Data Sovereignty in Archaeological and Anthropological Research

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Social Justice in Native North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

While collaboration has started to become an expected part of research with Native communities, prioritizing the needs and wants of Native communities has yet to be normalized within academic research. In this session, we will discuss how principles of "data sovereignty" might be applied to archaeological and anthropological research and how the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) has implemented these principles in our research around repatriation and the location of the remains of children who died at U.S. Indian boarding schools. Data sovereignty means that indigenous nations have the right to determine how their "data" is collected, stored, shared, and interpreted. While we don’t always think of material objects or the remains of ancestors as "data," these items carry knowledge, and Native nations should decide how this information is managed. Sometimes, the decisions indigenous nations make about data run contrary to what scholars expect or what is beneficial to their careers. For these situations in particular, it is crucial that academic fields adopt best practices where Native nations define their own wants and needs. We will discuss what the development of such principles might look like and how this has guided NABS research.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Social Justice in Native North American Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25646