Second U.S. Indigenous Data Sovereignty Summit Encourages Scholars, Leaders, and Data Warriors to ‘Come Home’
More than 500 individuals gathered online and in person on the lands of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe and the traditional homelands of the Tohono O’odham Nation for four days of programming and discussions on Indigenous data sovereignty and governance.
Born in 1944 in Pueblo de Cochiti in what is known today as New Mexico, 82-year-old Joseph Suina told a crowd at the 2026 U.S. Indigenous Data Sovereignty & Governance Summit that he is “old enough to remember the old ways.”
The former governor of the Pueblo de Cochiti, professor emeritus at the University of New Mexico’s College of Education, and former director of the Institute for American Indian Education explained that technology was often late coming to the reservation lands where he grew up, so Suina was still a boy when electricity became commonplace in his Pueblo. A bevy of powered gadgets soon followed – television, air conditioning, clock radios, refrigerators.
Joseph Suina speaks at the 2026 U.S. IDSov Summit.
All at once, Suina says, about 80 years of technology swept into his world over a stretch of about a decade. Of course, these conveniences had their benefits. Who among us could imagine our lives today without access to the internet, let alone without the lights that allow us to carry on at night with activities that once were, by necessity, reserved for hours when the sun was shining?
But, Suina says, with the lights came light bills. And, just like that, a subsistence existence built around community, agriculture, and ceremony was no longer enough to get by. Now the Pueblo people needed paper money. And, to get it, they had to participate in the colonial economy that seemed to be closing in on them more and more each day.
Progress and Responsibility
From left, IDA board officers Malia Villegas (Afognak), Donald Warne (Oglala Lakota), and Tai Pelli (Taino).
Every technological advancement offers a burst of hope for the myriad potential applications of that technology. But, without fail, the costs of those advancements become clear sooner or later.
The automobile made travel easier and exponentially faster, but with cars came car payments, insurance bills, and cities that were increasingly impossible to navigate on foot. The invention of the internet promised to connect us all to each other and to provide instantaneous access to all the world’s information, but with it came yet another monthly bill, the need to upgrade our technology constantly, and misinformation campaigns from near and far. Today artificial intelligence (AI) offers a promise of increased productivity and the offloading of some of our intellectual burdens to digital assistants. At the same time, companies are replacing human workers with AI while experts worry about potential declines in our ability to reason while questioning whether sentient robots will one day wipe out humankind completely.
“We are the data, but a lot of Indigenous Peoples do not know... the impact that our data is having right now.”
–Tai Pelli (Taino), IDA Board Officer
Malia Villegas is senior vice president of community investments for Afognak Native Corporation. She is also an inaugural board officer with the Indigenous Data Alliance (IDA), the organization responsible for planning and executing the 2026 Summit.
Villegas says she remembers how the announcement that scientists had mapped the human genome in the early 2000s had a mixed effect on her and others in Tribal leadership positions. She recalls “how fearful yet hopeful many Tribal leaders were about the potential of this technology to help us solve rare diseases.” She also recognizes that the unknown outcomes from this new knowledge still had many feeling cautious, and with good reason.
When scholars and leaders talk about Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDSov) today, it’s not just about keeping population statistics and personally identifiable information about Tribal members under lock and key. That’s part of it, but IDSov is also the recognition that data are increasingly powerful tools that can be used to support both good and bad outcomes and products with or without the consent of the individuals or the political collectives like Native Nations to whom those data relate and belong.
Tai Pelli is the international relations and human rights officer for the United Confederation of Taino People, an organization that advocates for the collective interests of Indigenous Peoples of the Caribbean. Pelli, who is also an inaugural IDA board officer, says that her journey deeper into IDSov at the 2024 Summit opened her eyes to the scope of the issue and its importance in light of today’s rapidly accelerating technology.
“Whenever I heard about data in the past, I thought it was statistics,” Pelli says. “I didn't realize all the things that were involved when we were speaking about data sovereignty and I think we need to catch up.” Pelli explains, “We are the data, but a lot of Indigenous Peoples do not know... the impact that our data is having right now.”
What, after all, is a strand of DNA other than a repository of data detailing the history, composition, and genetic makeup of an individual? And, as one elder pointed out during a day of talks reserved for Tribal leaders, “each time you lick that string” while working on a craft project, “you’re putting your data on that art.” Data which, the elder pointed out, is too often kept by institutions that are outside the control of the Tribal Peoples who created them and should, by all rights, control them.
‘Coming Home’: The 2026 U.S. Indigenous Data Sovereignty Summit
IDSov Masterclass students and instructors
Though it has been a subject of intense scholarship and debate for decades, IDSov is a relatively nascent field. The first recorded professional IDSov gathering in the U.S. took place in the form of a one-and-a-half-day seminar at UCLA in 2017, and it wasn’t until 2024 that the gathering grew into a full, multi-day conference in southern Arizona.
The 2026 IDSov Summit, just the second of its kind in the U.S., welcomed a sold-out crowd to the Pascua Yaqui Tribe’s Casino Del Sol conference center, just like the inaugural event did two years before. Of course, lessons learned from the previous Summit and through another two years of research and development brought improved functionality and deeper engagement to this year’s event.
The 2026 program included a full day of concurrent pre-conference events: a one-day seminar and workshop on Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Governance open only to Tribal leaders as well as the first-ever Indigenous Data Sovereignty Masterclass, from which more than 100 scholars and data actors graduated with certificates confirming their efforts.
There was also a full day of conference activities in which scholars and data actors from all backgrounds were welcome, followed by a day and a half of Indigenous-only sessions, per popular demand.
There were roundtable discussions, presentations on academic findings, conversations about data sovereignty and governance in practice, informal gatherings, and a series of regionally-focused gatherings organized by Indigenous people from beyond the lower 48, such as Hawaii, Alaska, and the U.S. territories including Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa.
From left, 2026 IDA awardees Richard M. Todd, Hannah-Marie Garcia Ladd (Sicangu Lakota), and Alec Calac (Pauma Band of Luiseño Indians).
As they did in 2024, the hosting organization also gave out a handful of awards to scholars and data actors who have made a notable impact on IDSov through their work and advocacy.
Economist and former Vice President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Richard M. Todd received the Indigenous Data Alliance’s (IDA) Indigenous Data Warrior Ally Award; Program Director of the Indigenous Sentinels Network at the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island Tribal Government Hannah-Maria Garcia Ladd (Sicangu Lakota) received the Indigenous Data Warrior Community Award; and MD candidate and recent PhD graduate Alec Calac (Pauma Band of Luiseño Indians) was honored with the Indigenous Data Warrior Student Award.
All three honorees were blanketed by members of the IDA and an honor song was performed on their behalf by Northern Cheyenne elder and language teacher Conrad Fisher and Northern Cheyenne graduate student at the University of Wyoming Xavier Littlehead. To the delight of the crowd, they were also joined by six-year-old VoShay Gray, who is known to be the youngest fluent speaker of the Cheyenne language.
Multi-Generational Effort and Impact
Northern Cheyenne singers (from left) Xavier Littlehead, Conrad Fisher, and VoShay Gray perform an honor song for 2026 I.D.A. awardees.
Organizers of the 2026 Summit made intentional efforts to bring multiple generations of scholars, Tribal leaders, and Data Warriors together to share knowledge and exchange ideas.
With generous funding from the Urban Indian Health Institute, Indigenous elders and students were united in a first-of-its-kind intergenerational knowledge exchange. Ten elders and ten students were awarded travel stipends to attend the Summit and were paired up to share knowledge and lessons from the Summit with one another. The organizers hope to replicate this approach in future years.
Dr. Donald Warne is professor of International Health and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health. He comes from a long line of healers in the Oglala Lakota tradition; in fact, his Lakota name, which he shares with his grandfather, is Pejuta Wicasa, which means “Medicine Man” in Lakhota. Warne is also an IDA board officer.
“We need to understand that, as Indigenous Peoples, we've always been researchers. We've always been program evaluators. We've always been educators. We've always been scientists."
–Dr. Donald Warne (Oglala Lakota), IDA Board Officer
A scholar with footing in both the worlds of traditional and modern medicine, Warne insists that the IDSov movement we know today is inclusive of information that is often produced and interpreted by contemporary pieces of technology. Still, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the tenets of data sovereignty and governance are entirely new to Indigenous Peoples. In fact, Warne asserts that traditional knowledge is essential to understanding modern health contexts.
“We need to understand that, as Indigenous Peoples, we've always been researchers. We've always been program evaluators. We've always been educators. We've always been scientists. And we have our own ways of knowing and our own ways of assessing our programs and assessing the work that we're doing in our communities.” Warne says. “And I think that, when we blend the Western scientific approaches that are not acknowledging of or respectful of our cultural perspectives, we see misalignment of public health programing and public health research and outcomes.”
Summit attendees were invited to depict their communities on this not-to-scale map.
The fact of the matter is that Indigenous Peoples have always owned and stewarded data, information, and knowledge, whether or not Western scientific practitioners were capable of understanding that knowledge and respecting its origins. “When we think about medicine, aspirin comes from willow bark,” Warne says. “We've been using willow bark tea for thousands of years until Bayer ‘discovered’ it, and now it's a modern medicine. But we have hundreds of examples of that.”
Warne says his enthusiasm for the developments he is seeing in IDSov is bolstered by the increase in young people taking an interest in this work. “What really excites me the most is the numbers of young, brilliant, Indigenous scholars I've met,” Warne says. “When I see this concentration of Indigenous brilliance, it makes me excited about the future.”
This is a sentiment echoed by IDA co-founder and IDSov Scholar Stephanie Russo Carroll (Ahtna), who played a key role in managing both the 2024 and 2026 U.S. Indigenous Data Sovereignty Summits in southern Arizona. Carroll has been a mentor to many of the up-and-coming scholars who are now managing research projects of their own and finding their way into faculty positions at respected institutions of higher education.
Stephanie Russo Carroll (Ahtna)
“To see the growth and maturity developed in this movement over just the last couple of years is incredibly encouraging,” says Carroll, a scholar at the University of Arizona’s Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy and Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health who has been closely involved in nearly every major development in the IDSov space since the early 2000s. “Seeing leaders from every generation, from high school students to elders, and from such a diversity of positions, organizations, and fields working with everything they have to ensure that Tribal data remains in the hands of the Indigenous Peoples to whom it rightfully belongs is beyond inspiring,” Carroll says. “This is why we do this work.”
The IDA will work with partners to revive the U.S. Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Governance Summit in 2028. In the meantime, anyone interested in learning more about IDSov and Indigenous Data Governance can engage with a series of recorded and forthcoming live webinars on relevant topics via another of Carroll’s data governance collectives, the Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance.