Desi Small-Rodriguez
Like many Tribal Nations, the Northern Cheyenne Tribe was disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 Pandemic. As the pandemic raged, the Tribe faced life or death crises daily, which were exacerbated by a messy web of data from local, state, and federal government entities. Data inconsistency and barriers to access negatively impacted tribal decision making. This experience serves as the impetus for our study, which seeks to empower the Northern Cheyenne people to build their own data. We will describe how we obtained tribal government support for this project, which includes: 1) building a comprehensive tribally owned and managed database that links existing administrative datasets across tribal, state, and federal levels; 2) conducting interviews and a survey of tribal citizens to document local tribal impacts and ongoing disease burden of the pandemic; and 3) developing a Northern Cheyenne Data Sovereignty Law that will enable to the Tribe to exercise sovereignty over its data. As a team of Northern Cheyenne citizens, we will describe our efforts to get Cheyenne data back into Cheyenne hands.