Creating spaces for Indigenous perspectives
The necessary augmentation of current research norms and infrastructures
to acknowledge Indigenous interests will take time, but the most
expedient transition will be achieved if all parties are empowered to
enact change. Currently, over 60 Indigenous communities across 6
nations/countries are customizing Labels for multiple research programs,
the Genomic Observatories Metadatabase (GEOME; Deck et al., 2017) has
developed metadata fields supporting the interoperability of the
initiative (Riginos et al., 2020), and several digital publishers have
incorporated the Labels to make clear and visible Indigenous protocols
for accessing and sharing knowledge (e.g. Scalar,
https://scalar.me/anvc/scalar/; RavenSpace,
https://ravenspacepublishing.org/). As a Molecular Ecology research
community, we also have an opportunity to accelerate support for our
Indigenous collaborators and the principles of the Nagoya Protocol
through the use of the Notices – one of the Local Contexts tools
specifically developed for researchers.
The Notices (Figure 1) are applied by researchers and/or institutions to
support the recognition of Indigenous interests in collections and data.
In particular, the Biocultural (BC) Notice and Traditional Knowledge
(TK) Notice allow researchers to publicly acknowledge Indigenous rights
and interests and pledge their commitment to meeting ABS principles. The
TK Notice is used to signal that place-based knowledge carries
accompanying cultural rights and responsibilities, meaning that
appropriate permissions may need to be sought for future use of that
knowledge; and the BC Notice signals the right of Indigenous communities
to define the use of information, collections, and data (including DSI)
generated from biodiversity and genetic resources associated with their
traditional lands or waters. Unlike the Labels developed by communities,
Notices are not customizable. Instead they are designed to be
placeholders for the Labels when these have been generated by Indigenous
communities. In this sense, the Notices initiate an equitable pathway
within data systems for the inclusion of Indigenous rights and
interests. Moreover, the use of Notices by researchers invites
collaboration with Indigenous communities, normalizes use of the Local
Contexts system, and creates physical spaces (e.g. appearing on
publications and websites) and digital spaces (e.g. as metadata in
repositories) for Indigenous provenance, protocols, and permissions.
To further activate and extend the inclusion of Indigenous interests
into our research system, institutions and data repositories that hold
collections of Indigenous origin can use Cultural Institution (CI)
Notices. The ‘Attribution Incomplete’ Notice recognizes that collections
and/or data have incomplete, inaccurate, and/or missing attribution. In
identifying this missing attribution, there is an accompanying
invitation for appropriate Indigenous communities to correct this
exclusion or omission. The ‘Open to Collaborate’ Notice indicates that
an institution is committed to developing new modes of collaboration,
engagement, and partnership over collections. Together the CI Notices
signal the commitment of an institution or repository to addressing
missing information regarding the origins of specimens and genetic
resources, and correspondingly their Indigenous contexts. As a practical
mechanism, the Notices push towards standards for the inclusion of this
information at a researcher and repository level. This increases
capacity for meeting international obligations under the Nagoya
Protocol.
Notices can be applied quickly and at any stage of a research program,
including on data that is already published and deposited in publicly
accessible repositories (such as provided by the International
Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration; Cochrane, Karsch-Mizrachi,
Takagi, & Sequence Database Collaboration, 2016). To apply a Notice,
researchers register with the Local Contexts Hub and create a profile
using their ORCID iD (https://orcid.org/). The Hub will generate the
Notice selected by the researcher and will send a notification to the
relevant Indigenous community. Authors contributing to Molecular
Ecology and Molecular Ecology Resources can apply Notices to
their articles by providing the persistent unique identifier and an
optional use-statement associated with the Notice in their “Data
Accessibility and Benefit‐Sharing Statement”. Notices can also be
connected to publications, specimens, DSI and derived genetic data held
in other repositories through fields provided in GEOME (e.g. the
‘TraditionalKnowledgeNotice’ field used by the Ira Moana Project,
https://sites.massey.ac.nz/iramoana/, and the ‘Diversity of the
Indo-Pacific Network’, http://diversityindopacific.net/).
Local Contexts is currently focused on scaling these practical
mechanisms for connecting Indigenous peoples with research and data
collected on Indigenous lands and waters. There has been active uptake
of the system by Indigenous communities, institutions and researchers in
the US, Canada, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Chile, and Spain. An
international ‘Cultural Institution Working Group’ has been formed where
experiences in using and implementing the Notices can be shared. The
‘Aotearoa Biocultural Label Working Group’ is also trialing the use of
Notices and Labels across a diversity of research programs conducted at
a national scale. The goal is to digitally integrate Indigenous rights
and interests into research systems – in both research practice and in
data storage and transfer – to alleviate concerns regarding Indigenous
Data Sovereignty and ABS pertaining to genetic resources.