Indigenous data governance: A discussion

30 September 2024

Figure 1: Panellists and audience at Indigenous Data Governance: A discussion.
Image Source: Lewis James Bin Doraho

The Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA) hosted an Indigenous Data Governance panel discussion on 30 September 2024 at The University of Queensland (UQ) Anthropology Museum. This event brought together a panel of three speakers — Lesley Acres (UQ Library), Dr Rose Barrowcliffe (Macquarie University and LDaCA), and Robert McLellan (UQ and LDaCA). The discussion was facilitated by Grant Sarra.

Rose Barrowcliffe is Butchulla and is a post-doctoral research fellow at Macquarie University and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at UQ. Rose’s research examines the representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in archives and her postdoc specifically focusses on embedding Indigenous perspectives in metadata to support discoverability and access of records for Indigenous peoples. Rose is a Chief Investigator on the LDaCA project.

Robert dhurwain McLellan is a proud Gooreng Gooreng descendant of the Wide Bay region. He is a community researcher, an experienced Director, governance and engagement practitioner and is Program Manager for the Language Data Commons of Australia at the University of Queensland. Robert is a strong advocate for truth telling and speaking up for Aboriginal people’s rights and justice, economic advancement, and to ensure First Nations voices are authentically valued and embraced across all levels of society. He is passionate about revitalising Indigenous languages and building culturally inclusive, honourable, and cohesive communities.

Lesley Acres is a descendent of the Bidjara, Kairi tribes and Badugal people, Badu Island, Torres Strait Islands and she currently works with the University of Queensland Library as a Manager (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collections and Services). She worked at the State Library of Queensland Indigenous Services for nine years where she supported the operation and establishment of a network of Indigenous Knowledge Centres across Queensland, and has some twenty-seven years’ experience working at different levels of government in a wide range of Indigenous affairs.

Grant Sarra is a proud descendant of the Gooreng Gooreng people through his mother and a first-generation Italian through his father. As a highly strategic and analytical cultural leader, Grant has played a key role in designing and developing large-scale social and economic enterprises across Australia. His work has led to increased self-determination, operational success, and substantial additional funding for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations and communities.

The panellists explored topics of data accessibility and discoverability, Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP), and tools and methods for Indigenous Data Governance (ID-Gov). What follows is a summarised version of the panellists’ contributions organised around the main themes of the discussion. Key takeaways for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) sector workers looking to implement Indigenous Data Governance strategies in their collections were the importance of employing First Nations staff and working in respectful partnership with communities.

Supporting community access to data

The structural barriers for Indigenous communities accessing their archival materials are many. Rose Barrowcliffe reflected on these challenges, describing her entry into the archival sector:

I came into that space from my own personal experience of trying to access archival records that were about my Country, that were in an archive. The archive specifically was about my Country, and it was named using our language name of all things, yet we were told it wasn’t really relevant to us. It was owned and managed by an institution. (RB)

Rose went on to say that negative experiences of accessing materials held in large collecting institutions are common in communities, and identified two critical challenges for community access.

Firstly, most collecting institutions facilitate access to materials through slow, analogue processes. If used appropriately, however, new technologies and machine learning offer exciting opportunities for institutions to support discoverability and access in ways that have not been possible before. Of course, implementing these changes requires collecting institutions to be resourced for this kind of work, which should be done in partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

Secondly, some collecting institutions carry a misunderstanding of ‘Indigenous data’. Indigenous data is expansive and includes all data by, about, or for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It includes data collected, used or stored by any agency, department, laboratory, organisation, corporation, statutory body, university or research institute, conducted by, with, and about Indigenous people, communities, or their Country, and data that Indigenous communities have generated and maintained themselves. Embracing this definition requires structural change and a ‘letting go’ of some of the control which collecting institutions are constructed around.

A fuller understanding of Indigenous data opens up better pathways to recognise ICIP within collections. ICIP asserts that the authority for knowledge should remain with the original creators and holders of that knowledge.

Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property reasserts the authority of Indigenous people to say ‘It actually doesn’t matter where that knowledge sits and what form it takes, the knowledge and authority for that knowledge always remains with the Indigenous people that that has come from.’ (RB)

Importantly, Rose added that collecting institutions who engage with ICIP are better equipped to build frameworks for Indigenous Data Governance.

Figure 2: Dr Rose Barrowcliffe.
Image Source: Lewis James Bin Doraho

Strategies for implementing Indigenous Data Governance

Indigenous Data Sovereignty (ID-Sov) and ID-Gov are terms sometimes used interchangeably in the Australian public sector. Robert McLellan sees Indigenous Data Governance as “the mechanism that gives effect to those self-determined ideals [of ID-Sov].” Important pockets of work developing these ideals are happening nationally and internationally. How can collecting institutions meaningfully engage with and practically implement mechanisms for Indigenous Data Governance in their work?

Transparency of roles

One of the key steps that Robert identified for collecting institutions beginning to implement ID-Gov processes is transparency around different roles within the data ecosystem. Three roles are described by Rose et al (2024) in the article Indigenous Data Governance in Australia: Towards a National Framework:

• Data owners are those who have legal rights over the materials.
• Data custodians are those who provide storage and access services.
• Data stewards are those who process data in different ways.

Robert commented that:

When we talk about the archives, you’ve got, in many instances, a government who is asserting that it is all three of these things. (RM)

When Indigenous data has been collected as ‘archival records’, contemporary government departments and agencies acquire a practical authority associated with the role of data owner. The data is also held within their systems and under their care.

Rose added that:

The reason it’s so important is that it causes a lot of frustration when people don’t understand the different roles. If I think about the Queensland State Archives, they’re the custodians of state records, but they’re not the owners. The owner remains the state department or agency that created those records. (RB)

Being transparent about these roles will improve accountability in institutions and work to address frustration about access to materials in communities.

Figure 3: Robert McLellan.
Image Source: Lewis James Bin Doraho

Auditing and metadata enrichment

Lesley Acres’s work on the Elevating and respecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges and perspectives in UQ special and research collections project offered an inspiring example of the power of auditing and metadata enrichment for ID-Gov. Lesley and her team developed an audit methodology to survey materials and enrich their metadata. They refined the methodology using four collections that were identified as high priority:

• Vocabularies of four representative tribes of South Eastern Queensland (F3843)
• Oodgeroo Noonuccal Papers (UQFL84)
• Record of visit to mission stations (Norman Nelson Collection) (UQFL57)
• Caroline Kelly Papers (UQFL489)

The process uncovered gaps in the library’s metadata and was a means of:

Giving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people control over their own knowledges…Those four collections had never been audited. Back then, there were three of us — three Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women — who were looking at that information, and when we started, the first one we looked at was Caroline Tennant Kelly’s papers. By the time we finished auditing that collection, we found over 200 people listed in her fieldnotes, 47 we recognised as contributors. That collection was so significant in that we met with LinkUp QLD and they now use that collection to help connect their clients to ancestors. (LA)

Figure 4: Lesley Acres.
Image Source: Lewis James Bin Doraho

Getting out of your comfort zone

What I have said from the beginning is that you need to get out of your comfort zone, you have to be uncomfortable… You need to look at what your institution stands for, what it’s represented and what it’s done in the past. (LA)

It is important for collecting institutions to investigate their legacy. A core principle of ICIP is free, prior and informed consent, which can be difficult to determine for historical collections. In some cases we may know that permissions were not obtained, or that they were collected but not in ways that are current best practice. In other cases, we may not have any information about the provenance of and permissions surrounding historical materials. Collecting institutions can work to build partnerships and invest financial and staffing resources, where this is possible, into this reflective and investigative work. Lesley described this type of work as a “cultural learning journey.”

Employing First Nations staff

Another key takeaway from Lesley’s work at UQ Library is the need for Indigenous staff in collecting institutions. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be employed at all levels to contribute to, and lead, ID-Gov.

You need Indigenous staff. You cannot do this without us — because we have the knowledge, we have the understanding, we have the lived experiences. (LA)

For Robert, collecting institutions are built around Western governance frameworks, which are not equipped to handle Indigenous knowledge systems. Indigenous communities asking the question “How do I see myself reflected in this piece of digital infrastructure?” need to see representation within institutions. Rose posed an additional prompt for collectives working with data, asking the question, “Who is in the room having conversations about Indigenous data?”

Lived experience also plays an important role in decision making around technology and digital infrastructure for archival collections.

Technology is always an amazing opportunity if it’s used in the right way, but you have to have people who have the lived experience of using it the wrong way too. (RB)

Figure 5: Members of the audience engaging with the panellists.
Image Source: Lewis James Bin Doraho

Working with archives safely

The panellists highlighted two important groups impacted by ‘safety’ in collections work: archival workers themselves and Indigenous communities engaging with collecting institutions.

All three panellists shared experiences of collectively working through trauma in archival spaces.

I found my grandfather’s records when I was auditing collections that I had no knowledge about. (LA)

Lesley’s team at UQ Library developed a ‘Social and Emotional Wellbeing’ toolkit to support Indigenous and non-Indigenous library workers. The toolkit gave them space to “express, reflect, and digest.”

In relation to community safety, the panellists stressed that it is important for communities to decide their own capacity to engage with archival records and collecting institutions.

It’s important to remember that Indigenous Data Governance is Indigenous community members or Indigenous communities deciding for themselves. (RB)

When communities are not ready to engage with archival processes, this can be an indicator that now is not the right time to engage with those materials. For communities juggling competing concerns of housing, employment, health or education, collections and library services might be very low priority. As Lesley said, “Every consultation process will be different” and should go “at community’s pace.”

We are grateful to all three of the panellists for their theoretical and practical insights into Indigenous Data Governance, as well as to Grant Sarra for facilitating the discussion.