Indigenous Approaches to Digital Infrastructure

Earlier this year, Data & Society proudly welcomed Tiara Roxanne as a postdoctoral fellow. In this blog post, Roxanne introduces their approach to a vital question: Can a digital infrastructure be trustworthy from an Indigenous perspective? Throughout the course of their fellowship, Roxanne will work with the key concepts of sacredity, Indigenous cosmology, and storytelling, bringing them into conversation with an evolving literature on trust and safety in digital infrastructures. Roxanne uses a methodology that comes to define these concepts through practice, grounding their explorations of trustworthiness in the everyday and in vital practices of building Indigenous knowledge, sovereignty, and data. Their contribution will help build a networked community of Indigenous practitioners and a corpus of scholarship in Indigenous approaches to data and trust. Roxanne’s crucial work extends Data & Society’s approach to data through, as they write, “decolonial gestures” that refuse to “appropriate ritual, tradition, or cosmology” and instead center Indigenous safety in data-centric worlds. <a href="https://medium.com/datasociety-points/indigenous-approaches-to-digital-infrastructure-9d8fc1d53801">Click Here</a>