Indigenous Data Sovereignty

COVID-19 in New Mexico Tribal Lands: Understanding the Role of Social Vulnerabilities and Historical Racisms

“…Since the early phase of the pandemic, a substantial amount of attention has been paid to the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 on Indigenous Peoples, especially those on Tribal lands (Kakol et al, 2020). However, due to long-standing and systematic erasure of Indigenous representation in data and race misclassification (Kukutai and Taylor, 2016;Yellow Horse and Huyser, 2020) of Indigenous Peoples during COVID-19; assessing the reliable and accurate impacts of COVID-19 on Indigenous Peoples and communities has been limited. While a recent study documents that the cumulative incidence of COVID-19 among AIAN Peoples were nearly 3.5 times higher compared to non-Hispanic white individuals (Hatcher et al, 2020); this estimation is based on only laboratory-confirmed COVID cases from 23 states.…”

“…Third, many Indigenous Peoples reside in households without a physical home address and use a P.O. Box, and omitting those who reside in households without a zip code may contribute to underestimation of impacts of COVID-19 as they are systemically erased from federal data through inaccurate and unreliable estimates of Indigenous Peoples (Kukutai and Taylor, 2016). Lastly, we do not capture potential inter-Tribal differences in New Mexico; and our findings may not be generalizable to other Tribal nations in different states.…”

“…Given the disproportionately high COVID-19 confirmed cases and deaths among AIAN individuals (New Mexico Department of Health, 2020) and relatively small population size of AIAN persons at the aggregate level on non-Tribal lands; we urge public health researchers and policy makers interested in designing any place-based mitigating strategies to explicitly include percentage of AIAN Peoples as one of the main factors of identifying vulnerable places rather than the percentage of racial and ethnic minority. This is critical, without careful attention on whom we exclude through categorization and aggregation, any mitigating efforts could further harm Indigenous Peoples and communities who are often already marginalized through inadequate and unjust representation in federal data (Taylor, 2009;Kukutai and Taylor, 2016). Any research and public health policies with AIAN Peoples that do not explicitly consider the Indigenous research framework will likely produce erroneous conclusions and/or strategies for Indigenous Peoples; and that will contribute to further harming AIAN Peoples and communities.…”

“…COVID-19 has spread in Indian Country 1 -general description of Native space and place in the United States, and is inclusive to the Native Nations that occupy the spaces-through pre-pandemic mechanisms ranging from disproportionate chronic health conditions, inadequate access to healthcare, and poor living conditions generated from structural inequalities. While the current pandemic has exacerbated inequalities and health inequities, which were already critical issues pre-pandemic, the true estimations of the magnitude of such effects continue to be challenging due to long-standing and systematic erasure of Indigenous representation in data and race misclassification (Kukutai and Taylor, 2016;Yellow Horse and Huyser, 2020). That is, despite the critical importance of reliable and accurate COVID-19 statistics in mitigating the impacts of COVID-19, public health data often completely omit Indigenous Peoples or misclassify them as "others" by aggregating Indigenous Peoples with other numerically small populations.…”

Unlocking First Nations health information through data linkage

“…Internationally, there is a strong movement towards Indigenous data sovereignty that highlights the importance of data governance and research processes that are Indigenous-led [1]. In Canada, First Nations established the principles of ownership, control, access and possession (OCAP R ) of their data in the mid-1990s [2].…”