Indigenous scientists are fighting to protect their data — and their culture

Every month, a group of Indigenous scientists from around the world gathers on Zoom. They never have an agenda. They meet as colleagues to catch up and commiserate about the challenges of being Indigenous in Western academia.

Their February meeting, however, quickly struck a different tone.

“There was this cascade that started happening,” recalled Max Liboiron, a professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland who hosts the virtual calls. “Everyone in the US was like, ‘Holy shit. My career is over. My students’ funding is screwed.’”

Liboiron immediately entered triage mode. A geographer and university administrator by trade, Liboiron used to organize with Occupy Wall Street. “I was a full-time activist,” they said over Zoom. With their hair buzzed and arms tattooed, Liboiron’s past life isn’t hard to imagine. They’re Red River Métis, the Indigenous peoples of Canada’s prairie provinces, and speak with a candidness that is both cool and calculated.

Since Donald Trump entered office, Liboiron has put those rapid-response skills to use to support their US colleagues in need. US federal law recognizes many tribal nations as sovereign political entities, not racial or ethnic groups, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from sweeping up Indigenous peoples in his attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). From Alaska to New England, Indigenous researchers — and the communities they serve — are losing access to dollars for critical science that could help them amid the planet’s changing temperatures. They’re worried that the loss, theft, seizure, or privatization of their research — which often includes ancient cultural knowledge — could be next.

After all, the US and Canada hold a nasty track record on Indigenous rights from centuries of theft, genocide, and ongoing oppression: “That starts in 1492,” Liboiron said. Indigenous communities are now concerned that the government may weaponize their data against them, using it to justify the surveillance of their activities or extraction of valuable resources on their lands.

“We have to have more control over how the settler-state represents us in data, how they collect data about us,” Liboiron said, describing discussions on Indigenous data sovereignty in the ’90s. “The movement comes out of an idea of mismanagement through bad data practices from the state.”

There’s a new level of uncertainty since tech billionaire Elon Musk’s mysterious invasion of sensitive federal data.

“There’s an unknown relationship between what Musk can touch and our data,” Liboiron said.

After the disturbing February discussion, Liboiron sent out a survey to assess everyone’s needs: “Servers were immediately on that list.”

These servers are repositories for anything digital, including research. Liboiron and this group are part of a decades-long movement around Indigenous data sovereignty and governance, which advocates for the rights of Indigenous peoples in determining who accesses, manages, and owns their information. Data can include anything from environmental DNA to oral history audio recordings. They’re often sensitive, too. Indigenous peoples don’t want this information falling into the wrong hands — or, worse, disappearing entirely — but the federal government is looking like less of an ally with each passing day. Under the first Trump presidency, scientists were concerned only about federal data, but the behavior in the second term is unprecedented.

“The rule of law and norms of governance, the norms and laws of jurisdiction, no longer apply,” Liboiron said. “Even if your data isn’t held by the federal government or funded by the federal government, it’s become very clear that different parts of the federal government can reach into almost anywhere and intervene.”

A possible solution has already emerged: private servers located in foreign countries.

Through the IndigeLab Network Liboiron codirects, members have already identified at least three locations in Canada where Indigenous data can be securely stored. While the researchers finalize access to new servers, they have turned to cloud storage, using providers like CryptPad, a France-based alternative to Google Docs, and Sync, a Canadian-based alternative to Dropbox.

“I’ve gone from basically protesting and staying safe to massively mobilizing resources with the same techniques,” Liboiron said.

One ally is Angie Saltman, a citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta and founder and president of Saltmedia, a Canadian-based tech company with its own data center. Saltmedia and its sister company, IT Horizons, work with a range of clients, including private industry, government, First Nations, and Indigenous nonprofit and for-profit organizations. Saltman thinks of her client relationships similarly to that of a landlord and tenant.

“We will look after the house, but we usually set it up so that our team doesn’t get to creep in the house,” she explained.

Meanwhile, Big Tech companies in the US, like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, can creep all they want. They have long collaborated with law enforcement agencies to hand over users’ private data. Lately, they’ve been aligning themselves with Trump through donations and internal policy changes.

Data storage isn’t everything

Indigenous data sovereignty ultimately goes deeper than servers and technology, though. It’s about stewarding the cultures and autonomies of Indigenous peoples, recognizing the intellect of Indigenous peoples, and training the next generation to continue that legacy.

“Indigenous peoples have always been data experts,” said Riley Taitingfong, a postdoctoral researcher at the Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance who is Chamorro. She points to the historical Marshallese stick charts, made of coconut strips and cowrie shells, her ancestors used to record sea data and voyage safely. Indigenous peoples in unincorporated US territories, like Guam, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands, face unique challenges around Indigenous data sovereignty due to their lack of federal recognition.

This movement is also about trust — between researchers and the communities they serve, as well as between Indigenous peoples and the federal government. But trust isn’t built overnight.

“You have to reckon with all the stuff you’ve done as an institution and also as an individual,” said Stephanie Russo Carroll, director of the Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance who helped author the CARE Principles that guide conversations on Indigenous data sovereignty. “Even as an Indigenous individual, you have to reckon with how your mind has been colonized.”

At Memorial University, Liboiron created a contract template between the university and Indigenous communities in 2019 whose language cements that Indigenous partners own and benefit from a particular research project. The University of Maine similarly signs memoranda of understanding with the Wabanaki Nations researchers with whom it regularly collaborates.

“The solutions to this are not just digital tech solutions,” said Carroll, who is Ahtna, a citizen of the Native Village of Kluti-Kaah in Alaska. “We’re talking about real shifts in power and real shifts in authority and real depth of relational work.”

Relationships push progress forward: The Trump administration hasn’t stopped the National Institutes of Health from finalizing a policy that would require federal researchers to seek permission from tribes to access their data in the agency’s databases, according to NIH Tribal Health Research Office Director Karina Walters. Elsewhere in the federal government, however, Indigenous leaders are losing their contacts as the Trump administration fires staff. Now, advocates are increasingly looking to state governments, which also harbor health and environmental data Indigenous peoples need.

Climate crisis adds urgency

In Washington, for example, the Tulalip Tribes and Department of Health recently signed an agreement — the state’s first — that gives tribes direct access to lab reports and disease updates that will help safeguard their communities’ well-being. As climate change contributes to more public health emergencies, Indigenous peoples also urgently need access to data from weather satellites, medicinal plants, and nonhuman relatives, like salmon and alewives.

After all, every Indigenous community is different, but a common thread unites them: their connections to the earth and the flora and fauna with whom they share it. In many cultures, animals, plants, waterways, and the cosmos are seen as relatives.

“The health of the land is the health of the people,” said Christina E. Oré, an associate director at Seven Directions, an Indigenous public health institute at the University of Washington. She is an Andean descendant of Peru.

Back at the University of Maine, anthropology professor Darren Ranco, who is a citizen of the Penobscot Nation, wrapped up a project in December where his team gathered audio recordings from Wabanaki knowledge holders (elders enshrined with caretaking duties to guard and share Indigenous knowledge) who lived through previous disasters. The researchers analyzed the oral histories and cultural expertise alongside climate change data, like precipitation patterns and air and water temperatures, to identify earlier adaptation strategies that may be helpful in responding to current climate impacts.

“The data was related to tribal perspectives on past, current, and future environmental and climate change,” Ranco explained. “This isn’t the first time we’ve adapted to a changing climate.”

The data was jointly controlled by the scientists and the tribal communities during the research, but instead of following the standard protocol of deleting the human subject data upon project completion, the team released all the information to the tribes. Now, the relevant communities have access to the information as long as they like without having to seek permission or jump through hoops.

Desi Small-Rodriguez, executive director of the Data Warriors Lab and UCLA sociology professor, has been working with her leaders at the Northern Cheyenne Nation to eliminate those hoops entirely by drafting a tribal law to protect their ancestral knowledge. The hope is to pass it later this year. Right now, tribal leaders struggle to access necessary information about fisheries and air and water quality. In some cases, the government is already collecting this data. Tribes just aren’t let in.

“How do we get the data that’s already out there back into our hands? And how do we also rebuild data that we haven’t had in our communities for a very, very long time?” Small-Rodriguez said. “We’re moving forward to figure out how we use the white man’s law to protect Cheyenne data.”

Small-Rodriguez is worried about who is currently running the US federal government. She can’t trust Trump — and definitely not Musk — with her people’s cultural knowledge. She trusts her Indigenous relatives in the US and beyond. In March, she visited her Māori peers who invited her to New Zealand to collaborate on solutions to the crisis US Indigenous researchers face. In April, Small-Rodriguez was in Australia for a Global Indigenous Data Governance conference.

“We are very committed to cultivating and nurturing our international Indigenous relationships as there is so much to learn and share with one another,” she said. “What a beautiful thing. It makes me cry to think that we have Indigenous colleagues and relatives across the world who are like, ‘We see you, and we want to help you.’”