Indigenous Environmental Data Justice: Confronting Colonial Data and Activating Indigenous Sovereignty

Abstract

This article offers Indigenous Environmental Data Justice (IEDJ) as a framework related to, but importantly distinct from, Environmental Data Justice. IEDJ points to the manifold practices and principles that diverse Indigenous communities have developed in response to the pervasive structures of colonial environmental datafication and toward creating their own sovereign data governance practices. This article gathers a constellation of Indigenous community-specific place-thought data relations and practices, particularly drawing on work in North America, which are nonetheless convergent broadly in that they all confront commonalities of colonial data structures. We describe IEDJ as following the principles of Indigenous Data Sovereignty and involving complementary practices for confronting inadequate colonial data that government environmental agencies and companies provide to Indigenous communities.

Introduction

All the data in the world will not end colonialism. Data will never be enough to prevent environmental violence. These simple yet true statements prompt this discussion of Indigenous Environmental Data Justice (IEDJ). The environmental governance practices of colonial nation-states and international agencies have elevated data as key currencies within environmental justice struggles. Consequently, environmental data are used by communities and activists alike to demonstrate violence and harm, and also by states and companies to hide both. Indigenous communities—whose lands, waters, and bodies are disrupted by industrial, property, and extractive relations—are likewise forced to wrestle with the datafication of environmental governance.

By datafication, we mean the turning of everyday activities of persons, nonhumans, or organizations into data, primarily quantitative in form (Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger 2013). Scholar Kim Fortun (2012) points to the datafication, or what she calls “informating,” of environmental governance as a trend beginning in the 1980s, in which data collection about toxicity, emissions, or climate change is emphasized over regulating or materially preventing environmental harms. For example, the United States and more than 50 countries began mandating “Toxics Release Inventories” or TRIs, in which industries provide data about their own emissions of select chemical pollutants to state governments. However, Indigenous communities are often stuck confronting data provided by companies to colonial nation-states that obscure the extent of environmental violence and normalize colonial data logics.

Faced with multi-scaled environmental disruptions, Indigenous communities around the world are taking up the challenge of building new ways to create and manage data that work for Indigenous sovereignty, values, and aims. Datafication for communities is not merely about the widespread extraction of data from life activities but also a practice in which Indigenous Peoples ¹ and lands are subjected to colonizing data logics and relations. As part of colonization processes, waters, more-than-human beings, skies, and lands have been marked, named, and datafied by occupying nation-states to take control and possession over Indigenous lands (Moreton-Robinson 2015). Data are made from these processes, as Maggie Walter (Trawlwoolway) ² and Chris Andersen (Métis) explain: “Data do not make themselves. Data are created and shaped by the assumptive determinations of their makers to collect some data and not others, to interrogate some objects over others and to investigate some variable relationships over others” (Walter and Andersen 2013, 2). Environmental data are likewise full of colonial relations and cannot be merely plucked out of them. Data, as built out of colonial forms of knowledge-making, are wrought implicitly and explicitly through property, universalism, and extraction. These colonial features of data practices, moreover, are particular to their pernicious as well as ordinary uses.

This article offers Indigenous Environmental Data Justice (IEDJ) as a term that points to the manifold already existent and future practices and principles that diverse Indigenous communities developed in response to the pervasive structures of colonial environmental datafication and toward Indigenous sovereign environmental data governance practices. Some examples in the context of settler colonialism are Indigenous revisions of environmental assessments in North America, such as the OCAP principles established in 1998, the Indigenous Land and Data Stewards Lab at Colorado State University, the Indigenous Environmental Network's framings of the financialization of practices responsible for climate change, the intergenerational work of Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment concerned with industrial contamination and its legacies, and Māori data practices in land management in New Zealand. (Arsenault et al. 2019; The First Nations Information Governance Centre 2014; David-Chavez et al. 2024; Indigenous Environmental Network 2019; Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment 1996; Forster 2023). In this article, we draw on our own work in IEDJ and primarily gather many of our insights from our knowledge of Indigenous practices in North America and responses to settler colonialism. Yet, colonial data practices include and exceed the specificities of settler colonialism, and thus the insights we offer here can resonate beyond our specific examples to concern colonial data practices generally, in the same way Indigenous Data Sovereignty works as an international general framework with relevance across many specific sites and Peoples. ³

We conceptualize Indigenous Environmental Data Justice together as two Indigenous scholars who collaborate in an IEDJ Lab at the University of Toronto, which is on Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territories. Our work is local, place-based, and community-led by Anishinaabe lab members, as well as particularly concerned with settler-colonial petrochemical structures. We will describe some of this work later in the article. We are also scholars individually in obligation to our home communities. One of us, María Fernanda Yanchapaxi, is Kichwa-Panzaleo and Mestiza, born and raised in Ecuador, and is accountable to her relationship to Panzaleo land and community, Sigchos, where her family lives. Yanchapaxi's research work focuses on intellectual property, Indigenous Data Sovereignty, and Indigenous research methodologies. The other author, M. Murphy, is Red River Métis and began working on Environmental Data Governance to connect colonialism, data, and pollution in the Great Lakes region. Beginning in 2017, Murphy worked with Lourdes Vera and others in collectively building an “Environmental Data Justice” (EDJ) working group in the organization Environmental Data and Governance Initiative that developed the concept of EDJ. This collaboration influenced the establishment of our Indigenous Environmental Data Justice Lab, at the Indigenous-led Technoscience Research Unit at the University of Toronto (Dillon et al. 2017; Walker et al. 2018; Vera et al. 2019).

This article lays some of the conceptual groundwork for Indigenous Environmental Data Justice as a framework. We will start this article by asking, what is IEDJ? To deepen our answer, we outline some of the key onto-epistemological and political antagonisms IEDJ has with the norms of colonial environmental science and regulation, particularly settler colonial manifestations. We will then describe what we understand as some of the features of IEDJ and outline a few distinctions between IEDJ and EDJ. Then, we will turn to how IEDJ builds on the international Indigenous Data Sovereignty movement, followed by a discussion of the very concept of “data.” Lastly, we share some of the tactics we have used in our Toronto-based lab to confront colonial environmental data practices and enact IEDJ.

What is Indigenous Environmental Data Justice?

Indigenous Environmental Data Justice connects to conceptions of Environmental Data Justice, which derives from a social justice framework that is sometimes influenced by Indigenous scholarship. Indigenous Environmental Data Justice is distinct, however, in its epistemic and political commitments grounded in the particularities of Indigenous self-determination and what Vanessa Watts (Mohawk and Anishinaabe) has described as place-thought. As Watts (2013, 21) describes, “Place-Thought is the non-distinctive space where place and thought were never separated because they never could or can be separated. Place-thought is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and nonhumans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts.” Starting with place-thought—with specific orientations and obligations to lands, waters, skies, and responsibilities to nonhumans that are understood as active thinking beings—IEDJ refuses the sense of soil, atmosphere, or water as non-living objects and thus involves different onto-epistemologies from Western worldviews.

As there are many different manifestations of place-thought across Indigenous Peoples, IEDJ cannot be captured in a single succinct formula. Indigenous Environmental Data Justice instead points to a constellation of community-specific place-thought-informed data practices that nonetheless converge, not because they have the same understandings, but because they all confront commonalities of colonial data structures across sites. As Indigenous peoples, we all recognize that environmental violence began with colonization (Gilio-Whitaker 2019) and no nation-state or industry is interested in meaningful reparation. Given the distinct onto-epistemologies that IEDJ begins from, it is vital not to conflate IEDJ or Indigenous land defense with environmental justice, and to understand the differences between them.

Beginning with place-thought, we emphasize in the next sections how IEDJ is committed to non-universal understandings of knowledge and justice; is bound in specific obligations to land, waters, skies, nonhumans, and ancestors, and thus does not see human health as apart from these. IEDJ sees data within extensive relations, not merely as measurement; it understands data to be inseparable from governance; and crucially that IEDJ is a manifestation of Indigenous self-determination. To draw out these complex features of IEDJ, we first turn to how it is antagonistic to colonial environmental epistemologies and data practices.

Antagonisms with Colonial Environmental Epistemologies

While colonization took place across Indigenous lands, diverse forms of colonialism were developed forcing us to come up with varied tactics against it. Writing from the Great Lakes of Turtle Island, this article is particularly informed by the ongoing practices of settler colonialism. Honoring differences across colonial conditions, there remains the commonality of confronting colonial governance practices transnationally that can bind together Indigenous struggles to address the colonial epistemologies and practices built into conventional environmental data practices (McGregor, Whitaker, and Sritharan 2020, 36). Diverse IEDJ practices contend with this complex legacy and continuing occurrence of colonial environmental research that extracts, steals, and appropriates from Indigenous communities. This legacy uses data to create inauthentic environmental consultations, hide harms, render the livingness of land and water into resources, or portray Indigenous people as in deficit. It is in light of these similar patterns among colonialisms that we use the general term colonial environmental data practices.

Indigenous communities on the frontlines of acute environmental violence—communities proximate to mines, pipelines, refineries, clear-cutting, nuclear projects, and so on—are forced to engage with forms of environmental research and data created by companies and states. Impacted communities might call on companies or states to be accountable for the harms they have committed, yet companies and states refuse such ethical accountability. In colonial nation-states, pollution is largely governed by a “permission-to-pollute” approach. This approach assumes that land is a resource to be exploited for economic benefit, and that it is acceptable to kill or injure up to a certain point. Max Liboiron (Michif) in Pollution is Colonialism shows how the notion of the threshold and the safe dose undergirds the legality of pollution, in which the point of governing pollution is to determine the limit at which the violence is too much and cannot be assimilated. Liboiron (2021, 5) calls this the “threshold theory of pollution.”

There are many ways in which settler colonial environmental governance and research separate bodies, lands, and objects of study from ethical relations. For example, data about chemical pollutants are almost entirely collected and created one chemical at a time, reflecting the priorities and logics of the colonial state (Murphy 2021). Knowledge about individual chemicals mirrors laboratory science methods that treat chemicals as objects and isolate objects from their context to control the variables involved in a study. In doing so, the laboratory science of fields like toxicology seeks to trace out individual causes and effects in a universal way. They are largely concerned with physical properties that are the same anywhere. In turn, settler governance draws on this kind of science and treats synthetic chemicals as isolatable objects about which data are collected individually. It prioritizes universalizable data about each chemical, such as its unique molecular form, and its universal physical properties.

Chemicals are mostly not governed as pollutants but rather as commodities (Hepler-Smith 2019). A synthetic chemical is a potential form of property that one can own, have intellectual property over, and sell. Many laws and regulations protect chemical property relations. Pollution, often understood as a chemical, is treated similarly but differently: pollutants are treated as a singular object with particular physical properties, yet pollutants are not commodities. Pollutants are the undesired material excess created when commodities are made, the unwanted substance that is unvalued, seen as waste, and expelled outside of the property relation and its responsibilities. Since the property relation is the primary logic of settler colonial responsibility, the “excess substance” of pollution that is not turned into commodity and property becomes an unregulated zone in colonial logics (Voyles 2015). In colonial environmental law, the responsibilities about pollution are typically limited to what amount of a pollutant can be emitted before it causes provable harm, what level of harm can be absorbed for the sake of making property, and if a pollutant in the air, water, or bodies can be traced back to a specific polluter, who would have legal liability for that harm.

Yet we know that pollution is never just one chemical at a time. For example, in Ontario's Chemical Valley, there are over 50 petrochemical facilities operating continuously in a region that has had refining since the 1850s (MacDonald and Rang 2007). Every substance emitted can be understood as “chemical” and chemical pollution exists in plumes of many different synthetic chemicals, accumulating over time, and in profound interaction with the moving and animate matter of air, lands, bodies, and relations. We think of chemical pollution as a colonial “structure” not an event, an extensive set of relations filled with ethical obligations (Shadaan and Murphy 2020). The one-chemical-pollutant-at-a-time approach to governing pollution has little relation to the grounded realities of environmental violence in which smoke plumes, contaminated waters, or particulates swirl, mix, and enter bodies—both human and others. This approach is antagonistic to the relational land-body obligations of Indigenous legal orders and worldviews (Ataria et al. 2023). This way of governing pollution serves the interests of polluters, dodging responsibility for their violence, and has become a strategic way of limiting what counts as pollution. Colonial environmental data are profoundly limited for understanding environmental violence in its fullness. At its best, colonial environmental data look at chemicals one at a time and connect a specific chemical to a specific harm. At its worst, polluters purposely use and manipulate environmental data in bad faith to hide harmful activities. Thus, Indigenous communities are forced to become experts in the limits and entanglements of colonial environmental data.

Very few chemicals are successfully banned, and the few that are, such as PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) and DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane), were only banned after they became so globally pervasive that all humans now live in relation to their exposure. Pollution regulation is largely informational—it involves projects of data generation. Crucially, in Canada and elsewhere, the colonial nation-state tends not to generate its own studies of chemical toxicity and pollution. Instead, it turns to the companies that generate substances and pollution to conduct studies about toxicity, and to collect data about their emissions. These forms of self-policing by major polluters are the norm of pollution governance, akin to the police policing its own violence. In other words, chemical pollution and its datafication are built through colonial forms of environmental data governance, which are filled with violent and bad relations (Liboiron 2021; Murphy 2017; Gray et al. 2023).

The conflict between Indigenous land protection and colonial nation-states is not merely scientific, legalistic, or epistemological. Colonial states often actively criminalize land defense and Indigenous environmental justice activities as documented in Joanne Barker's (Lenape) Red Scare: The State's Indigenous Terrorists (2021). Practices of police and secret service surveillance of land defenders here in Canada, where we are currently writing from, add a further dimension to the state's colonial data extraction. Furthermore, nation-states like Canada, which hosts many global mining company headquarters, purposely construct laws so that extractive companies cannot be held legally accountable here for illegal activities they undertake in other jurisdictions, such as Honduras, Guatemala, or Eritrea, even including the murder of land defenders. Criminalization, policing, and murder have thus become another datafied struggle in the colonial and transnational permission-to-pollute system, which is fundamentally a system that gives permission-to-kill in particular ways (slow, concentrated, jurisdictionally). This too is part of the complex ambit of Indigenous Environmental Data Justice.

Differences between Indigenous Environmental Data Justice (IEDJ) and Environmental Data Justice (EDJ)

Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities’ efforts to deal with environmental data contend with permission-to-pollute infrastructures of environmental governance. EDJ, as a non-Indigenous framework, has been profoundly connected to the grounded practices of North American community struggles against environmental racism by Black, Latinx, and other marginalized communities. The historical coining of the term “environmental racism” in the 1980s is connected to struggles against the disproportionate siting of landfills proximate to non-white communities. The first use of the term derived from an analysis done by the United Church of Christ that repurposed United States federal state demographic and landfill placement data to create a critical anti-racist analysis, prompted by grassroots organizing led by the Black church and civil rights activists against a PCB-laden landfill in Warren County, North Carolina in the early 1980s (Bullard 1993; United Church of Christ Commission on Racial Justice 1987). From its start, understandings of environmental racism were interconnected to data politics and concerned with disproportionate exposures to environmental violence derived from racism, in which the state and not just companies were implicated (Bullard 1993). The term has since been developed by scholars such as Laura Pulido (2000), foregrounding the work of white supremacy and settler colonialism in the making of environmental racism. Such work is in solidarity with Indigenous land defense. Yet it is distinct because, as Indigenous Peoples, we center Indigenous onto-epistemological place-thought and manifest our own relations to Indigenous self-determination, where the nation-state is understood as an occupying and racist force. While Black and Indigenous communities in North America are often in solidarity, Afro-Indigenous environmental justice offers important expressions of overlap (Moreno-Tabarez 2020; Vera et al. 2019).

Indigenous environmental justice is not just a struggle against colonial structures and dispossession. It is fundamentally about activating and maintaining obligations and relationships with land, nonhuman agencies, ancestors, and those yet to come. IEDJ thereby has a positive project of activating Indigenous knowledge, worldings, and jurisdictions. It is not primarily human-centered but embedded in this place-thought relational obligation that is also oriented toward healing, ways of living, and collective continuance that extend beyond the human. Indigenized environmental justice “must acknowledge the political existence of Native nations and be capable of explicitly respecting principles of Indigenous nationhood and self-determination” (Gilio-Whitaker 2019, 12). As Deborah McGregor (Anishinaabe) explains in defining Indigenous Environmental Justice, “Indigenous peoples assert that a just path to a sustainable future must consider all relations, an approach best expressed through Indigenous knowledge systems, legal orders, governance, and conceptions of justice” (McGregor, Whitaker and Sritharan 2020, 36).

The use of the plural in McGregor's definition of Indigenous Environmental Justice is crucial. The extensiveness of Indigenous territories, the large variety of Indigenous place-thought, and the vast sets of relations make Indigenous data practices diverse; therefore, conceptions of “data” in IEDJ are not universal. Data are not merely a collection of discrete values or information. IEDJ differs from EDJ in that it acknowledges that Indigenous data are community-specific, placed-thought, and land-based. It understands data to be relational and filled with obligations and bound with governance, and not merely a description or measure of an object. We will say more about “data” later. For now, we are underlining that IEDJ can differ from EDJ in its onto-epistemic understanding of data.

EDJ and IEDJ share a rejection of the nonconsensual extractive data practices that can characterize environmental science. Efforts to build ethical Indigenous responses in defense of these pervasive extractive practices by necessity shape Indigenous research methodologies, even as Indigenous methodologies exceed being merely reactive to colonialism and ground themselves in specific place-thought, obligations, and futures. Theft and extraction of data from Indigenous communities are not only widespread in, for example, colonial state practices involved in building or supporting environmentally harmful projects, like mines. Theft and extraction are also found in purportedly well-intentioned “savior” research by health professionals and social scientists who do research without the leadership and instruction of the communities on whose lands they work and the lives they describe (Tuck 2009). For Indigenous researchers, refusing extraction is particularly pressing because of the damaging legacies and normalization of extracting value from Indigenous life and lands. Uahikea Maile (Kanaka Maoli) excellently describes the panoply of extractive practices across sectors that his community is facing in the transnational scientific conquest of the sacred land of Mauna Kea to build the Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii (Maile 2021). The pervasiveness of extractive and coercive research in university, corporate, and state practices undergirds harmful disruptions to the lands, waters, skies, and beings that Indigenous Peoples have obligations and responsibilities to. IEDJ resists extraction both as a data practice and as a material colonial land practice.

While EDJ may critique the nation-state and understand it as complicit in environmental violence, IEDJ focuses on the activation of the rights of Indigenous Peoples to self-determination, a right violated by the colonial state's very presence. Crucially, practices of IEDJ additionally have a common orientation against the colonial nation-state. Non-Indigenous critical environmental justice struggles more often seek to critique, change, or appeal to the nation-state as the horizon of environmental governance, such as the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States or the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change in Canada (Pellow 2017). While Indigenous communities are forced to address or can indeed choose to forge collaborations with colonial state agencies, Indigenous Peoples’ senses of justice derive from their nations and laws. The imminent sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples positions colonial nation-states as an intrusive counter-sovereignty, where any reinforcing of the jurisdiction of the colonizing nation-state risks reinforcing colonialism itself (Vimalassery 2014). Indigenous resurgence, as theorized and described by scholars such as Dene theorist Glen Coulthard (2014) and Anishinaabe feminist Leanne Simpson (2011), involves turning away from the legacies of colonialism and creating new realities for ourselves without the sanction, permission, or engagement of the colonial nation-state.

The urgency of Indigenous land defense around the world is in part why there has been a decades-long international project to enshrine Indigenous-specific human rights law through the United Nations, an effort that began with a collaboration between Haudenosaunee and Māori leaders in the 1920s (Anaya 2000). The UN Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which was signed in 2007, emphasizes, as a component of self-determination, the right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent of Indigenous communities when confronted with all research, economic development, industrial projects, and social activities pertaining to them. Article 29 of UNDRIP (2007) particularly emphasizes that “Indigenous peoples have the right to the conservation and protection of the environment” but also that “States shall take effective measures to ensure that no storage or disposal of hazardous materials shall take place in the lands or territories of Indigenous Peoples without their free, prior and informed consent.” UNDRIP was signed by 143-member nation-states in 2007, with 4 against, 11 abstained, and 34 absent. The four nations that voted against UNDRIP were Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, all settler colonial states actively challenged by the resurgence and demands of Indigenous Peoples affected by environmental violence. Not accidentally, these are locations from which a significant amount of Indigenous Data Sovereignty research has been developed. In other words, IEDJ has distinct local and international genealogies that derive from specific place-thought and international Indigenous solidarities that insist on self-determination. While UNDRIP recognizes the right to self-determination, IEDJ understands that this right is immanent and exists regardless of recognition of the colonial nation-state or the United Nations. Indigenous self-determination is disruptive of Western rights discourses and senses of sovereignty, such that elevating UNDRIP can risk validating the power of colonial-derived governance to decide the force of Indigenous self-determination. As Tanana Athabascan scholar Dian Million (2013, 4) describes, “Indigenous peoples preexist nation-states and reject nation-state authority to grant them a right to a political self-determination that they have never relinquished.”

Self-determination is therefore connected to practices of refusal. While the tactic of refusal is a key practice in data justice—again drawing from Indigenous feminist work and emphasizing the right to say no as a part of consent—for Indigenous communities, refusal has added significance. As Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson (2017) explains, to participate in consent with colonial states, even in the act of saying no, can still be used to reinforce the colonial state as the arbiter of justice, to which all political activity must answer. “The trickery of ‘consent’ in colonial contexts,” she argues, “papers over the very conditions of force and violence that beget ‘consent’” (Simpson 2017, 20). Thus, IEDJ refuses at another register, by rejecting the colonial nation-state as the horizon of justice or rule. Instead, it orients itself toward horizons of justice derived from the specificity of Indigenous Peoples that are fundamentally in conflict with the colonial state. Colonial nation-states are not interested in exercising justice for Indigenous communities nor assenting to the sovereignty of Indigenous nations. There are discrepant and sometimes incommensurate horizons of justice across struggles, and this holds true for the many kinds of Environmental Data Justice (Tuck and Yang 2018).

Thus, in these many ways, Indigenous Environmental Data Justice has non-identical and sometimes even incommensurate relations with some Environmental Data Justice practices, even as the two sets of practices learn from one another and build anti-colonial and anti-racist solidarities. Importantly, we are not calling for EDJ to assimilate or absorb IEDJ, but to be in deeper solidarity in ways that respect not just entanglements, but distinctions and the practices of Indigenous Peoples. From our perspective, many of the practices and projects that might be called Indigenous Environmental Data Justice are not published and are not connected to any university. Instead, they reside in communities, in Indigenous governance, and in land protection.

Building on Indigenous Data Sovereignty

In reaching toward good ways of working with data, IEDJ draws upon the thinking, contribution, and frameworks of Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS) movements. From establishing international principles to critically thinking about Indigenous data alongside Indigenous knowledge protection, Indigenous Peoples have demonstrated that the application of data within a Western framework does not do justice to Indigenous communities. Over the past decade, Indigenous Peoples around the globe have converged to discuss data extensively. These conversations emerged following further attention to how data from and about Indigenous communities is being accessed, used, and owned, in insidious ways, and with profound implications to Indigenous daily lives. Alongside assertions of Indigenous land and territories, debates around “data sovereignty” have become a priority (Kukutai and Taylor 2016). Discussions about IDS insist on the right that Indigenous Peoples have to collect, own, and control data about themselves. Knowing how data collection has historically served the interest of colonial nation-states (Walter and Carroll 2020), Indigenous scholars instead located Indigenous communities at the center and as stewards of these discussions. This framework locates Indigenous sovereignty, governance, and leadership as key aspects of what makes up data. Data are not just values collected: data are a mode of governance and relation.

Within the Research Data Alliance (which was founded in 2013 by European, North American, and Australian scientific agencies), the International Indigenous Data Sovereignty Interest Group was constituted to address the ways most Indigenous data were not owned by Indigenous Peoples, and hence how the normative values of openness and sharing developed for non-Indigenous research did not serve Indigenous concerns. As an organized group, and in consultation with newly established IDS networks in Canada, Aotearoa, Australia, and the United States, they developed the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance in 2019: Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics (Carroll et al. 2020). Oriented by the values, protocols, and practices that Indigenous Peoples hold, the principles complemented the “FAIR” Guiding Principles for Scientific Data and Management: Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability (Wilkinson et al. 2016). The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance provided a direction to rethink “data, information, and knowledge, in any format, that impact Indigenous Peoples, nations, and communities at the collective and individual levels; data about their resources and environments, data about them as Individuals, and data about them as collectives” (Carroll et al. 2021, 1). Collectives such as the First Nations Information Governance Center in Canada, the Global Indigenous Data Alliance, and The Māori Data Sovereignty Network have established new parameters for working with Indigenous data that exposed extractive practices and highlighted community-specific assertions of Indigenous data protection (Lovett et al. 2019). These collectives have provided guidance and models of care that insist on the exercise and expression of Indigenous inherent rights through data (Walter and Carroll 2020); rights that are too often disavowed by colonial nation-states (Moreton-Robinson 2015).

Indigenous Environmental Data Justice follows from Indigenous Data Sovereignty to insist that data cannot be separated from governance (Carroll et al. 2020; Carroll, Duarte and Liboiron 2024). As Carroll, Duarte, and Liboiron (2024, 210) assert, Indigenous Data Sovereignty “is not simply about Indigenous individuals collecting data toward an imagined gain, but rather is also a form of Indigenous governance through data based in right relation.” Governance is not just the work of Indigenous governments but is more capaciously part of enacting obligation and responsibilities in all relations, including beyond the human, with land, between beings and generations. Creating knowledges and observations (quantitative and otherwise) that are subjected to and support Indigenous governance is not new even as digital technologies are. Indigenous Peoples have a pre-colonial authority and responsibility to the collective well-being of their communities and, as data gatherers (Adams 2024), have collected data since time immemorial to inform decision-making for survival (Walter et al. 2020). Furthermore, “as tribal nations continue to rebuild their governance structures, they are also reclaiming processes of ‘doing data’ by them and for them” (Walter et al. 2020, 232). Moreover, Indigenous governance is community-specific, and so too is “data.” Data, as a general term, are useful and at the same time fails to capture the manifold knowledges, values, memory, and calculative practices that make up Indigenous epistemologies.

What Are Data in Indigenous Environmental Data Justice?

Indigenous data scholars emphasize that our understanding of “data” should not be confined to their colonial definition (Walter and Andersen 2013; Walter et al. 2021). Walter and Andersen (2013, 87–88) in their work on Indigenous statistics describe the approach of nayri kati, meaning “good numbers” in the Palawa Tasmanian Aboriginal language, which emphasizes privileging Indigenous knowledges and does not presume Indigenous deficit. Liboiron has pointed to counts in the governance of Métis Buffalo hunts as an Indigenous collective data practice. The Māori Data Sovereignty Network, which has done extraordinary work, grounds itself in the understanding that “data is a living tāonga,” a treasured possession with inherent value (Māori Data Sovereignty Network Charter 2016). On the lower Great Lakes, where we work, we often see data as following the 1701 Dish with One Spoon Wampum Covenant between the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee Confederacies. This is an “environmental” agreement, in which people have reciprocal responsibilities with all of creation to ensure ongoing sustenance and life. Furthermore, as a mode of governance, the wampum belt emphasizes polishing, revisiting, and renewing the agreement over generations and across nations. Kichwa scholars think of data as yachaykuna, knowledge that does not exist independently but as knowledge and always in relation.

Within the IDS framework, Indigenous data are defined as knowledge and information presented in various formats: “It encompasses data, information, and knowledge about Indigenous individuals, collectives, entities, lifeways, cultures, lands, and resources” (Rainie et al. 2019). The CARE principles of Indigenous Data Governance emphasize that these data are generated by Indigenous Peoples as well as governments and other institutions, on and about Indigenous Peoples and territories. They accentuate that part of “Indigenous Peoples’ data comprise information and knowledge about the environment, lands, skies, resources, and nonhumans with which they have relations” (Carroll et al. 2020, 3). Environmental data are often perceived as measurements of such knowledge. In our own work, data do not necessarily measure. Our work within an IEDJ framework perceives data as extensive forms of relations. These relations are constituted by specific places, communities, lands, and waters. Above any quantitative or informational set of knowledge, Indigenous data are determined by and a reflection of Indigenous relation to land, skies, waters, and nonhuman beings. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) unravels and beautifully describes plants and animals as our oldest teachers. Her work insists on Indigenous Peoples’ relationship to the land as intrinsic and explains how great aspects of Indigenous knowledge (such as science) come from ties with the land and all living beings. Following her work, we insist that what we might grasp as environmental data is the language we find to represent such relationships; our interactions; our ways of communicating what we have learned from our teachers. We assert that Indigenous data are formed through language and land together, which is a manifestation of land's reciprocal relations, as opposed to seeing data as descriptions of objects, as environmental statistics, or measures of impact on an ecosystem.

A place-thought understanding of “data” in IEDJ is always in relation to specific Indigenous governance and ethics. Indigenous peoples as well as Indigenous land are too often portrayed by colonial data and statistics without acknowledgement that statistics are racially politicized objects (Walter and Andersen 2013). Indigenous data are too often extracted ignoring Indigenous governance bodies and ethics. Differing from such practices, data in IEDJ must be accountable to specific Indigenous governance bodies and follow community protocols. As Indigenous scholars we work with this broad sense of Indigenous data, yet our work is guided by particular principles of accountability and leadership established by each community and the relations embedded within. Our work must follow the principles of IDS which set clear expectations for the management and stewardship of data.

Ultimately, relations to land cannot be fully datafied. This perhaps is one of the challenges of environmental data justice and why an extended Indigenous framework is required. Indigenous data in IEDJ are non-object based; therefore, not everything can or must be datafied. IEDJ recognizes that data are limited and is careful about replicating imperial practices of working with environmental data. IEDJ acknowledges that data cannot tell you everything, and maybe not the most important things. Pollution data as often presented in reports cannot tell you by itself the extent to which relationships with land are breaking apart; the amount of fresh breath that companies are taking from all living beings; the breaches of consent and governance; the colonial violence; the non-separation of humans from nonhuman relations; the reciprocity of the land; the ethical obligations across generations including ancestors and those yet to come; or the ways in which Indigenous communities are asserting data sovereignty. Environmental data, as precise as they can be, are unable to fulsomely portray human and more-than-human relations and most importantly, Indigenous practices of sovereignty, care, and resistance. There is already enough data evidence in the world to prove violence against the land and Indigenous Peoples, and yet not enough to prevent it.

Confronting Colonial Environmental Data

In our Indigenous Environmental Data Justice lab, our work has focused on understanding environmental violence and its regulation in a large petrochemical region as a form of colonialism. Chemical pollution from petrochemical refining is a form of violence: it includes slow and fast killings and local and planetary-wide disruptions to the conditions on which life depends. We understand this pollution as violence both to bodies and to the land. This orientation toward interwoven land/body relations, and not a narrow concern with human health, is described powerfully in the Native Youth Sexual Health Network report Violence on the Land, Violence on our Bodies:

Through our response to environmental violence, we seek to uphold Indigenous peoples’ self-determination over their bodies and support the leadership of Indigenous women, Two Spirit and young people working to resist this violence, while also decreasing the harms they face from extractive industries. To do this, we understand that violence is not only caused by industry but also by cis-supremacy and patriarchy in both environmental destruction and environmental justice movements. (Konsmo and Pacheco 2016, 6)

In our lab work, our approach to Indigenous Environmental Data Justice is largely concerned with researching bad relations within environmental data and calling them into obligation and accountability through specific Indigenous values. Our lab membership is composed of academics and community researchers focused on Ontario's Chemical Valley, where some 40 percent of Canada's petrochemical refining is done. Chemical Valley began in the 1850s, so it is one of the world's oldest commercial oilfields, which has expanded over 175 years to occupy a region of Anishinaabe land with more than 50 refineries, pipelines, and storage facilities, all of which surround the community of Aamjiwnaang First Nation (Technoscience Research Unit 2024). Chemical Valley is older than Canada and was made possible by colonialism, from land theft to genocidal residential schools. The air monitors in Chemical Valley that have been put in place in the last twenty years are governed by an Industrial Association, and their results since 2018 can be viewed as a real-time snapshot online, even as the cumulative data are not made public. The same Industry Association (called BASES) is charged with providing notifications to the community for spills, releases, flares, and emergencies. In 2023, BASES was governed by a board that included representatives of Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, Shell, and Abu Dhabi National Oil, four of the world's biggest companies and greatest contributors to climate change, some of which are climate change deniers and purveyors of misinformation (Gray et al. 2023). Air monitors in Chemical Valley can provide data about whether specific individual pollutants are released at a high level, but they cannot definitively tell you who is polluting. Air monitors cannot link pollutants to the source, and each can detect only a small number of substances. These are limits of perception built into the data that serve the logics of permission-to-pollute colonialism and not the obligations and concerns of Aamjiwnaang. With Liboiron (2021), we describe the permission-to-pollute system of environmental regulations that allow pollutants to cause harm in water, lands, skies, or bodies. Environmental data in Chemical Valley are overwhelmingly shaped by relations grounded in the colonial permission-to-pollute system. Furthermore, data can be part of a theater of disinformation, providing vague information that masquerades as responsible corporate self-governance.

Our practices for confronting permission-to-pollute systems and bad relations are led by the Lab's community researchers (Vanessa Gray and Beze Gray) and guided by community consultations. IEDJ in Chemical Valley often involves starting with Anishinaabe values and following the leadership of Aamjiwnaang land protectors and community members to research the bad relations baked into company and state-provided pollution data.

A first practice is to research how the data that Aamjiwnaang is provided have been assembled. We ask: Who is making the data and how? What do data show and not show? How are limits purposefully designed into data collection and provision? Moreover, we identify the bad relations that go into the making of inadequate and obscuring environmental data. We do this work through the frame of Anishinaabe values, such as honesty, truth, respect, intergenerational responsibility, and obligation to Land. This work can be quite disheartening. The more we research the terms of existing data, the more it is revealed how mired conventional environmental data are with the tactics of multinational companies and Canada's colonial commitments toward companies and property over Indigenous life. However, meaningful information about the pollution that for generations has been disrupting life and land in Aamjiwnaang is desired, and we honor this desire.

A second practice is to contextualize and reframe bad data with Indigenous values and relations. Environmental data often represent phenomena using technical jargon, replete with obscure chemical terms or undefined metrics. They are inaccessible. Studies are scattered, and health information and ecological research are separated by scientific discipline and government agency. Moreover, environmental data are often constrained by being a “snapshot” of a certain moment and limited to a small number of particular chemical pollutants. Cumulative understandings are rare and difficult to assemble out of the array of inadequate, technically presented, and scattered sources of data. Thus, our second practice is to reassemble, reframe, and translate existing data following the values, knowledge, and desires of the community. This can look like retelling the history of companies and their activities from the vantage of Aamjiwnaang; it can look like translating scientific studies and chemical pollution datasets into ordinary language and formats that are accessible to community members; it can look like attaching emissions data to understandings of relations and obligations to land, plants, and fish. It can also look like community members collecting and assembling inadequate and disappearing data over long periods of time to create more truthful portraits of the regular and chronic pollution disruption as ongoing violence, as opposed to an individualized “accident.” Or it can look like evaluating air monitors with Anishinaabe values in their failure to enact ethical relations such as consent, truth, and intergenerational cumulative obligation. It can look like connecting quantitative data about emissions to stories about harm to life and land, or back to the companies creating the pollution and the hedge funds or multinationals that own and profit from them, thereby creating forms of accountability to colonialism that pollutant-focused environmental data evades. We look for ways of upholding Indigenous legal orders and obligations, and call polluters and financial relations into Indigenous senses of responsibility and justice.

A third practice we use is what Eve Tuck (2009) calls “desire-based” research. In this practice, Indigenous people positively imagine Indigenous data futures. How do community members, including Elders and Youth, who are experts in living with intensive and intergenerational environmental violence, envision other ways of governing pollution and environmental data? With what teachings and values do they want to create data? Evaluating and subverting “bad data” will never be enough. While it can be important to dismantle the veneer of responsibility that colonial environmental data so often seek to display, Indigenous Environmental Data Justice is fundamentally oriented to upholding Indigenous futures, obligations with nonhumans, and self-determination. Joyful, affirming, visioning, dreaming, and imagining go beyond the immediate pragmatics and activate the long arc of futures yet to come. Anishinaabe scholar Jennifer Wemigwans (2018, 34–35) has developed the term “digital bundles” to name digital forms of Indigenous Knowledge that support resurgence and contribute to a lifelong commitment to collective action, where a bundle “refers to a collection of things regarded as sacred and held by a person with care and ceremony…. These sacred items are highly valued and protected, and some are transferred for the benefit, growth and sustainability of the community.” Like Mvskoke scholar Laura Harjo (2019, 193), we understand this futurity orientation to be collective, changing, and ongoing, involving many kinds of tools, practices, and a plurality of ideas:

It is all up for renegotiation as conditions change, understandings of community processes deepen, or different tools are used to understand the community and its context. Furthermore, there are many other paths, ideas, and knowledges in the project of Indigenous futurity. Finding our way to Indigenous futurity and enacting it involves a plurality of ideas and people. I invite others to join this conversation … because ultimately the impetus is vnokeckv for our community, kin, and lifeways, and the wish that they continue to perpetuate and thrive.

Land and life futures in all our relations include changing digital tools and exceeding them.

Conclusion

Yanchapaxi remembers growing up seeing her grandfather (Kichwa-Panzaleo elder, community leader, and knowledge keeper) interviewed by university students, researchers, policymakers, and government officials, among others, about ancestral agricultural practices. Knowledgeable of the vast number of activities connected to Andean products, traditional agricultural medicines, moon harvesting calendars, or ancestral irrigation systems, her grandfather was constantly interviewed. In the presence of climate change, increased use of genetically modified seeds, and recurring interest from mining companies seeking to exploit his land, Yanchapaxi's grandfather later started to share with researchers about the dangers that the speed and intensity of these changes and human interventions could provoke in Sigchos. Yanchapaxi assumes the records of these interviews were coded, analyzed, and perhaps even published. While environmental data from Indigenous territories can come from qualitative methods of data collection, knowledge about lands, waters, and skies also derives from knowledge keepers, Elders, and community members’ lived (and living) experiences. Practices of colonial environmental data rely on the codification of all kinds of knowledge into “data,” even to visualize or prove environmental violence. Indigenous Environmental Data Justice holds an important distinction between such practices and refuses the assumed imperial datafication of all things and all knowledges, regardless of the purpose.

Within Indigenous scholarship, knowledge protection and data sovereignty have been discussed as separate issues. On the one hand, conversations about the protection of Indigenous knowledge have followed a trajectory of exposing the colonial aspects of intellectual property regimes (Younging 2015; Gray 2019; Reed 2019). Data, on the other hand, have been analyzed in connection to quantitative studies, policy studies, policy development, or Western statistics. At the intersections of both trajectories, there have been efforts to reassert access, control, and authority over different elements closely connected with Indigenous Data Sovereignty and knowledge protection (Kukutai and Taylor 2016; Rainie et al. 2019; Carroll et al. 2020). Scholars have surfaced discussions about the questions of ownership of knowledge and the harmful implications of engaging with knowledge as property, which reproduces a colonial relation (Anderson 2009). These two bodies of scholarship have helped us to see the intersection of Indigenous knowledge protection and data sovereignty. We recognize the pitfalls of keeping Indigenous knowledge protection fully separated from Indigenous data justice. At the same time, conflating Indigenous knowledges with “data” risks reinstalling colonial relations and reinscribing imperial codification practices that seek to expand datafication to all domains. However, the answer is not so simple as to hold Indigenous knowledge as completely separate from questions of data. Indigenous Data Sovereignty movements are purposeful in their expansive definitions of what counts as Indigenous data. Moreover, Indigenous knowledge protection and data sovereignty are not primarily academic practices, but community-based practices done for the sake of community futures, not analysis for its own sake. IEDJ must hold an awareness that disregarding Indigenous land-based knowledges as part of data as well as separating Indigenous knowledges from their own terms, risks omitting the relational aspects of Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Gathering these many tensions and needs, we see IEDJ as striving to follow the principles of Indigenous Data Sovereignty, while also attending to the importance of thinking about, treating, and maintaining Indigenous knowledge as such, on Indigenous terms, and distinct from questions of data.

Activating self-determination in its many forms as we reach for an understanding of Indigenous Environmental Data Justice, we see IEDJ as a term for practices that are in solidarity with, learning from, and yet importantly not incorporable into Environmental Data Justice. While we might all benefit from understanding data as relational and ethical, what makes up relations in place-thought versus other non-Indigenous struggles is incommensurable. We hope some of the interventions and insights we offer here will resonate with EDJ practitioners and researchers; however, we are not looking for IEDJ to be incorporated as a feature in EDJ. As manifold activations of Indigenous self-determination, IEDJ is oriented toward its own obligations, and a description of it cannot be fixed or universalized. We offer a vision of solidarity across difference and entanglement, both across manifold Indigenous communities, and with non-Indigenous struggles against environmental racism and climate colonialism. To this end, we gather around the truth that even as we might need data to confront colonialism, data will never be enough.