Why Indigenous people are fighting for data sovereignty

Abigail Echo-Hawk is tired of working with data sets that erase urban Indigenous people. 

Echo-Hawk, who is a citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, is the executive vice-chair at the Seattle Indian Health Board and director of the board's Urban Indian Health Institute. She regularly combs through large data sets from county, state or federal governments that weren't collected with Indigenous people in mind or simply don't count them at all. 

That's why it's important that Indigenous communities gather their own data, in their own way, she said. This is Indigenous data sovereignty. 

"As individual nations … we have the ability to govern our own data. That means how it is gathered, how it is analyzed and how it is shared," Echo-Hawk told Unreserved host Rosanna Deerchild. 

Indigenous communities are doing just this, on both sides of the Medicine Line. They're taking back control of their data and using data to tell their histories.

"We use information to build the strength of our communities, not to tell people how bad off they are," Echo-Hawk said. 

Echo-Hawk and her organization call this erasure of Indigenous people a "data crisis." She says it lets governments off the hook for their treaty obligations to provide resources and supports to Indigenous nations. 

In 2018, Echo-Hawk's organization published a report on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in the United States. She and her co-author, Annita Lucchesi, gathered information from law enforcement in 71 cities across the country. 

"When we looked at the law enforcement databases, we found that they weren't even capturing the race and ethnicity of our relatives when they went missing and murdered," she said. 

"So we were able to point out this discrepancy and the fact that it allowed for this crisis to become invisible, which meant they weren't investing the resources that were necessary to ensure the safety and well-being of Indigenous women and girls in the United States."

Echo-Hawk said she and her organization were able to make recommendations for where changes needed to be made in those databases. They also advocated for policy change, leading to two pieces of national legislation — the Not Invisible Act and Savanna's Act — in the United States, she said. 

"The data was key for us to be able to say, hey, this is what the problem is, this is how you need to do it better and this is the justice our people deserve."

Indigenous data sovereignty is about ensuring Indigenous people are recognized in data and are part of — or in control of — their own data collection. But it's also about recovering stories, memories and information that were taken from Indigenous people and their communities. 

Laura Arndt is the lead of the Survivors' Secretariat in Six Nations, Ont., which is working to make sure residential school data is held and preserved by Indigenous communities.