Dominique David-Chavez
Riley Taitingfong
Tai Pelli
Cassandra Puletapuai
Rosie ‘Anolani Alegado
Leasi Vanessa Lee Raymond
This roundtable serves as a means for connecting across waters for relationally recognized (non-federally recognized) Indigenous Peoples within island territories–Borikén (Puerto Rico), U.S. Virgin Islands, Guåhan (Guam), American Samoa, Samoa, Hawai’i–and their diasporas. Indigenous island Peoples’ knowledges, sciences, technologies, and innovation have travelled with us across space and time, including protocols for sharing, protecting, and governing knowledge which have guided resilience and exchange across our ancestral lands and territories for millennia. Building from our 2024 roundtable focus on inter-island and cross-community movements and alliances, Indigenous scholars and leaders from island territories will facilitate story-sharing and participatory activities aimed at collectively generating practical strategies, protocols, and processes for realizing Indigenous data sovereignty and governance within this current era. We welcome all with relational ties and/or interests concerning island territories to join our roundtable goals to: 1) Explore how we shared knowledges in the past, including protocols and insights shared across our cultures; 2) Understand unique challenges faced across our territories (militarization, illegal occupation, governance, infrastructure, invisibility in demographic data); and 3) Identify practical tools (both ancient and emerging) for resilient data futures across all four summit themes–Data for Governance, Governance of Data, Data Futures: Looking Back Walking Forward, and Infrastructure–with an emphasis on intergenerational access and engagement. We aim to generate a visual publication sharing what we learn from this roundtable discussion that can bring visibility and context to the Indigenous data sovereignty and governance movement concerning current realities and futures we wish to shape across our ancestral lands and territories.