How Indigenous Communities in New Zealand Are Protecting Their Data
- Author: Science
- Full Title: How Indigenous Communities in New Zealand Are Protecting Their Data
- Category: articles
- Document Tags: #data #ddw
- URL: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado9298
Highlights
- To aid its language efforts, Te Hiku has developed AI tools including a natural language processing tool, a Māori language pronunciation app “Rongo,” and a media platform app “Whare Kōrero” to which tribal radio stations can upload their content. (View Highlight)
- It has also designed Kaitiakitanga Licenses (stewardship licenses) for both of its apps as well as the “Papa Reo” application programming interface (API) that Rongo uses to process user data to enable features such as speech detection. The licenses draw on tribal tikanga (protocols) to specify conditions of data access, sharing, and use. The API license prohibits its use for surveillance, tracking, building Māori corpora, mining Māori data, and anything that is inconsistent with Māori data sovereignty principles. To gain access to the API, all interested parties must sign a legally binding agreement in which they agree that they won’t use the tools for any of the prohibited uses. (View Highlight)
- Whakapapa (genealogical) data are also highly valued by Māori and are widely considered to be tapu (sacred). Whakapapa includes ancestry and DNA data along with Traditional Knowledge (TK) connecting humans to their wider environments, including ancestral mountains and rivers, as well as flora and fauna. Māori tech company Āhau has developed a decentralized data platform that helps whānau (families) and tribal communities capture, preserve, and share whakapapa and other forms of collective information in secure, whānau-managed databases. Using a free, open-source app, whānau are able to record their own ancestry data and share cultural knowledge to preserve its intergenerational transmission. All of the information is encrypted on the users’ devices or to their own kinship group “pātaka” (storehouse), a computer connected to the internet that serves as a communication link between devices. The company itself does not have servers or databases that keep a record of any information shared by whānau—an approach that departs sharply from the profit-driven model of genealogical websites and genetic genealogy services. (View Highlight)
- The lack of enforceable intellectual property (IP) rights can be a formidable barrier for Indigenous peoples wanting to exercise sovereignty over their collectively owned IP, including cultural knowledge and heritage, as affirmed by the UNDRIP. In Aotearoa, this remains an ongoing concern. Originating in the US, the TK labels were designed as an extralegal tool for communities to add provenance information and contextual metadata to their cultural heritage records, and to assert their rights in relation to them. Stewarded by the Local Contexts Hub, the labels are digital tags that can be attached to cultural material held in public repositories. The labels provide community-specific conditions regarding access and use, in ways that uphold their own protocols and values. One notable example is the TK labels applied to the 1890 wax cylinder recordings of the Passamaquoddy tribe of northeastern North America in the Library of Congress. Although the TK labels are not legally enforceable, they enable communities to assert their collective rights in relation to their cultural heritage and provide a ready resource for institutions and researchers wanting to do the right thing. (View Highlight)