Whose Metadata?
Indigenous data sovereignty against unconditional openness
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
The national archives of Latin America hold thousands of hours of sound recordings of Indigenous songs and narratives collected by ethnographers in the twentieth century. Many of these recordings have now been digitised, and anyone anywhere in the world can listen to them. For the open access movement this is a victory. For some of the communities those songs came from, it is a fresh wound: a song that was sung only in a particular ceremony and for particular listeners is now available to everyone through a link.
In 2016 the FAIR principles said that data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. These principles are about data, not about people. In 2020 Stephanie Russo Carroll and her colleagues put forward the CARE principles: collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility and ethics. Their message is simple: openness is a decision, not a default. And the decision belongs to those whose knowledge it is.
In Decolonizing Methodologies (1999), Linda Tuhiwai Smith wrote that the word ‘research’ is one of the dirtiest words in the vocabulary of Indigenous peoples. The reason is clear: research has repeatedly meant taking knowledge away to places where its owners had no access to it. If today we hand that same knowledge back to everyone without permission, we complete the cycle of taking rather than breaking it.
My question concerns metadata. Even when a recording stays closed, its description is usually open and written in the archive’s language: Spanish, with categories chosen by the ethnographer. The Traditional Knowledge labels proposed by Local Contexts are one way of returning the community’s voice to this layer: a community can say that a work is for women only, is heard only in a certain season, or requires consultation before use.
My proposal is that in knowledge infrastructures, access should not be an on-off switch but a policy with a name and an owner: who, in what role, to which part. The description in the community’s language should be the primary record, and the archive’s description one of its translations. And no language model should read a work that a community has kept closed. Without these technical details, data sovereignty is no more than a slogan.
Questions for discussion
- Is there a fundamental conflict between the ideal of open access and Indigenous data sovereignty, or only a conflict of design?
- Who decides about access on behalf of a community, and how is that decision recorded?
- Should the description of a work be subject to access restrictions, like the work itself?
References
Carroll, Stephanie Russo, et al. 2020. “The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.” Data Science Journal 19: 43.
Wilkinson, Mark D., et al. 2016. “The FAIR Guiding Principles for Scientific Data Management and Stewardship.” Scientific Data 3: 160018.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books.
Kukutai, Tahu, and John Taylor, eds. 2016. Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Toward an Agenda. Canberra: ANU Press.
Local Contexts. Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels.