Indigenous data governance: CARE Principles in…

The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance were published in 2019 by the Global Indigenous Data Alliance (GIDA), expressing four principles – Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics – designed to sit alongside the FAIR principles when research data involves Indigenous Peoples, communities, lands, or knowledge. This post offers an introductory map of the CARE landscape in 2026, the relationships among the regional Indigenous data sovereignty movements that informed it, and the operational artefacts that researchers and institutions are using to apply CARE in practice. We write as outsiders to these traditions and rely on the published statements of Indigenous-led organisations; what follows is descriptive, not prescriptive, and any institution implementing CARE should engage directly with the communities whose data is in question.

The CARE Principles

The CARE Principles, drafted by Stephanie Russo Carroll, Maui Hudson, Tahu Kukutai, and colleagues through the GIDA, articulate that data governance is not only a question of technical FAIR-ness but of who has authority over data, who benefits, and what ethical commitments are owed. The four pillars are:

Collective benefit. Data ecosystems should be designed and function in ways that enable Indigenous Peoples to derive benefit from the data. Inclusive development and innovation; improved governance and citizen engagement; equitable outcomes.
Authority to control. Indigenous Peoples’ rights and interests in Indigenous data must be recognised and their authority to control such data must be empowered. Recognising rights and interests; data for governance; governance of data.
Responsibility. Those working with Indigenous data have a responsibility to share how those data are used. Capability for Indigenous communities; positive relationships; appropriate care for data.
Ethics. Indigenous Peoples’ rights and wellbeing should be the primary concern at all stages of the data life cycle. Minimising harm and maximising benefit; justice; future use.

The principles are deliberately at the level of governance commitments, not the level of technical implementation. Their operationalisation depends on engagement with specific communities and their own governance institutions.

The regional movements that preceded CARE

CARE did not emerge in isolation. It is the international synthesis of regional Indigenous data-sovereignty movements that had been building governance frameworks for years.

OCAP® Principles (Canada)

The OCAP® Principles – Ownership, Control, Access, Possession – were articulated in 1998 by the First Nations Information Governance Centre (FNIGC) and have governed First Nations data in Canada since. OCAP is a registered trademark of FNIGC; the principles assert that First Nations have collective ownership of their information, control over how it is collected and used, access to it, and physical possession of it. FNIGC operates training programmes that researchers working with First Nations data are expected to complete; multiple Canadian Tri-Agency Indigenous research policies reference OCAP explicitly.

Te Mana Raraunga (Aotearoa New Zealand)

Te Mana Raraunga is the Māori Data Sovereignty Network, established 2015. Te Mana Raraunga articulates Māori data sovereignty rooted in tino rangatiratanga (self-determination) under Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The Network’s foundational statements include the 2018 Principles of Māori Data Sovereignty, which were among the documents informing CARE. The relationship between Te Mana Raraunga’s Māori-specific frame and the international CARE frame is one of mutual recognition; Te Mana Raraunga operates with the authority of Māori governance, not as an instance of an international standard.

Maiam nayri Wingara (Australia)

Maiam nayri Wingara, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Sovereignty Collective, was established in 2017 and articulated principles of Indigenous data sovereignty for Australia in 2018. The collective’s work emphasises the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to control data about their people, communities, lands, and waters. The Australian Indigenous Health-Welfare Data Working Group and several federal agencies’ Indigenous data policies reference Maiam nayri Wingara’s frame.

Other regional movements

Indigenous data sovereignty movements with their own governance frameworks operate in many other contexts, including Sámi Council work in Sapmi, Native American data sovereignty organising in the United States (the United South and Eastern Tribes Tribal Health Program and others), Indigenous Latin American collectives, and others. The CARE Principles refer to and respect this plurality; they are not a substitute for any of these regional frameworks but a complement at international scale.

How CARE relates to FAIR

CARE and FAIR are designed to coexist. FAIR addresses technical interoperability and data reusability; CARE addresses governance authority and ethical commitments. A dataset can be both FAIR and CARE-compliant; a dataset can also be FAIR while failing CARE (technically open data that violates community authority); a dataset can be CARE-compliant while not openly FAIR (community-controlled data with restricted access in line with community decision).

The GIDA’s published positioning is that CARE precedes FAIR when Indigenous data is involved: the questions of authority, benefit, responsibility, and ethics must be settled before the questions of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability are operationalised. A FAIR-without-CARE approach to Indigenous data has historically reproduced harm; CARE asks researchers and institutions to do the governance work first.

Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) is the international human-rights principle, articulated in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP, 2007) and widely adopted, that Indigenous Peoples must be consulted and consent obtained before any project affecting them, their lands, or their resources proceeds. FPIC applies to research projects involving Indigenous communities, knowledge, or data. The four elements – free (without coercion), prior (sufficiently in advance), informed (with adequate information), consent (with a community decision-making process) – are all substantive.

FPIC operationalisation depends on the community in question. Some communities have formal protocols and Indigenous Research Ethics committees; others negotiate consent through community-leader engagement; others may decline participation. In all cases the timing of the consent process matters: FPIC sought after a project has been designed is generally not FPIC; FPIC must precede project design or at minimum precede any irreversible step.

Traditional Knowledge Labels and Local Contexts

Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels and Biocultural (BC) Labels, developed by the Local Contexts initiative led by Jane Anderson and Kim Christen, are metadata labels that can be attached to datasets, archival records, or collection items to communicate community-defined permissions, attribution requirements, and cultural protocols. TK Labels include labels for attribution, non-commercial use, outreach, family or clan use, ceremonial use, and others; BC Labels cover biocultural specimens and data with similar granularity.

The labels are not legal instruments by themselves; they are governance signals issued by communities that researchers and institutions are expected to respect. Several repositories (notably the Mukurtu CMS platform, also developed by Christen and colleagues) integrate TK and BC Labels natively. By 2026 several major museums, archives, and a small but growing number of institutional research repositories support TK Labels at the record level.

Practical implementation for institutions

An institution beginning to operationalise CARE alongside its FAIR practice would, in the broadest terms, attend to:

Recognising the priority of community authority over data concerning Indigenous peoples, lands, and knowledge, and reflecting this in institutional research-data policy.
Engaging with communities through their own governance institutions early, with FPIC understood as a substantive process not a checkbox.
Adopting the relevant regional principles where applicable (OCAP in Canada, Te Mana Raraunga principles in Aotearoa, Maiam nayri Wingara in Australia, etc.) rather than treating CARE as a substitute.
Supporting researchers in their institution with training, ethics-board capacity, and community-engagement resources; not pushing the burden onto Indigenous researchers within the institution.
Implementing technical support for community-defined permissions (TK Labels, access-control models that respect community decision) in institutional repositories.
Reporting transparently to communities about how data is used, with channels for community-initiated change to data status.

Several institutional CRIS and repository vendors have begun adding CARE-aware functionality (TK Label support, community-attribution fields, access-control models that respect community-defined permissions). The CASRAI Indigenous data CARE domain tracks adoption.

The integrity question

The honest position for non-Indigenous researchers and institutions is that operationalising CARE well requires deferring to Indigenous-led governance, not designing one’s own “CARE-compliant” system. The literature is consistent on this point: the CARE Principles were developed by Indigenous-led organisations and their authoritative interpretation rests with those organisations and the communities they serve. The CARE Principles are not a checklist that an external institution can mark itself against and self-certify on.

The implication for institutions and researchers is that the CARE work is relational and ongoing rather than one-time and administrative. The investment is in long-term partnerships with communities, capacity-building within Indigenous research leadership, and a willingness to share authority over how data flows into and out of institutional systems. The technical artefacts (TK Labels, FPIC processes, Mukurtu integrations) support the relational work; they do not substitute for it.

Where to learn more

For non-Indigenous researchers and institutions beginning this work, the foundational reading is the GIDA’s published statement of the CARE Principles, alongside the regional movements’ own foundational documents (FNIGC on OCAP, Te Mana Raraunga on Māori data sovereignty, Maiam nayri Wingara on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander data sovereignty). The Carroll, Hudson, Kukutai, et al. 2020 paper in Data Science Journal is the foundational scholarly reference for CARE. The Local Contexts initiative’s documentation is the foundational reference for TK and BC Labels. The Mukurtu CMS documentation is the foundational technical reference for community-controlled repository implementation.

References

Carroll, Hudson, Kukutai, et al., The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance (Data Science Journal, 2020). GIDA, CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance (founding statement, 2019). First Nations Information Governance Centre, The First Nations Principles of OCAP® (foundational and ongoing publications). Te Mana Raraunga, Principles of Māori Data Sovereignty (2018). Maiam nayri Wingara, Indigenous Data Sovereignty Communique (2018). UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). Anderson and Christen, work on Traditional Knowledge Labels and the Local Contexts initiative (ongoing).