Stephanie Carroll
Across the world, there are significant decentralized activities where Indigenous Peoples, their nations, leaders, advocates, and communities are actively exercising and using various Indigenous data for governance, teaching, archiving, and restorative work. There is also an increasing number of Indigenous data governance regulations, protocols, principles, and preferences across scales, including Indigenous Peoples’ own laws, regulations, policies, and preferences that require enriched metadata. These various activities occur at all levels of society and necessitate an international standard for Indigenous Peoples’ data provenance. The IEEE 2890-2025 Recommended Practice for the Provenance of Indigenous Peoples’ Data details the process for describing and recording the provenance of data about or related to Indigenous Peoples and their cultures, lands, and knowledge systems. Within data-generated industries, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as biodiversity research and innovations in genomic science, this standard enhances the integrity of that data, and the likelihood of engaged collaborations with data producers in ways that were previously unthinkable. Setting standards begins to address the combined problems of the proliferation of unreliable data and information on Indigenous Peoples; the lack of Indigenous participation, control, and governance over the circulation of Indigenous data and information; and the misappropriation and misuse of Indigenous data and information. This session will describe the context for and development of the standard, and its implications for Indigenous Peoples and other data actors. Notably, the process included Indigenous leadership at all stages, an Indigenous Caucus, consultation with Indigenous Peoples’, and open access/source for standard.