Developing the Karuk Tribe Department of Natural Resources Data & Knowledge Sovereignty Policy

There is an urgent need for the development and implementation of collective Indigenous privacy laws, regulations and standards. While settler-colonial governments are lagging in UNDRIP’s implementation, Indigenous communities are creating their own policies. Karuk interest in asserting IDSov partially comes from a history of settler-colonial resource extraction in the region (e.g., the gold rush, timber rush, fish rush, green rush, TEK rush, and data rush). The Karuk Tribe Department of Natural Resources (“Karuk DNR”) has, in recent years, identified receptive conditions for the development of an Indigenous Data & Knowledge Sovereignty (“IDKSov”) Policy. Non-Tribal collaborators have increasingly sought guidance on how to approach the Tribe in a respectful way with regard to their Knowledge and data. Pursuit of providing such guidance has thus far revealed there are few, if any, examples of a comparable context to follow. The IDKSov Policy is emanating from Karuk Tribal Community engagement in the form of workshops, panels, a speaker series, and youth outreach. Our policy development process will be shared to academic spaces through the dissertation of Sierra Hicks, PhD student in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment at Cornell University, and Karuk DNR Data & Knowledge Sovereignty Fellow (contract worker). Sierra’s dissertation is currently undergoing co-design as a part of a decolonizing methodology, but ethnographic study of the policy development process is slated to begin in early 2025. Building on theoretical frameworks of Political Ecology and Indigenous Futurism, this dissertation seeks to make a practical contribution to the citable material that informs coming local, state, and federal IDSov laws, regulations and standards. Reporting of initial findings, as well as reflections on the past two years of our Karuk IDSov collaboration, is what we seek to bring to this session.