Data is kin: 9 ideas reshaping Indigenous-led conservation
Picture a conservation team at work on Indigenous land. Over a season, they map a river, log a rare plant, write down an elder's account of where the water used to run and mark a cultural site on a shared map. By the end, they hold a small archive about a community and its home.
That archive holds real power, and for a long time, the communities it described had little say over it. Who owns it? Who can share it, sell it or feed it to an AI model later? Conservation has been slow to ask. Now, a growing field has an answer, and it is changing how good conservation gets done. The field is called Indigenous data sovereignty. It focuses on the right of Indigenous peoples to govern information about their lands, communities and knowledge.
This idea comes with clear rules. Here are nine of them, drawn from the Indigenous scholars and communities who built them. Much of it is taught at the Conservation Futures Academy at ASU, a professional learning program for people already working in conservation and part of the Rob Walton School of Conservation Futures, where the partnership course is led with Indigenous faculty.
1. A conservation project is also a data project
Treat data as part of the work itself, as central as the fieldwork around it. Conservation runs on information: satellite images, species counts, a GPS point on a sacred site and the story of a coast before the storms changed it. All of it has authors, and all of it has subjects. On Indigenous lands, the subject is usually a community with the right to decide what happens next. Once you treat a map as a relationship, this question moves to the center of the work.
2. Indigenous data sovereignty extends self-determination to information
Indigenous data sovereignty is the right of Indigenous peoples to govern data about their communities, lands and knowledge. That means deciding how it is collected, stored, used and shared. It takes a right that Tribal Nations have always held, the right to govern their own affairs, and applies it to data. Traci Morris, who leads work on Tribal digital sovereignty at ASU, puts it in striking terms: "If research is ceremony, then data is sacred. Indeed, data is kin." That line moves data out of the language of assets and into the language of relatives, and that shift is the whole idea.
Global Futures Professor of Indigenous Conservation Melissa Nelson, carries the shift down to the level of grammar. In "The honorable harvest of Indigenous data," she draws on Anishinaabeg language and concepts to reframe what gathering data is. One root sense of the word "data," she points out, is "to dare to give," which raises a question few research plans ever ask: is data taken, or is it given? Her answer runs through the honorable harvest, the instructions many land-based peoples follow when gathering from the Earth. Ask permission and abide by the answer. Take only what is given. Never take more than half. Give thanks, and give something back. Applied to a conservation dataset, they become a field method and an ethical practice.
3. "Open" data has limits
The open-data movement gave science a useful habit: make data easy to find and reuse. For Indigenous communities, though, "open" can mean losing control of their information again. The CARE (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics) Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, built through the Global Indigenous Data Alliance, hold the line. They ask that data serve Collective benefit, that communities keep the Authority to control it and that those who hold it act with Responsibility and Ethics. CARE works alongside open data, and it keeps a community's authority to decide first.
4. Consent has to continue over time
Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) comes from the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). People often treat it as a form to sign before fieldwork starts. It reaches further than that. Consent to collect data covers that collection alone, each potential following step needs its own consent, whether it involves publishing it, selling it or feeding the data to a model years later. Ownership, Control, Access and Possession (OCAP) stay with the community, down to where the data lives and who can open it. The OCAP principles, from the First Nations Information Governance Centre, make this plain. The test is simple: does the community still hold the decision?
5. A flattering number can still be extractive
For 20 years, people have said Indigenous peoples protect 80% of the planet's biodiversity. In 2024, researchers in Nature traced that number to a small study of seven forests. It described one local place, yet it traveled the world as a global fact and turned up in more than 300 documents. Their warning is worth keeping: a number about Indigenous land, made and shared by outsiders, can hurt the people it means to praise. Good intentions start the work, and governance makes data fair.
6. Indigenous Knowledge is a present-tense science
Conservation often treats Indigenous Knowledge as the past, as heritage to admire, when it is a living science that people test across generations and add to today. One method, called Two-Eyed Seeing, takes it seriously by holding Indigenous Knowledge and Western science side by side and looking through both at once. The goal is to let each keep its own authority, so that together they reveal more than either shows on its own.
7. Partnership and data are two different skills
Here is a distinction most training blurs: governing the data is one skill, and building the relationship that creates the data is another. The history helps explain why. For a century, conservation practiced fortress conservation, protecting land by removing the Indigenous peoples who had cared for it. The fix is partnership, with communities helping govern the work from the start. Still, a team can get the partnership right in every meeting and then sign a data deal that hands a vendor rights to images of a Nation's sacred sites. The relationship was sound, but the data governance failed. A whole partner respects your community and your data alike.
8. The people closest to the land should help govern the work on it
The Rob Walton School of Conservation Futures is built on this idea. Its land acknowledgment names the 22 Native Nations whose care of this place makes the work possible, including the Akimel O'odham and Piipaash communities. The School builds its Indigenous programs with Indigenous faculty, and the knowledge in them belongs to the people who carry it. The course on partnership is led by Melissa Nelson (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), Global Futures Professor of Indigenous Conservation, who brought in Indigenous Education Specialist Alycia de Mesa of the Firekeepers Initiative at the Labriola National American Indian Data Center. De Mesa, co-principal investigator on the initiative, co-designed the curriculum and teaches the data sovereignty work, which draws on her research in Tribal knowledge sovereignty, Indigenous futures and emerging technologies.
In fall 2025, the first cohort of the Conservation Futures Academy met near Phoenix to celebrate its first graduates. More than 150 people applied and 66 enrolled, from North and South America, the Pacific and Africa, most of them Indigenous or partners in Indigenous-led conservation. The talk that night went straight to this essay's theme: how to hold community knowledge and data tools like GIS in the same hand. De Mesa said the future of conservation depends on "how we listen, to each other, to the land."
9. You can learn to practice this
These ideas are learnable, and two courses at the Conservation Futures Academy teach them from opposite ends. Indigenous Knowledges and Data Sovereignty is self-paced, built for the people who design projects and write data agreements. It is organized around CARE, OCAP and FPIC, so learners can spot extractive data before it is shared. Indigenous Conservation Collaborations is an eight-week group course for the people who build the partnerships, and it ends with a plan each person takes into a live project. Both count toward the Global Conservation Leadership certificate. Together they teach the lesson this field keeps relearning: listen first, protect the record and leave the authority where it belongs.
Learn more at the Conservation Futures Academy.