The Protection That Tribal Nations’ Data Needs

Source Domain: www.governing.com

Public agencies are moving quickly to adopt artificial intelligence. Federal guidance now encourages agencies to use and procure AI tools, while state and local governments are increasingly experimenting with systems that are already shaping public services, records, research and decision-making.

These efforts may have the intention of improving governance. But when it comes to cultural knowledge and data, AI technologies pose important questions about tribal nations’ sovereignty and governing authority that are too often overlooked by other government actors.

For tribal nations, these are old questions: whether outside institutions will once again decide how Native knowledge is used or if they will recognize tribal nations’ authority. Too often Native peoples’ records, policies, archives and public narratives were collected to serve colonial authority rather than Native self-determination.

AI poses a similar threat. It can repurpose records collected without consent. It can absorb cultural materials into systems built for outside purposes. It can produce outputs that sound authoritative while distorting the realities of distinct tribal nations.

That does not mean Native peoples are approaching AI only with fear. At the recent U.S. Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Governance Summit in Tucson, I heard Native leaders, scholars, technologists and community advocates asking not simply whether AI should be embraced or rejected but how tribal nations can govern it.

That begins with a simple premise: Native knowledge is not just data. It spans government records, language materials, photographs, songs, oral histories and more. In many cases, researchers collected these materials under conditions that would not meet any serious standard of informed consent today.

Now, AI systems scrape this information across many communities. But the Native data that these systems collect raises a distinct sovereignty…

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