Data Services for Indigenous Scholarship and Sovereignty (DSISS): Report on the 2022 Workshop

Abstract

The Data Services for Indigenous Scholarship and Sovereignty (DSISS) project is deriving its understanding of how to implement CARE (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, and Ethics) through engagement with Indigenous scholars and data professionals invested in putting the principles into practice. While Research Data Services (RDS) tends to prioritize data access and sharing, DSISS emphasizes preservation and governance based on Indigenous scholars, community needs and goals. For this foundational workshop, participants were invited that represented the interests of both scholars and libraries. The guiding statement for the workshop was: "Stewarding Indigenous research data with CARE". Our approach to the CARE Principles in RDS prioritizes the values and norms of stakeholders within their specific contexts, in accordance with the concept of contextual integrity. Scholar participants represented the Indigenous methods and the data practices, needs, and aspirations of active Indigenous culture and language researchers, both Native and non-Native. Library and repository participants represented the perspectives of librarians, curators, and developers in data services in library and repository environments. The following workshop objectives provided direction in the development of the program and activities: (1) Identify scholar priorities based on research methods, data practices, and “contextual integrity” factors; (2) Identify challenges and tractable steps for libraries and repositories for supporting scholar priorities and the CARE principles; (3) Examine potential of Traditional Knowledge (TK) labels approach for application to Indigenous research data.