Abya Yala Data Sovereignty Network

The global Indigenous data sovereignty movement has been theorized substantially from the legal, institutional, and political contexts of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States (CANZUS), through the Global Indigenous Data Alliance (GIDA), the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, the Ownership, Control, Access and Possession (OCAP®) framework, Te Mana Raraunga (the Māori Data Sovereignty Network), and the Indigenous Data Alliance (IDA). These frameworks are foundational, and this paper does not depart from them. This paper contributes to theory-building by introducing the Abya Yala Khipus Zįķ’ — The Latin American and Caribbean Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network grounded in the Khipu::Panaka governance tradition of Tawantinzuyu — as a distinct node in what we theorize as partial-overlap conversatory: a field of Indigenous data governance frameworks that share core commitments (self-determination, collective authority, internal autonomy) while retaining framework-specific, non-substitutable content drawn from distinct legal orders, cosmologies, and biocultural systems conditions. We show that Ayni (Andean-structured agonistic negotiated reciprocity) configures, in key respects, the scope of CARE principles (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics) to uphold place-based Indigenous Peoples’ rights and interests in their data. Abya Yala’s megabiodiversity, plurinationality, and transboundary conditions generate governance demands from its own territorial jurisprudence and from a relational positioning model. The Yľa semiotics::semiographics offers a general architecture for organizing sovereignty and solidarity across in situ and diasporic Indigenous populations. We conclude that Indigenous Peoples’ rights to hold, govern, and derive value from data about themselves and their territories — in any format, medium, or expression, and regardless of where that data resides — constitute a single underlying right expressed through plural, ground-up frameworks, nonreducible to the others. We ground this theoretical claim territorially on the Kara::Kichwa Data Sovereignty Framework, which already operationalizes a cognate instrument for the Kara and Kichwa Peoples of Ecuador, demonstrating that an Abya Yala-origin data governance law exists at Nation scale, and that Khipus Zįķ' proposes to federate such instruments.