CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance

Making data easier to find does not settle who is entitled to use it. The September 2019 CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance place that distinction at the center of research and knowledge production. The original five-page statement credits the Research Data Alliance International Indigenous Data Sovereignty Interest Group and the Global Indigenous Data Alliance. CARE names collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility and ethics. These are connected commitments concerning Indigenous self-determination, rather than four qualities that a database can acquire independently of the people it concerns.

Open data and authority answer different questions

The opening includes data about peoples and territories collected by governments and institutions within its understanding of Indigenous data. That matters because an institution’s possession of a file does not, by itself, exhaust the political rights at stake. A record can describe land, knowledge or a community without being physically held by that community. The question therefore reaches beyond whether a researcher followed the repository’s download conditions.

GIDA’s explanation presents CARE as complementary to FAIR, not as a rejection of every form of sharing. FAIR concerns making data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. CARE asks how those activities relate to people and purpose. An openly reusable dataset can still reproduce an unequal relationship if outsiders determine its categories, purposes and rewards. Conversely, community authority need not mean preventing all research: it can enable uses that serve self-determined priorities. Openness and justice cannot be treated as interchangeable measures of success.

Consent does not end with the first collection

Authority to control connects consent with representation and stewardship. An individual agreeing to an interview does not automatically settle how a dataset may later identify a nation, describe a territory or be combined with another archive. This is a distinction between individual permission and collective governance, not a claim that collective rights erase an individual’s interests. It directs attention to who can decide about further uses and under which protocols.

The ethics section makes future use and possible future harm part of governance. Its attention to provenance, purpose and obligations in metadata is particularly concrete: a file’s conditions should not disappear when it travels. As an editorial application, an institution planning automated analysis should ask whether the proposed purpose remains within the relationship under which material was shared. Merely finding the file on the open web cannot answer that question. The principles do not supply one universal licensing formula or a technical test that resolves every dispute.

Benefit requires the capacity to govern

Responsibility includes reciprocal relationships, resources for Indigenous languages and worldviews, and support for skills and infrastructure. Those provisions resist a model in which the institution gains publications while a community receives only a closing presentation. The power to govern data depends partly on material capacity to create, interpret, secure and contest it. A promise to share benefits is incomplete if people cannot examine the work or alter its terms.

A feminist reading also needs to ask who can exercise that authority within a community. Women, people with caring responsibilities or those unable to disclose their circumstances may not have equal access to meetings, technical training or public representation. These are questions to investigate in applying the framework, not inequalities measured by the declaration. Indigenous self-determination should not be flattened into a generic appeal to stakeholder participation; neither should one spokesperson be assumed to settle every internal disagreement.

The Feminist Data Manifest-No helps examine when people need to refuse extraction; the Design Justice Network Principles focuses attention on decision-making and control after a project. CARE adds a specific account of Indigenous rights, collective authority and obligations through time. Reading them together can sharpen a governance question without making their histories or political claims identical: who retains the power to define a legitimate use after information has left its original setting?