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.