Global Indigenous Data Alliance

The Global Indigenous Data Alliance (GIDA) is an international network of Indigenous researchers, data practitioners, and policy activists founded in 2019 to advance Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDSov) and Indigenous Data Governance at global scale. GIDA fills the corpus's anchor slot for the pan-Indigenous data-sovereignty organizing layer: where national networks advocate within their own state contexts, GIDA constitutes the international coordination infrastructure that asserts shared governance frameworks across jurisdictions — and, since 2024, the primary venue in which Indigenous communities are developing collective responses to AI's claim over Indigenous knowledge and data.

Founding

GIDA emerged from a workshop convened July 11–12, 2019, at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Oñati, Spain, titled "International Law, The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and Indigenous Data Sovereignty." The workshop was convened by Maggie Walter and Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear and brought together participants from seven nation states, including representatives of three founding member networks: the Maiam nayri Wingara Collective (Australia), the Te Mana Raraunga Māori Data Sovereignty Network (Aotearoa New Zealand), and the United States Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network. The workshop's purpose was to translate the legal principles embedded in UNDRIP into a shared international framework for Indigenous data rights — the legal theory behind data sovereignty that precedes operational governance work.

Stephanie Russo Carroll — Ahtna, citizen of the Native Village of Kluti-Kaah, Associate Professor of Public Health at the University of Arizona and Director of the Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance — co-founded and chairs GIDA. Carroll had co-founded the US Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network and led the multi-author development of the CARE Principles; GIDA operationalized that work as a permanent international network.

CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance

GIDA's most widely adopted product is the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, which complement the existing FAIR Principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) that have governed open-science data sharing since 2016. The CARE Principles were drafted on 8 November 2018 at an Indigenous Data Sovereignty workshop co-located with International Data Week and the Research Data Alliance Plenary in Gaborone, Botswana, and published in November 2020 in the Data Science Journal by a 14-author team led by Carroll and Maui Hudson (University of Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand). The four principles are:

• Collective Benefit — Indigenous data must facilitate benefits for Indigenous Peoples to achieve inclusive development, innovation, improved governance, and equitable outcomes.
• Authority to Control — Indigenous Peoples' rights affirm their authority to govern data and determine governance protocols, with active involvement in all stewardship decisions.
• Responsibility — Stewards must nurture respectful relationships through capacity development, embedding data within Indigenous languages and cultures.
• Ethics — Indigenous Peoples' rights and wellbeing must be the primary frame across data ecosystems and lifecycles, minimizing harm, maximizing benefits, and promoting justice.

The CARE Principles address a gap the FAIR framing does not: mainstream data-sharing values focus on data characteristics that facilitate sharing while ignoring power differentials and historical contexts — the same dynamics that produced extractive use of Indigenous knowledge in scientific and commercial research. The canonical call is for researchers and institutions to "Be FAIR and CARE."

12 Indigenous Peoples' Rights in Data

In May 2023, GIDA published the 12 Indigenous Peoples' Rights in Data, organized into two tiers. The first tier, Data for Governance, encompasses rights to self-determination, reclaim, possess, use, consent, and refuse. The second tier, Governance of Data, encompasses rights to govern, define, privacy, know, association, and benefit. Carroll framed the rights framework as a response to an "explosion of data" that had outpaced society's ability to establish responsible governance standards: the CARE Principles established what stewards should aim for; the 12 Rights establish what Indigenous peoples are entitled to claim. The move from principles (recommendations) to rights (entitlements) marks the document as an escalation — from normative framework to rights-claim infrastructure.

Conferences and the AI turn

The Global Indigenous Data Sovereignty Conference is GIDA's primary in-person assembly of the international IDSov movement. The April 2025 conference in Canberra gathered over 250 Indigenous representatives from around the globe to assess a decade of progress and map pathways beyond principles into practice. A central finding: systemic barriers continue to concentrate the vast majority of Indigenous data under non-Indigenous nation-states and institutions. The 2025 conference also identified AI as an urgent emerging domain requiring dedicated Indigenous protocols.

The 2026 GIDA IDSov and AI Workshop — held February 25–27 at COLPOS in Texcoco, Mexico, convening representatives from Te Mana Raraunga, Te Kāhui Raraunga, the Pacific Data Sovereignty Network, Maiam nayri Wingara, the US Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network, the First Nations Information Governance Centre, GIDA-Inuit, and GIDA-Sápmi alongside scholars and activists from Latin America and Africa — addressed AI as the primary site where data sovereignty is now being tested. The seven facilitated workshops examined how AI systems trained on Indigenous knowledge without consent threaten cultural survival and how member networks can develop community-specific protocols for engaging with AI that uphold IDSov principles.

GIDA also recognized the IEEE 2890-2025 standard for provenance of Indigenous Peoples' data — the first global technical specification for tracking Indigenous data provenance — as a significant operationalization effort after a five-year development process that incorporated Indigenous participation.

Corpus role

GIDA is the international coordination node for a network of national Indigenous data sovereignty organizations. It sits above the national-level anchors — Te Mana Raraunga, the First Nations Information Governance Centre, the US Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network — as the international framework-setter and convener. Its product — CARE, the 12 Rights, the AI protocols in development — constitutes the normative infrastructure those national networks deploy domestically. The 2026 AI turn makes GIDA's relevance to the make-AI-good movement concrete: it is the principal international body asserting that AI systems are subject to Indigenous data governance frameworks, not only to the FAIR/open-science norms that have governed data sharing in research.