U.S. Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network

The U.S. Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network (USIDSN) is the United States' national network for Indigenous data sovereignty, founded in 2016 by Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear (Northern Cheyenne & Chicana) and Stephanie Russo Carroll (Ahtna, citizen of the Native Village of Kluti-Kaah) as a community of practice for Indigenous data sovereignty research, policy advocacy, and education. USIDSN's mission is to "ensure that data for and about Indigenous Peoples in the US are utilized to advance Indigenous aspirations for collective and individual wellbeing" — an assertion that data sovereignty is an inherent right of Native nations, not a regulatory concession. With over 300 members drawn from Indigenous researchers and tribal policymakers across federally and state-recognized tribes and territories, USIDSN is a founding member network of the Global Indigenous Data Alliance.

Founding

Rodriguez-Lonebear and Carroll established USIDSN in 2016 out of a recognized structural gap: Indigenous communities across the United States faced data disadvantages that compounded political marginalization. The 2010 Census undercounted American Indian and Alaska Native populations by 4.9% — a failure that translated into misallocated federal resources and weakened representation. Simultaneously, tribal governments lacked access to administrative data about their own citizens held by federal and state agencies, and most national survey programs excluded people living on tribal lands.

Carroll directs the Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance at the University of Arizona's Udall Center and Native Nations Institute, where USIDSN is institutionally based. Rodriguez-Lonebear, now at UCLA's DataWarriors Lab, researches the intersection of Indigenous erasure, data, and inequality. The network defines Indigenous data sovereignty as the right of a Native nation to govern the collection, ownership, and application of its own data — grounding that claim in tribal sovereignty as a prior political relationship with the federal government, not a derivative of civil-rights law.

Research and the CARE Principles

In 2019, Carroll, Rodriguez-Lonebear, and Andrew Martinez published "Indigenous Data Governance: Strategies from United States Native Nations" in the Data Science Journal — the foundational research statement of the USIDSN program. The paper diagnosed five structural data challenges for US tribes: external control of data collection without tribal benefit; population undercounting; restricted access to administrative data; insufficient capacity for independent data systems; and historical dependency rooted in colonization. Against this analysis it articulated Indigenous data governance as a positive program — "harnessing tribal cultures, values, principles, and mechanisms — Indigenous ways of knowing and doing — and applying them to the management and control of tribal data systems" — and advanced the CARE Principles (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) as the international governance standard now deployed alongside the FAIR Principles in research and AI policy contexts.

Founding the Global Indigenous Data Alliance

USIDSN was among the three founding member networks of the Global Indigenous Data Alliance — constituted at the July 11–12, 2019 Oñati workshop convened by Maggie Walter and Rodriguez-Lonebear, alongside Maiam nayri Wingara (Australia) and Te Mana Raraunga (Aotearoa New Zealand). Carroll co-founded and now chairs GIDA; Rodriguez-Lonebear is a founding GIDA member. Carroll also led the 14-author team that published the CARE Principles in the Data Science Journal in November 2020, co-authored with Maui Hudson of Te Mana Raraunga — the foundational international standard for Indigenous data governance alongside FAIR.

2024 Summit: Building Action and Power

In April 2024, USIDSN organized what the Udall Center described as "the largest Indigenous data sovereignty event in history" — the "Building Action and Power" IDSov and IDGov summit held April 10–12 on the homelands of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe and Tohono O'odham Nation near Tucson. The event drew 450 in-person participants and over 200 remote attendees, representing dozens of Tribes and Native nations across the United States, Canada, Mexico, Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, the Caribbean, and Pacific island nations. The summit marked a deliberate transition: from articulating principles and rights toward establishing enforceable standards. Three strategic goals organized the program — establishing national US standards for Indigenous data governance; creating Indigenous data standards through nation-to-nation partnerships with the federal government; and strengthening Indigenous Peoples' laws, policies, and systems for data sovereignty. A follow-on summit is scheduled for April 14–17, 2026 in Tucson.

AI and Data Sovereignty

USIDSN participated in the February 25–27, 2026 GIDA IDSov and AI Workshop at COLPOS in Texcoco, Mexico — convened alongside Te Mana Raraunga, the First Nations Information Governance Centre, the Pacific Data Sovereignty Network, Maiam nayri Wingara, GIDA-Inuit, and GIDA-Sápmi — to develop Indigenous protocols for AI. The workshop addressed AI as the primary site where data sovereignty is being tested: AI systems trained on Indigenous languages, traditional knowledge, oral histories, and ecological data without consent concentrate benefit with corporations while posing risks to cultural survival. USIDSN brings the US tribal-sovereignty legal framework to that contest — tribes are sovereign nations whose data governance rights derive from the political relationship with the federal government, not from civil-rights standing.

Corpus role

USIDSN is the United States anchor for the Indigenous data sovereignty organizing layer — the direct counterpart to Te Mana Raraunga in Aotearoa New Zealand and the First Nations Information Governance Centre in Canada. Like those national networks, USIDSN grounds a shared international framework in a specific domestic legal context, and contributes directly to the international infrastructure — GIDA, the CARE Principles — through which Indigenous nations are asserting that AI systems are subject to data governance frameworks they hold. The 2024 summit's historic scale confirms USIDSN as the organizational hub through which the US movement from IDSov principles to IDSov standards and enforcement is being built.