Credit: Bevan Goldswain/Getty
University staff who support researchers can ensure Indigenous rights are protected when drawing up agreements for projects, a conference for research managers has heard.
The Australasian Research Management Society Conference 2024, held in Darwin, Australia in September, featured presentations focused on the importance of ‘Indigenous data sovereignty’, which refers to Indigenous peoples’ rights to own and control their knowledge and data — an area that is gaining traction across Australian research institutes.
Emma Lee, a Trawlwulwuy woman of Tebrakunna country in north-east Tasmania and social scientist with the National Centre for Reconciliation, Truth and Justice at Federation University, in Sydney, told the event that research agreements can give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people control over the data and knowledge they share with researchers through the use of a specific Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) clause. This could be used for projects that use health data from Indigenous communities, for example, or projects that incorporate Indigenous knowledge related to the management of natural resources or the health benefits of native plant extracts.
“Your sphere of influence, as research managers, is contracts and that intellectual-property clause,” said Lee.
Lee said it was essential to recognise that knowledge held by Indigenous communities — whether that was related to their environment or culture or other areas — was sacred and only such communities should decide how it was used.
“You will create the most magnificent recourse for people like me, just by saying you don’t want” ownership of Indigenous knowledge or data used in research projects, Lee said. “That takes away my anxiety. That takes away my fear,” she said, adding that there could be “kinship and reciprocity” if these points were recognized.
Lee said colonization was not a distant past event, but an ongoing issue with Indigenous rights being continually ignored, and stressed the need for vigilance. “You have a tremendous amount of power,” she said, and called on research managers to become “contract warriors”. “You can either sign off on that narrative that justifies what happened to us, or you can create this little space for someone like me to have the right to say ‘no’,” she said.
In a separate conference session, Hinearangi Busby, a research manager in the Office of Research Strategy and Integrity at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, spoke about the dual responsibilities faced by Māori research managers, such as balancing Western norms with Indigenous values.
“It’s really difficult being Māori in a profession that has a really bad reputation with my people,” she said. “We know that colonization and the colonizing agenda had a huge impact on Indigenous peoples all over the world. The context is important, for reconciliation in my own mind, to recognize the duality. We all know about the negative aspects, but what’s really cool are the positive aspects that come out in response to those histories.”
Busby said her university was making efforts to integrate Māori perspectives into how it thinks about and brands itself, how it carries out research, and how it sets its priorities, through its Taumata Teitei strategic plan, underpinned by a framework of principles called Waipapa Toitū. “For me to accept Taumata Teitei was for me to see the indigenizing parts that sit within it. That helps me to make sense of a lot of things,” she said.
In another session, Danielle Miller-Beland, who helps to train researchers in the Research and Innovation Office at the University of Auckland, said it was important to move from consultation with Māori and other Indigenous communities to genuine collaboration. She said researchers should build meaningful relationships before starting projects and emphasized the importance of understanding the cultural context and potential impact of research on Indigenous communities.
“Research should benefit everybody around you, not just researchers. How are you engaging and collaborating with Māori communities, and how is your research going to impact them? I’m helping researchers … so that once they start to engage with Māori, they are ready to do so in respectful and responsible way,” said Miller-Beland.
She added that the university was “on the right track” of changing its approach away from the researcher studying the people” in a way that just benefitted academics and towards “working with the people that we’re partnering with, and understanding the history”.
