CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: Local Contexts

  • OCAP and Indigenous data governance in practice: ownership, control, access and possession

    Data about people is never neutral, and for Indigenous peoples the question of who holds authority over that data carries particular weight. Historically, research involving Indigenous communities was too often done to them rather than with them: data was collected by outside researchers, taken away, analysed and published with little regard for the communities’ own authority over knowledge about themselves, and sometimes to their detriment. The principles of Ownership, Control, Access and Possession — known as OCAP® — were developed by and for First Nations in Canada to reverse that pattern and assert collective self-determination over data. This article looks at how OCAP works in practice and how it relates to the wider movement for Indigenous data governance, drawing on the Indigenous data and CARE domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.

    What the four principles assert

    OCAP names four related forms of collective authority. Ownership refers to the relationship of a First Nations community to its cultural knowledge, data and information, asserting that the community owns this information collectively in the way an individual owns their personal information. Control asserts the right of First Nations to control how information about them is collected, used and managed throughout the entire research lifecycle — from the framing of a study to the use of its findings. Access means that First Nations must have access to information and data about themselves, wherever it is held, and the right to decide who else may access it. Possession refers to the physical control of data: the principle that data should, where possible, be held by the community itself, as the most concrete mechanism for asserting and protecting ownership. Together the four move authority from the outside researcher or institution to the community whose data is at stake. They are principles of collective rights, which distinguishes them from data-protection regimes built primarily around individual privacy.

    OCAP as self-determination

    It is important to understand OCAP not merely as a set of data-handling rules but as an expression of self-determination. The principles assert that First Nations — not governments, universities or external researchers — should decide how data about their communities is gathered and used. Stewardship of OCAP has been led by First Nations themselves, notably through the First Nations Information Governance Centre (FNIGC), which maintains the principles and supports their application. This community ownership is itself part of the point: OCAP is not a code handed down by outsiders but principles developed by First Nations to govern research on their own terms. Respecting OCAP means engaging with communities as governing partners, not as subjects.

    How OCAP complements CARE and FAIR

    OCAP sits within a broader international movement for Indigenous data sovereignty, and it complements two other frameworks readers may know. The FAIR principles — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable — are concerned with the technical qualities that make data useful and shareable, but they are largely silent on people, power and purpose. The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance — Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility and Ethics — were articulated to fill that gap, insisting that data practice serve Indigenous peoples’ interests and respect their authority. CARE and FAIR are explicitly designed to work together: FAIR ensures data is well-managed and reusable, while CARE ensures that reuse is governed ethically and in the interests of the people the data concerns. OCAP can be seen as a concrete, community-developed articulation of these governance commitments for First Nations specifically — the operational expression, in the Canadian First Nations context, of the authority and benefit that CARE asserts in principle. The frameworks reinforce rather than compete with one another.

    Indigenous data sovereignty as a global movement

    This is not a Canadian phenomenon alone. Indigenous data sovereignty networks have formed around the world, asserting the rights of Indigenous peoples to govern data about their communities, lands and cultures. In Australia, Maiam nayri Wingara, the Indigenous Data Sovereignty Collective, has articulated principles and priorities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander data. Similar movements exist in Aotearoa New Zealand, the United States and elsewhere. What unites them is a shared insistence that the people a dataset is about should have authority over it — a principle with obvious resonance well beyond Indigenous contexts, but with particular urgency given the history of how Indigenous data has been treated.

    Making governance visible: TK and BC Labels

    Principles need practical mechanisms if they are to shape what actually happens to data. Local Contexts provides one of the most important: Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels and Biocultural (BC) Labels. These are digital labels that can be attached to data, collections and records to communicate the community-specific provenance, protocols and permissions associated with Indigenous knowledge — signalling, for example, that material is associated with particular protocols around its use, attribution or seasonal sharing. The labels make governance visible and machine-readable in the metadata that travels with data, so that a researcher or repository encountering the material knows that community authority and protocols apply, and what they are. They turn the abstract claim “this community has rights over this data” into a concrete signal embedded in the record itself.

    A consistent vocabulary for governed data

    For Indigenous data governance to be respected across repositories, institutions and systems, the way governance is described must mean the same thing everywhere — what a label signals, what permissions apply, what authority governs a record. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary works towards: a shared vocabulary so that governance information attached to data is honoured wherever the data travels. And because research conducted with and for communities involves genuine contribution from community members and stewards, that work can be recognised within the same frameworks used for all contribution, such as the CRediT taxonomy and its full set of contribution roles. OCAP, CARE and the labelling systems built around them share a single conviction: that data about people belongs, in a deep sense, to those people — and that good research practice means honouring that authority rather than overriding it.

  • CARE alongside FAIR: Indigenous data governance and the TK Labels

    The FAIR principles have a default direction of travel: toward openness. Make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable, and the implicit aspiration is that data should flow as freely as good metadata allows. For a great deal of research that aspiration is exactly right. But for data about Indigenous peoples, lands, and knowledge, “open by default” can reproduce the very extraction that Indigenous communities have spent generations resisting. The CARE Principles exist to address this, and the key to understanding them is that they sit alongside FAIR, not against it. This article sets out how, drawing on the Indigenous data care domain.

    FAIR is about data; CARE is about people

    The cleanest way to grasp the relationship is this: FAIR is concerned with the technical properties of data, while CARE is concerned with the rights and interests of the people the data are about. FAIR asks whether data can be found and reused; CARE asks whether they should be, by whom, under what authority, and to whose benefit. The two are complementary axes, and the considered position of the Indigenous data sovereignty movement is not to reject FAIR but to insist that FAIR is necessary and insufficient on its own. A fuller treatment of the relationship is at FAIR vs CARE.

    CARE stands for four principles: Collective benefit (data ecosystems should be designed so Indigenous peoples benefit), Authority to control (their rights to govern data about them must be recognised), Responsibility (those working with the data are accountable for supporting self-determination), and Ethics (the rights and wellbeing of Indigenous peoples are the primary concern). They were articulated by the Global Indigenous Data Alliance (GIDA) as a complement to FAIR, and are now widely cited in research-data policy.

    The foundational concepts

    CARE rests on a small set of concepts that need to be precise, because the whole framework turns on them.

    • Indigenous data is data about Indigenous peoples, their lands, resources, or knowledge — a broad category that includes administrative data, environmental data on Indigenous territories, and records of Traditional Knowledge.
    • Indigenous data sovereignty is the right of Indigenous peoples to govern the collection, ownership, and application of data created by, about, and for their communities. It is the principle from which the rest follows.
    • Free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) is consent given freely, before activities begin, and with full information — the foundational consent standard for research engaging Indigenous communities, and distinct from the individual informed consent familiar from biomedical ethics in that it often operates at the level of the community.

    A recurring feature is that consent and benefit are frequently collective rather than individual. A community may hold rights in knowledge or data as a collective, which is why collective consent and a benefit-sharing agreement are central rather than peripheral.

    The TK Labels: governance made machine-readable

    Principles need mechanisms, and the most influential mechanism for expressing Indigenous governance in digital systems is the Traditional Knowledge (TK) Label, developed by Local Contexts. A TK Label is a digital label attached to cultural material or data that communicates the community’s protocols for its use — who may use it, in what contexts, with what attributions and restrictions. The companion Biocultural (BC) Label serves the same function for biocultural materials, such as data tied to genetic resources and the lands they come from.

    The significance of the TK and BC Labels is that they make community authority legible to systems. Where a Creative Commons licence expresses a rightsholder’s permissions in a form repositories and search engines understand, the TK Labels express a community’s protocols in a comparable, attachable form — turning “authority to control” from a principle into metadata that travels with the data. They do not assert copyright; they assert protocol, the kind of governance conventional licensing was never built to carry.

    A TK Label does not lock data away. It does something more subtle: it tells anyone who encounters the data what the community of origin expects of them, moving the default from “open unless restricted” to “governed by those it belongs to”.

    The international architecture

    Indigenous data sovereignty is a global movement with a coordinated structure, which makes clear this is settled community infrastructure, not a fringe concern. GIDA is the global coordinating body. Beneath it sit established networks: Te Mana Raraunga, the Māori Data Sovereignty Network in Aotearoa New Zealand; Maiam nayri Wingara, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Sovereignty collective in Australia; and the US Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network. Connected to this, the Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit-sharing, under the Convention on Biological Diversity, provides a legal anchor where genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge are involved.

    Why this belongs in a metadata standard

    It would be easy to file CARE under “ethics” and leave it out of the structured-data conversation. That would be a mistake. The whole point of the TK Labels is that governance can and should be expressed as metadata that systems carry and honour. A repository that holds Indigenous data, a CRIS that records a project engaging a community, an access-control policy in a DMP — each needs vocabulary for collective consent, community-controlled access, and benefit-sharing if it is to represent CARE faithfully rather than flattening it into the open-by-default assumptions of FAIR-only infrastructure. CARE is, among other things, a metadata requirement — and it sits within a broader reorientation that includes Indigenous research methodologies and approaches such as two-eyed seeing, which bring Indigenous and Western knowledge systems into view together without subordinating one to the other.

    Where shared vocabulary fits

    The terms here carry deep significance and are easy to misuse — FPIC is not the same as individual consent, Indigenous data sovereignty is a right not a courtesy, and a TK Label is protocol rather than copyright. A shared, federated vocabulary that defines these precisely, pointing to GIDA for the CARE Principles and to Local Contexts for the TK and BC Labels, lets infrastructure honour Indigenous governance rather than override it. Supplying that definitional layer, and placing CARE alongside FAIR rather than beneath it, is the role the CASRAI dictionary is designed to play.

    What to do now

    For researchers engaging Indigenous communities: work to FPIC and collective-consent standards, agree benefit-sharing, and apply TK or BC Labels where the community directs. For repositories and systems: support the TK and BC Labels and the vocabulary of community-controlled access, not just open licences. For standards work: treat CARE as a first-class complement to FAIR, federating to GIDA and Local Contexts for the authoritative content.

    Related reading

  • US Tribal data sovereignty: Indigenous data governance in the United States

    Indigenous data sovereignty is often introduced through the well-known frameworks of other countries — Canada’s OCAP® principles, Aotearoa New Zealand’s Te Mana Raraunga — but the United States has its own distinct and rapidly maturing movement, grounded in the unique legal and political standing of tribal nations. The federally recognised tribes in the US are not merely communities or ethnic groups; they are sovereign nations with their own governments, a status affirmed in treaties, statute and case law. That sovereignty has profound implications for research data. When data is collected about a tribe’s people, lands, health or knowledge, the question of who governs it is, for tribal nations, an extension of nationhood itself. This article looks at how Indigenous data governance is taking shape in the United States, drawing on the Indigenous data and CARE domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.

    Sovereignty as the foundation

    The defining feature of the US context is that data sovereignty rests on political sovereignty. Tribal nations possess inherent rights of self-government, and from that flows a claim that is stronger than a request for ethical treatment: the right to govern data about their citizens, territories and affairs as a matter of jurisdiction. This reframes the conversation. Where a researcher might ordinarily think of data governance in terms of consent and confidentiality, working with tribal data means recognising a nation’s authority — its right to set the terms on which research about its people is conducted, and to decide what is collected, how it is used, and whether it is shared. Indigenous data sovereignty in the US is, at root, the application of self-determination to the information age.

    The United States Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network

    A central force in articulating and advancing this agenda is the United States Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network (USIDSN). It serves as a network and resource for tribes, Native organisations and researchers, working to ensure that data for and about Indigenous peoples and nations is used in ways that advance Indigenous self-determination. USIDSN sits within a wider international movement — alongside the Global Indigenous Data Alliance — but its focus is the specific US landscape of tribal nations and the federal and state systems that collect data about them. Its work includes raising awareness, supporting tribes in asserting governance over their data, and informing policy so that statistics and research about Native peoples reflect their priorities rather than being done to them. The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), the oldest and largest national organisation representing tribal nations, has likewise adopted resolutions supporting Indigenous data sovereignty, lending the movement weight at the highest representative level.

    Governing genomic and biological data

    Nowhere are the stakes higher than in genomic and biological research, where the history of extractive, harmful practice is most acute. The Native BioData Consortium is a notable response: a non-profit research institute led by Indigenous scientists and governed by Native people, established to keep biological samples and genomic data under Indigenous control. Its existence answers a long-standing problem — that biological materials and the data derived from them have too often left Native communities, to be stored, analysed and benefited from elsewhere, with little return for the people they came from. By creating Indigenous-governed infrastructure for biological data, the Consortium demonstrates a constructive form of sovereignty: not merely objecting to misuse, but building the institutions that allow research to proceed on Indigenous terms, with governance and benefit-sharing built in from the start.

    The CARE Principles in the US context

    Underpinning much of this work are the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance — Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility and Ethics. CARE was developed to complement the FAIR principles, which make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable but say nothing about power, history or whose interests data serves. CARE supplies what FAIR omits. In the US setting, Authority to control maps directly onto tribal sovereignty: it affirms the right of Indigenous peoples to govern data about them. Collective benefit insists that data ecosystems be designed so that Indigenous nations derive benefit, not merely outside researchers. Responsibility and Ethics require that those working with Indigenous data do so in ways accountable to, and respectful of, the communities concerned. Applied together, FAIR and CARE allow data to be both well-managed and justly governed.

    Local Contexts and the practical tools

    Principles need instruments, and one of the most influential practical tools is Local Contexts, an initiative that provides Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels and Biocultural (BC) Labels. These labels attach to data and collections to communicate community-specific provenance, protocols and permissions — signalling, in a machine-readable and human-readable way, that material originates with a particular community and carries expectations about how it may be used. The Labels do not replace law or negotiation, but they make Indigenous interests visible in the metadata layer, travelling with data into archives and databases that would otherwise strip away that context. They are a concrete answer to a hard question: how do you carry a community’s authority and cultural protocols alongside data as it moves through systems designed without those protocols in mind?

    A consistent vocabulary for Indigenous data governance

    For Indigenous governance to be honoured across institutions, funders and repositories, the terms involved — governance status, access conditions, provenance, community protocols — must be described consistently, or a label or condition recognised in one system will be lost in another. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary works towards: a shared vocabulary so that the metadata expressing Indigenous data governance is understood the same way wherever it travels. And because conducting research with and for Indigenous communities is genuine, recognisable contribution, the work involved can be described using the same framework as any other — the CRediT taxonomy and its full set of contribution roles, set within sound research administration. US tribal data sovereignty is not a regional variation on a theme; it is self-determination applied to data, and the institutions Native nations are building show what that looks like in practice.