Indigenous Environmental Data Justice: Confronting Colonial Data and Activating Indigenous Sovereignty

This article offers Indigenous Environmental Data Justice (IEDJ) as a framework related to, but importantly distinct from, Environmental Data Justice. IEDJ points to the manifold practices and principles that diverse Indigenous communities have developed in response to the pervasive structures of colonial environmental datafication and toward creating their own sovereign data governance practices. This article gathers a constellation of Indigenous community-specific place-thought data relations and practices, particularly drawing on work in North America, which are nonetheless convergent broadly in that they all confront commonalities of colonial data structures. We describe IEDJ as following the principles of Indigenous Data Sovereignty and involving complementary practices for confronting inadequate colonial data that government environmental agencies and companies provide to Indigenous communities.