Resisting the Institutional Hold: Indigenous Data Sovereignty for Urban Indigenous People

American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) people in the United States who live off reservations and may or may not be formally a part of their Nations are often excluded from conversations of Indigenous Data Sovereignty. With the majority of AIAN people now living off of federally defined reservation land (and/or living between both), academic institutions can and are asking that data collected about urban Indigenous people be stored on their servers. Using our National Science Foundation funded study on urban Indigenous housing outcomes across the United States as an example, we discuss strategies to circumvent the data demands of funders and academic institutions through community partnerships with urban Native health centers and the Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI). UIHI acts as the data steward for our project in order to protect our urban AIAN relatives who chose to participate in this project. We discuss the steps we took: from writing our approach into the grant, to arguing with our universities, to partnering with UIHI. We seek to brainstorm and think critically with others about how to continue to extend IDS for urban Indigenous people.