Relational Science

What if Data Sovereignty is not a technical problem, but an over 200‑year story of return?A story of land, language, and the long arc of Indigenous occupation. That question anchors this conversation, which was recorded live at the US Indigenous Data Sovereignty & Governance Summit.WarīNkwī K. Flores is joined by Joseph Yracheta and Tribal Council member Raphael Wahwassuck of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation to shift the lens from academia to the ground: to governance, to community, to the lived realities of tribal nations navigating digital sovereignty. Together, they trace how data moves through systems of power and how Indigenous Peoples are reclaiming it through treaty rights, cultural teachings, and sovereign design.Raphael recounts the nearly 200‑year struggle to reclaim stolen homelands in Illinois, a victory made possible only by pairing ancestral knowledge with the colonizer’s legal language. The conversation moves from land back to data, back again: how digital information crosses borders without consent, how language revitalization tools can both heal and harm, and how communities must educate their own citizens to navigate an era in which a single upload can echo across the world.When Indigenous nations build policy from culture rather than fear, they refuse the cat‑and‑mouse game of chasing extractive technologies. When youth approach AI grounded in identity, land, and kinship, they become the architects of Indigenous futures. And when sovereignty is understood as sustainability... as a way of living, not a legal category... the path forward becomes clear.This episode asks: Are we shaping technologies to serve Indigenous futures, or are we letting technologies shape us into replicas of the mainstream?

What if IDSov coming home is a return of direction? A method? A governance framework? Over the three days on O’odham lands, that idea kept surfacing: Indigenous Data Sovereignty is not only about protecting data but also about returning responsibility to the peoples and places from which that data comes.Recorded live on the final day of the US Indigenous Data Sovereignty & Governance Summit, WarīNkwī is joined by Joseph Yracheta, Stephanie Carroll, and Mary Hulbutta... leaders who have shaped this movement since its earliest days. Together they reflect on what unfolded: intergenerational learning in the Masterclass and Tribal Leaders Forum; the surge of youth leadership; the grounding presence of Elders; and the collective insistence that data governance must begin at home, in community, in culture.They trace the shift from theory to practice: tribal nations building their own stewardship offices, crafting their own AI and IP policies, and asking not just *what* data sovereignty means, but *how* to do it... in the middle of climate crisis, political instability, and everyday obligations like keeping Elders warm and families fed. They explore the need for regional networks, cross‑border collaboration across the Americas, and reparative work that reconnects data to land, water, and relation.When tribal leaders ask, “How do we do this?”, they are naming the work ahead. When communities define data on their own terms, they refuse the colonial assumption that data is only digital. And when Indigenous nations build governance from their own languages, laws, and responsibilities, they are not just preparing for AI. They are preparing for the next seven generations.This episode asks: If home is where governance begins, what will Indigenous Data Sovereignty look like when all our nations come home to themselves?

What if Indigenous Data Sovereignty is not about the data at all — but about the story? The voice? The face? The obligations that bind us to one another across generations? That question sits at the center of this conversation, recorded live from the US Indigenous Data Sovereignty & Governance Summit.WarīNkwī and Sierra are joined by Angelo Baca (Diné/Hopi) to explore the frontier where Indigenous storytelling, media, and AI collide. Together they trace the genealogy of data: who it comes from, who it belongs to, who is responsible for it, and what happens when technologies sever data from its relationships. From deepfake harms to collective IP, from podcast ethics to tribal policy, this episode sits at the intersection of creation and custodianship.Angelo recounts the Navajo Nation’s work toward an Indigenous IP and AI policy, and the moment an Elder’s daughter stood before an AI conference holding her mother’s photograph, confronting a deepfake that spoke words her mother never said. Her testimony reframed the room: AI is not neutral, and generative systems do not merely “hallucinate.” They reinscribe stereotypes, distort ancestors, and drag stories through the digital town square.Sierra brings the conversation home to media data sovereignty: who owns an interview, a photograph, a recording? The person in the frame, the person behind the camera, the community that holds the story... or no one at all? And if no one, then who carries the obligations? Together, they reflect on how AI has diluted the reverence once held for images and video and how Indigenous creators must rebuild meaning, trust, and relational accountability in a landscape where anything can be faked.When Indigenous nations articulate their own policies, they reclaim the right to define consent as dynamic, not one‑time. When youth approach AI grounded in culture, language, and land, they become the next generation of tech custodians. And when storytellers refuse extractive media practices, they are not just protecting data; they are protecting their relatives.This episode asks: If AI can imitate our voices and faces, what does it mean to protect the story of who we are, and who decides how that story is told?

What if data is not a resource to be managed, but a relative to be returned home? Across the Indigenous Data Sovereignty Summit, that question kept resurfacing. In plenaries, in hallways, in unconference circles, in the quiet moments when people admitted they were exhausted because this work is spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and ancestral all at once.Recorded live on O’odham lands, this episode gathers the threads of Days One and Two: WarīNkwī K. Flores and Sierra Hicks are joined by Joseph Yracheta and guest Angelo Baca (Diné/Hopi) to trace what emerged when Indigenous Peoples came together in an Indigenous‑only space. Together, they explore the sharpness of governance questions, the rise of sovereign AI, the resurgence of relational philosophies, and the future of immersive storytelling as a site of data sovereignty.They move from plenary visions of Indigenous‑designed computational systems to the Fire Keepers Initiative’s practical steps for community governance, to augmented‑reality reconstructions of suppressed histories, to the urgency of the Navajo Nation’s forthcoming IP and AI policy. Across every conversation, one theme returns: coming home. To culture. To land. To responsibility. To the relationships that make data into data. All in a time when US politics do not seem conducive to risky moves. When tribes build their own infrastructure, they reject the extractive logic of open‑by‑default systems. When youth teach elders to navigate AR, they enact intergenerational governance. When Indigenous nations design policy from their own philosophies (not from federal templates or tech‑industry defaults), they are not just protecting data. They are rebuilding worlds.This episode asks: If data is part of us, and we are part of home, what does it mean to build technologies that know how to come home too?

What if meaning is not something we discover — but something we make? And what if data, intelligence, and governance are not technical domains at all, but philosophical ones? Recorded live from the USA Indigenous Data Sovereignty & Governance Summit, this conversation turns toward the foundations beneath the foundations.WarīNkwī K. Flores is joined by Joseph Yracheta and Kelly Dine (Diné), a philosopher, bioethicist, and longtime collaborator with the Native BioData Consortium, to explore how Indigenous worldviews unsettle the assumptions of "Western Science". Together they trace the invisible architecture of meaning: how data becomes data through relationship, obligation, and use; how Western science hides its own sacred commitments; and why Indigenous philosophies offer a different way of understanding evidence, intelligence, and the living systems we inhabit.When scientists treat data as neutral, they erase its provenance. When AI is built on narrow cultural logics, it reproduces those logics at scale. And when Indigenous Peoples articulate governance from their own philosophies (from relationality, from stewardship, from the coherence of ancestral knowledge) they are not just managing data... They are redefining what counts as knowledge itself.

The sessions have ended for day 1. The room is still humming. And the conversation is only getting sharper.What happens when Indigenous Data Sovereignty becomes not just a legal framework — but a meeting place for global Indigenous experience? Recorded live from the media center of the USA Indigenous Data Sovereignty Summit, this episode traces the sharp, evolving conversations emerging across nations, disciplines, and political realities.Hosts WarīNkwī K. Flores and Sierra Hicks are joined by Joseph Yracheta (Native BioData Consortium) and Ibrahim Garba (Indigenous Data Alliance), whose work bridges African governance, international law, and Indigenous data movements, to unpack what unfolded on day one.What does NAGPRA have to do with data sovereignty? What happens when you interpret cultural patrimony to include intellectual property — and then ask: what if a physical object is data? Sierra walks us through one of the afternoon's most creative and careful conversations. Ibrahim unpacks UNDRIP — not as soft law to be dismissed, but as the relational legal architecture for sovereignty, and why internal autonomy remains the foundation for any meaningful governance. A legal architecture that means Indigenous Peoples no longer have to beg for a seat at the table. The seat is already there. The question is how to use it.They reflect on the rise of “data sovereignty” across universities, the risks of buzzword appropriation, and the need to keep Indigenous Peoples as rights holders, not stakeholders. Joe brings it home through the treaty — not as a historical document, but as a relational agreement between peers. Semiotics. Mutual obligation. And the reminder that Indigenous Peoples have always known that data has a durable, longitudinal life. They just called it something different.When political landscapes shift, when institutions chase trends, when legal systems stall... Indigenous nations return to their feet, their languages, their customary laws. This episode asks: In a moment of global uncertainty, how do Indigenous Peoples build data futures rooted not in crisis, but in who they have always been? Three principles anchor the yarning: internal autonomy, collective authority, and external participation. You cannot have the second or third without the first. Know what you are standing on before you reach outward.Self-determination is entering its second century, shaped by the emerging biokulturecene. The arc is long — from post-WWI Eastern Europe, to decolonization in Africa and Asia, to Indigenous rights today. And the direction, Ibrahim argues, is the opposite of the Western story: not the rise of the individual, but the return of the collective.Stay tuned. Tomorrow, we go deeper.

The summit has opened its doors — and from the very first session, something is shifting. What began years ago as a passionate, aspirational movement is now becoming operational.WarīNkwī K. Flores, co-host, is joined by Cristina Ore (Andean descent, Quechua genealogy from Huancavelica, Peru, and Irish descent), born and raised on Tohono O'odham ancestral land and Yaqui tribal land. Co-founder of the Indigenous Data Alliance and Seven Directions UW) and Joseph Yracheta (Executive Director, Native BioData Consortium) to debrief the morning's keynotes, panels, and roundtables. The conversation moves fast — from the Bandung Conference of 1955 to the Monroe Doctrine to Harvard and the burning Amazon — because history is not distant. It is generational. You can still find someone to walk you through it.At the center of this episode is a question that the summit is beginning to answer: how do Indigenous Peoples across the entire Americas — tribal nations with recognized sovereignty, diaspora communities, Latin America, the disenfranchised — build data authority together, across the imaginary lines drawn for them?Joe names it plainly: 220 million Indigenous Peoples in Latin America. 10 million in the United States and Canada, with the law, the language, and the recognized sovereignty. Put those together, and something unprecedented becomes possible.WarīNkwī K. Flores closes with a concept emerging from the conversation: the Biokulturecene (semiotic)— our own epoch, our own momentum, rising from within the Anthropocene's crises. Not new. Timeless. Finally being named.

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?

We are on the ground at the USIDSN Indigenous Data Sovereignty & Governance Summit 2026— and before the main doors open, we gathered in the circle. Day 0 was an Indigenous-only ethical space and a spatial justice: tribal leaders, students, data stewards, and practitioners were asking the foundational question: what is data, really, to us, for us, from us?WarīNkwī K. Flores and Sierra Hicks are joined by Joseph Yracheta (Purépecha, Executive Director of Native BioData Consortium) and Leece LaRue (Karuk & Shasta, Karuk Tribe Memory Lab Manager) to unpack what emerged from the Day 0 Tribal Leaders Forum and the Indigenous Data Sovereignty Masterclass. They move through the tension between ownership and authority, the challenge of naming what tribal data actually is, and the question of why Indigenous Data Sovereignty may be the last frontier capitalism is trying to extract from. The conversation explores what is still missing, and what is possible, when Indigenous Peoples design the infrastructure, write the obligations (e.g., policies/protocols, contracts/agreements/licenses, Tribal code/law/legislation, etc.) and set the holistic biocultural cost accrued. Hosts conclude with their aspirations for Day 1, which include a warm welcome, a keynote speaker, a plenary panel, and numerous oral presentations and roundtable sessions.

What does it mean to have authority over your data — not just ownership, co-ownership, but the living right to say who uses it, how, and when to stop? In this first part of the episode, WarīNkwī Flores and Sierra Hicks welcome Lisa Pizzoni, founder of the Indigenous Data Authority (Aotearoa, New Zealand), into the circle. Together they explore the distinction between sovereignty (the right to govern data) and authority (the active permission over it) — a difference that carries profound implications for Indigenous Peoples navigating AI, digital infrastructure, and cross-jurisdictional data flows.From the moko on a son's face captured by a security camera to tukutuku panels in a wharenui — this conversation grounds big-tech policy questions in the relational truth that data is never neutral, but also not only an asset. It is always whakapapa. It is always connected.

Our co-hosts, Sierra Hicks and WariNkwi Flores, continue their examination of Part II of the insights and foresights on the IEEE 2890-2025 Recommended Practice for Provenance of Indigenous Peoples' Data, focusing on sections 7.3 through 14. Their analysis explored key aspects of data creation, transfer, storage, and publication, powerfully emphasizing the essential importance of safeguarding Indigenous provenance information throughout the data lifecycle.The presenters confidently highlighted the necessity of due diligence and due process efforts to identify and disclose provenance information, particularly with respect to pre-existing datasets. They navigated the complexities of the community's diverse interests in data, affirming the enduring responsibility to disclose provenance information in the dynamic landscape of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence and biotechnology.The session culminated in a compelling discussion of the disclosure limitations imposed by Indigenous communities, underscoring the fundamental function of community governance on decision-making processes and privacy.

How do you validate the origin of knowledge in the age of AI and Big Data? The answer may lie in the IEEE 2890-2025 Recommended Practices for Provenance of Indigenous Peoples Data.Join our co-hosts, WariNkwi and Sierra, for a critical analysis of the first international standard that applies the CARE Principles through technical provenance. As the US Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network notes, this is a milestone step for governance—but what does it look like in practice?At Relational Science, we guide you through the operational realities of this document. In Part 1, dissecting the standard up to Section 7.3, exploring:Provenance as a Data Asset: How "appropriate disclosure" adds value and integrity to datasets.The Operational Gap: The purpose, scope, and necessary limitations of the standard.The New Compliance: Why properly documenting Indigenous relationships to data is now a prerequisite for ethical research and the fair Indigenous shareholdershio in the data economy/bioeconomyDon't get left behind by the shifting regulatory landscape; whether you are an Indigenous guardian, a tech developer, or a policy maker, this standard changes the rules of the "Data Gambit". Listen now to understand the new mechanisms of Indigenous Data Provenance.

We yarn on the territorial and international perspectives of the so-called "COP30, the Indigenous COP" with the Post Growth Institute fellows from the UK and Brazil to discuss Indigenous participation in climate negotiations, particularly focusing on the "COP of Indigenous Peoples". The discussion explored challenges around knowledge production, representation, and trust in climate processes, with participants sharing perspectives on how Indigenous communities can be more effectively included in decision-making. We invite Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities to a conversation for addressing climate impacts, concluding with reflections on the roles of technology, climate finance, and systemic change.

We've embraced a temporal new path in our Data Kinship Series after a season filled with rich ceremonies, engaging conferences, and meaningful fieldwork. In this episode, we embark on an autoethnography of those transformative experiences. Nkwi and Sierra explore the ethics of capturing moments through photos at ceremonies, how our positionality represents embodied metadata, and the vital role of imparting knowledge about pluralism to college students.

The Data Kinship series continues! In this episode, Nkwi and Sierra apply Indigenous autoethnography by beginning with a reflexive discussion about their positionality, intentionality, and the tension of integrity (potentiality). They then delve into what it means to learn from Indigenous Peoples' systems thinking (pattern thinking) and glean some insights into Indigenous systems thinking without “cherry picking” to fit your own paradigms.How do you know you have the right story? Find out by giving this episode a listen! Follow us and not miss out on our next episode with a VERY special guest. We’re also happy to announce that we’ll be extending the series with special conversations around all things DATA. More soon to come.

In their second episode of Relational Science, WN and Sierra launch a three-episode Data Kinship series, beginning with the topic of appropriation at a listener's request. The newly minted podcast hosts discuss the relationships and responsibilities inherent to data, how data can be appropriated, and the consequences for Indigenous Peoples. They also examine the cultural differences that contribute to data appropriation and provide recommendations for intervention. 

"Relational Science" is a thought-provoking podcast that delves into the intricate web of relationality in the realms of knowledge, data, information, and technology. Join PhD students WariN. Flores and Sierra Hicks as they engage in insightful dialogues with researchers, exploring the dynamics, multiplicity, and dimensionality of knowledge production and tackling pressing questions about our futures, pasts, and presents. Tune in for new episodes released monthly, and embark on a journey of discovery and understanding through the lens of biocomplexity systems, self-determination, sovereign praxes, and data & AI central dogma.