Day 0 Masterclass Debrief — USA Indigenous Data Sovereignty Summit
from Relational Science Hosted by WN. Flores and Sierra Hicks
What if sovereignty and sustainability are not two different words — but one? In the Hawaiian language, Ea holds both. That single insight anchors this conversation, recorded live from the media center of the USA Indigenous Data Sovereignty Summit. WarīNkwī K. Flores is joined by Keolu Fox (Hawaiʻi), Yousuf Rajput, and Eric Dawson — co-founders of Earthframe, a sovereign AI and low-scale compute infrastructure initiative — to unpack what emerged from the Indigenous Data Sovereignty Masterclass. Together they trace the concept of relational infrastructure: the idea that how we compute, where our data lives, and who governs it are not technical questions — they are relational ones. Like farming, like food systems, like the land itself. When you outsource your computation to a hyperscaler, you outsource your governance. When data centers go unmanned, people are removed from their own resources. And when Indigenous peoples begin designing from their own cultural infrastructure — from language, from customary law, from the genesis of their own knowledge systems — they are not just building data sovereignty. They are breaking the mirror of extractive capitalism. This episode asks: Are we building Indigenous futures, or are we building capitalism done by Indigenous People?
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