The Informed CARE Data Steward. Ways to CARE for Indigenous Data Sovereignty

Digital humanities projects increasingly encounter the ethical and social complexities of working with data about or from indigenous communities. While the FAIR principles provide a technical roadmap for interoperability and reuse, they do not address power, control, or benefit. The proposed poster presents the joint work of CARE Study Group (as part of the NFDI Section Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects) and the Specialised Information Service (FID) Middle East, North Africa and Islamic Studies in our ongoing pilot, which foregrounds the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. The acronym CARE stands for Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility and Ethics.[1] Why CARE in Humanities? In humanities, “data” encompasses digitized and born digital texts and objects, oral histories, and cultural artifacts evaluated for research questions. Without first attending to CARE, FAIR workflows can inadvertently replicate colonial dynamics. So hypothetically, CARE has to be embedded at workflow inception to ensure that subsequent FAIR activities respect community sovereignty. But to address CARE in a serious way, Humanities research engaging with cultural heritage must first contest the current definitions of “indigenous” before operationalizing data governance. Foundational frameworks - such as Cobo’s report [2], [3], and ILO Convention 169 [4] - anchor indigeneity in colonial histories and state-centric criteria (“blood and tongue”), and thereby risk essentializing identity and excluding self-defined communities. Similarly, the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) [5] offers aspirational language without enforceable obligations, allowing states to endorse rights in principle while maintaining systemic power imbalances.[6] This critical lens underscores the necessity of reflexivity: without interrogating who “counts” as indigenous and how identities are framed, RDM processes may inadvertently perpetuate colonial dynamics. Hence, in contrast to FAIR the CARE Principles cannot be addressed in a standard protocol. To translate CARE into practice in the ELSA CARE Study Group we consequently discussed the Informed CARE Data Steward Model.