Tamara Layden
Serena Natonabah
Dominique David-Chavez
Sofia Fernández
At the heels of legacies and contemporary realities of colonial oppression, Indigenous scholars and activists globally have been mobilizing to enact legal and policy instruments to strengthen Indigenous rights and self-determination across colonial nation-states. Complementary to these political leverage points, such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous experts have created and shared numerous guiding frameworks grounded in Indigenous values and relational understandings and ways of being. For example, across research fields that engage Indigenous knowledges, rights, and data, the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance serve as a key conceptual framework for reorienting data practitioners to honor Indigenous authority and place-based cultural protocols in data stewardship. In using CARE Principles as a guide, in this session we outline our experiences in co-creating place-based data stewardship protocols with Indigenous rights-holders. Specifically, we will share some tools and approaches for community-engaged processes in developing data stewardship foundations in rural contexts, including participatory mapping exercises and Local Context label assignment activities across diverse Indigenous data types (landscape and ecosystem knowledges, plant medicines, and more-than-human kin). The goal of this session is to provide examples of capacity sharing in action in support of Indigenous data sovereignty across both place-based and digital ecosystems.