Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Policy

Maggie Walter, Tahu Kukutai, Stephanie Russo Carroll, Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000214284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

This book examines how Indigenous Peoples around the world are demanding greater data sovereignty, and challenging the ways in which governments have historically used Indigenous data to develop policies and programs.

In the digital age, governments are increasingly dependent on data and data analytics to inform their policies and decision-making. However, Indigenous Peoples have often been the unwilling targets of policy interventions and have had little say over the collection, use and application of data about them, their lands and cultures. At the heart of Indigenous Peoples' demands for change are the enduring aspirations of self-determination over their institutions, resources, knowledge and information systems.

With contributors from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, North and South America and Europe, this book offers a rich account of the potential for Indigenous data sovereignty to support human flourishing and to protect against the ever-growing threats of data-related risks and harms.

The Open Access version of this book, available at

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429273957, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

1 Indigenous Data Sovereignty, governance and the link to Indigenous policy

Maggie Walter and Stephanie Russo Carroll

Introduction

Across Anglo-colonized nation states, official policy, and the administratively devised strategic actions and programs that flow from that policy, are the predominant ways governments engage with their internal Indigenous Peoples, nations and populations. In the United States, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada and Australia (referred to as CANZUS countries) (Meyer 2012), without exception, the central feature of this policy is its focus on Indigenous disadvantage and developmental disparity. The vision statements of each country’s key Indigenous policy entity highlight this similarity. In the United States, the US Department of the Interior, Indian Affairs (2019) states their mission as: “enhance the quality of life, to promote economic opportunity, and to carry out the responsibility to protect and improve the trust assets of American Indians, Indian tribes, and Alaska Natives”. In Australia, the National Indigenous Australians Agency’s (2019) Closing the Gap policy framework across health, education and employment targets lists its primary aim as “to improve the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians”. Indigenous Services Canada proclaim that their vision is “to support and empower Indigenous Peoples to independently deliver services and address the socio-economic conditions in their communities” (Government of Canada 2019) and in Aotearoa New Zealand Te Puni Kōkiri Ministry of Māori Development (2019) states its mission is to “lead public policy for Māori; advise on Government-Māori relationships; provide guidance to government about policies affecting Māori wellbeing; and administer and monitor legislation”. All policy frameworks also state, to varying degrees, that they undertake their policy role in collaboration with, and in the interests of, Indigenous Peoples. In practice, these policies lack the actual integration of Indigenous worldviews.

All agencies also reference data as an evidence base for Indigenous policy. These data also display an uncanny sameness. All provide a remarkably similar statistical narrative of Indigenous overrepresentation across the same development indicators of socio-economic, health, education and social disadvantage. Incarceration rate data provide a good example of this phenomenon. In both Canada and Australia, official statistics report that Indigenous People make up a quarter or more of the prison population, despite being less than four percent of the total population of each country (Chartrand 2018). In Aotearoa New Zealand, the data detail that half of those incarcerated are Māori although the Māori population count is around 17 percent of the total Aotearoa population (Department of Corrections 2019). In the United States, the data are disjointed due to the relatively dispersed nature of the criminal justice system, but the pattern is still clear. In Alaska, where 15 percent of the population is Native, 37 percent of the prison population is Alaskan Native or Native American. In South and North Dakota, around 30 percent of those incarcerated are Native American, but the Native population of these states is less than 10 percent of the total (“Native America: A History” 2018).

These numbers and the many other statistics detailing Indigenous societal positioning are not disputed. We know their reality too well. But accepting numerical reality is not the same as accepting the validity of the picture they represent or the policy settings that invariably emerge from these statistics. These pervasive data are not neutral entities. Statistics are human artifacts and in colonizing nation states such numbers applied to Indigenous Peoples have a raced reality (Walter 2010; Walter and Anderson 2013). Their reality emerges not from the mathematically supported analytical techniques they allow but via the social, racial and cultural standpoint of their creators. Data do not make themselves. Data are created and shaped by the assumptive determinations of their makers to collect some data and not others, to interrogate some objects over others and to investigate some variable relationships over others. As per Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva (2008), it is dominant society questions that are hidden behind the cover of claims of objective methodology. Within this, the Indigene remains the object, caught in a numbered bind, viewed through the straitjacketing lens of deficit (Walter and Anderson 2013).

For Indigenous Peoples, the statistics and data themselves per se, are not the problem. From a policy perspective, the far more critical question is how are such numbers deployed and what and whose purposes do they, and their attendant narratives, serve (Walter 2016, 2018)? Our basic contention, here and throughout this book, is that they do not serve our purposes or interests as Indigenous Peoples. With their limited scope, aggregate format, deficit focus and decontextualized framework, this joint data/policy narrative cannot, and does not, yield meaningful portraits of the embodied realities of Indigenous lives (Walter and Suina 2018). As such the social policy framework cannot and does not provide the policy outcomes that Indigenous Peoples across these countries need. Nor does it provide the data that we, as Indigenous Peoples, nations and tribes, need to develop and implement our own policy. The result is a historic and contemporaneous failure of Indigenous-related policy, across fields of policy and across CANZUS countries.

This chapter expands on this central thesis as well as the Indigenous response to nation state data/policy intransigence; Indigenous Data Sovereignty. At its core, Indigenous Data Sovereignty affirms the rights of Indigenous Peoples to control the collection, access, analysis, interpretation, management, dissemination and reuse of Indigenous data (Kukutai and Taylor 2016; Snipp 2016). Indigenous data, born digital or not, is a very broad category, including information, knowledge, specimens, and belongings about Indigenous Peoples or to that which they relate at both the individual and collective levels (Rainie et al. 2019; Lovett et al. 2019). Here, we explore Indigenous Data Sovereignty as a global advocacy movement for Indigenous Peoples and as a growing field of Indigenous scholarship alongside the concept’s underpinning policy-related rationales. We also outline the processes of Indigenous data governance, an activating mechanism of Indigenous Data Sovereignty, as a policy response.

Indigenous social policy: a history of failure

In 1858, public concern about destitute Aboriginal people occupying town fringes prompted the New South Wales Colony to hold an inquiry into the welfare of the Natives (Colony of Victoria 1859). The resultant report details the level of intense poverty and unmet need of these survivors of frontier wars, forcibly dislocated from their lands. In 2016, the Australian Productivity Commission, motivated by ongoing concern about Aboriginal inequality, released its seventh biennial report, Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage (SCRGSP 2016). This report series’ stated aim is to measure the well-being of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. Again, the data present a picture of deep, unremitting social, economic and health disadvantage, with little or no improvement record from that detailed in earlier reports. Apart from the modernizing of language, these two reports are remarkably similar.

Comparing these two reports highlights that the measuring and recording of Indigenous disadvantage is a long-established bureaucratic response. The resemblance of official documentation in 1858 to that in 2016, and the similarity of the data reproduced, also makes clear that between the first and second inquiries, the “welfare of the Native” is largely unchanged. Despite the more than 150 years of social policy enacted upon Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, as the data indicate, we remain the poorest, sickest, and least educated and employed group in Australia. This Australian example is repeated in other guises across the CANZUS countries. Inquiries such as the 1996 Canadian Royal Commission into Aboriginal Peoples (Government of Canada 2016) or the 1928 Meriam Report from the United States (NARF 2019) all document through data, in great detail, the level and depth of Indigenous disadvantage and the lack of change. To discuss the history of Indigenous policy in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada and the United States, therefore, is to discuss the history of an unrelenting repetition of policy failure.

Critiques of poor Indigenous policy outcomes tend to coalesce around two competing positions, both centering Indigenous Peoples. The first emphasizes the lack of connection between the objects of policy (Indigenous People and communities) and policy makers (primarily drawn from the non-Indigenous majority) in terms of interaction, understanding and a corresponding lack of policy self-determination (see Taylor and Hunter 2001). From this position, policy is seen as being imposed on Indigenous Peoples from well-meaning but inadequately equipped policy makers. The remedy is linked to greater Indigenous participation in policy framing and formulation. The other position is developed through the lens of market individualism and points to the perceived failure of individual Indigenous People to take advantage of the opportunities, especially those mandated in policy programs, afforded them by the nation state (see Price 2019). In this positioning, the cause of inequitable Indigenous social and economic positioning is the poor behavior and choices of Indigenous People themselves. The solution is framed in terms of Indigenous People taking greater personal responsibility.

Seeing Indigenous Peoples like a state

Our argument is that neither the lack of self-determination nor poor individual behavior is an adequate explanation for continuing Indigenous policy failure across nation states. Rather, we point to the cross-national patterns inherent in the consistency of the data produced and reproduced, the consistency of policy approaches and the consistency of the failure of that policy. All four nation states, for example, had policies active during the 20th century that sought to assimilate Indigenous populations via the removal of children from their families. The disastrous outcome of these policies has now been laid bare by the Royal Commissions and other formal enquiries held to uncover the harms done (see NTRC 2015; Commonwealth of Australia 1997). Yet, today, in all four nation states, Indigenous children are still far more likely to be removed from their families and placed in state care than non-Indigenous children. In Australia, Aboriginal children are ten times more likely than non-Aboriginal children to be placed in out-of-home care (Dickie 2019); in the United States, the rate is lower but American Indian and Alaskan Native children are 1.6 times more likely to be removed from their biological homes and twice as likely to remain in foster care for over two years (Fostering Together 2019); and in Aotearoa New Zealand, Māori children make up 59 percent of all children in care, more than double their proportion of the population (RNZ 2019). There is little to indicate that the current removal of Indigenous children from their families will not, one day, be also recognized as the policy disaster that it is, just like the forced assimilation programs of the past.

So, given the cross-nation pattern of policy approaches and policy failures, seemingly on repeat, can the long history of poor Indigenous policy outcomes be viewed as inevitable? Here we draw from Scott’s (1998) thesis, Seeing like a State, to conceptualize the terrain of Indigenous policy. This theory has had scholarly resonance in making sense of how state-preferred modes of organizing and managing Indigenous sub-populations are implicated in Indigenous policy failure (Andersen 2014; Walter and Andersen 2013). Scott’s (1998) core argument is that four elements are needed, in combination, to create a social policy disaster of truly epic proportions. The first element is the deployment of a system of administrative ordering necessary for modern nation states to make a society legible. An example is a national census whose purpose is not only to enumerate but to describe a population across criteria deemed important for understanding that population, such as age, gender and employment status. Scott (1998) emphasizes that this is not a straightforward exercise. The state needs to undertake transformative simplifications whereby “exceptionally complex, illegible and local social practices” (1998: 2) are standardized to allow central recording and monitoring. The result is radically simplified understandings of social (we would add cultural) environments. Critically, for our arguments, the state’s rationalizing and standardizing does not actually represent the reality of the society that is being depicted. Only the slice of that society that is of interest to the state is represented in the final product.

For Indigenous Peoples, the slice of our social and cultural realities represented in data collected about us is limited to those aspects of interest to the nation state. Transformed and recorded into state-defined terms and categories, the outcomes are the data which are the primary tool by which the nation state makes sense of its Indigenous population/s. These data, again in a commonality across CANZUS countries, play a much deeper role than being counts of Indigenous populations or neutral reflectors of Indigenous lives (Walter and Andersen 2013). Rather, these data drive a particular narrative of Indigenous Peoples, creating an underpinning framework of how Indigenous Peoples are recognized by the state (Andersen 2014). As argued later, and across many of the chapters of this book, the areas of interest of the nati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• 1 Indigenous Data Sovereignty, governance and the link to Indigenous policy
• 2 “Pushing the space”: Data sovereignty and self-determination in Aotearoa NZ
• 3 The intersection of Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Closing the Gap policy in Australia
• 4 Growing Pueblo data sovereignty
• 5 Indigenous data and policy in Aotearoa New Zealand
• 6 Indigenous self-determination and data governance in the Canadian policy context
• 7 The challenge of Indigenous data in Sweden
• 8 Data governance in the Basque Country: Victims and memories of violent conflicts
• 9 Indigenous policy and Indigenous data in Mexico: Context, challenges and perspectives
• 10 Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Quechan education data sovereignty
• 11 Indigenous Data Sovereignty and the role of universities
• 12 Narratives on Indigenous victimhood: Challenges of Indigenous Data Sovereignty in Colombia’s transitional setting
• 13 Kaupapa Māori-informed approaches to support data rights and self-determination
• 14 The legal and policy dimensions of Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS)
• 15 Embedding systemic change—opportunities and challenges
• Index