the names of people associated with Native American slavery and servitude. In 2019, the project shifted to include more community-centered work, centering on “the experiences of Native communities in these histories,” Fisher said.
Racialized impacts in the age of AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has evolved rapidly in recent years, and its growing use across different sectors has generated crucial debates about its implications for human rights. Building AI systems that are more just, pluralistic, and ethically responsible therefore requires greater attention to the ways in which these technologies affect the human rights of communities that have long experienced systemic racism and structural discrimination. However, even when AI systems are intended to benefit historically marginalized communities, such as through initiatives aimed at preserving and protecting indigenous languages, the use of the cultural heritage of groups under special protection still raises important questions regarding their free, prior and informed consent, as well as to data sovereignty. Who decides how this knowledge is collected, stored, and used, and who ultimately benefits from it, and how? Building more equitable forms of AI governance therefore requires also ensuring that indigenous peoples, people of African descent, minorities and other marginalized groups have greater control over the data, knowledge, and resources upon which these technologies depend.
Reclaiming Knowledge: Indigenous Disability, Language, Education, and the Politics of Research
This public lecture brings together three scholarly perspectives from Australia and Canada to examine how colonial systems have shaped understandings of disability and difference, whose knowledge is recognized, and how research, education, and language can either reproduce or challenge these structures. Presented by the CERC in Health Equity and Community Wellbeing, this lecture will explore Indigenous disability, language, education, and the politics of research, offering critical perspectives on how knowledge is produced, understood, and reclaimed. Abstract: How might our understandings of disability, language, education, and knowledge change when Indigenous knowledge systems and the experiences of Indigenous people with disabilities are placed at the centre?
Headlines that discuss Taiwan’s assertion of sovereignty in the face of Chinese encroachment or US dependence rarely mention the hard truth that Taiwan is a settler-colonial nation with its own Indigenous peoples who assert their own claims of sovereignty. Why is it that questions of sovereignty, AI or otherwise, so often elide the question of Indigenous sovereignty? And how might “sovereign AI” support, rather than undermine, Taiwanese Indigenous sovereignty? To answer the first question, we might look to the idea of settler-colonial incorporation, which describes the way in which settler societies incorporate their Indigenous populations into the national body and lay claim to the Indigenous inheritance of a given territory. There are several flagship AI projects in Taiwan which incorporate Taiwanese Indigenous linguistic and cultural data. To explore this intersection further, we will examine two such projects: the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) and the Indigenous Languages Research and Development Foundation’s (ILRDF) suite of AI tools.
Resources and opportunities
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