Indigenous Approaches to Digital Infrastructure | by Tiara Roxanne | Jul, 2022 | Data & Society

"Earlier this year, Data & Society proudly welcomed Tiara Roxanne as a postdoctoral fellow. In this blog post, Roxanne introduces their approach to a vital question: Can a digital infrastructure be trustworthy from an Indigenous perspective? Throughout the course of their fellowship, Roxanne will work with the key concepts of sacredity, Indigenous cosmology, and storytelling, bringing them into conversation with an evolving literature on trust and safety in digital infrastructures. Roxanne uses a methodology that comes to define these concepts through practice, grounding their explorations of trustworthiness in the everyday and in vital practices of building Indigenous knowledge, sovereignty, and data. Their contribution will help build a networked community of Indigenous practitioners and a corpus of scholarship in Indigenous approaches to data and trust. Roxanne’s crucial work extends Data & Society’s approach to data through, as they write, “decolonial gestures” that refuse to “appropriate ritual, tradition, or cosmology” and instead center Indigenous safety in data-centric worlds. Roxanne’s fellowship is under Data & Society’s new Trustworthy Infrastructures program, which we will share more about in September. – Sareeta Amrute, principal researcher and program director

As an Indigenous cyberfeminist (Tarascan/Purépecha/Mestiza) working at the intersections of technology, Indigenous studies, intersectional feminism, and performance art, I seek points of arrival and departure in imagining trustworthy infrastructures. My postdoc will integrate research methodologies and anti-colonial approaches that build from Indigenous cosmology. My practice locates encounters between trust in a general sense and Indigenous aspects from South, Central, and North America...."