Rethinking Research and Data Sovereignty

To an outside observer, the birch bark cylinder on Florence Glanfield’s desk might seem like simply a piece of decor. But the contents of that cylinder give the container a much more significant role in her work — and in the University of Alberta’s efforts in implementing Braiding Past, Present and Future: University of Alberta Indigenous Strategic Plan and meeting the institution’s commitment to reconciliation and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in post-secondary education and research.

As vice-provost of Indigenous programming and research, Glanfield worked alongside the Supporting Indigenous Language Revitalization (SILR) research team. The team, which includes Davina Rousell, Research Associate and graduate research assistants Crystal Wood, Velvalee Georges, Joline Bull, Sherryl Sewepegaham and Shuvo Saha, is guided by an advisory council of four recognized elders — Elmer Ghostkeeper, Doreen Frencheater, Molly Chisaakay and Mary Cardinal-Collins — who are Indigenous language champions. 

The team spent much of the last year working on The Search for Wellness Through Ancestral Languages, a national research study that initially sought to better understand the impact of knowing and speaking Indigenous languages on health and well-being, but eventually grew to an entire rethinking of how researchers at the U of A could work with Indigenous communities and data sovereignty.

“What we have to learn — it’s part of the work of all of us, the whole institution — is to learn how our processes can be different. Period. Because they have to be different if we’re going to continue to be the research-intensive university that we want to be,” says Glanfield.

The Search for Wellness Through Ancestral Languages began with a literature review to look at how speaking Indigenous languages contributes to community and individual health and well-being. But as SILR’s research team set out on their searching journey, the limitations of using written materials to study oral languages quickly became apparent.

“Our research team conducted a systematic literature review and then posed the question, ‘How do we get the voices of the elders and knowledge keepers and communities in this research?’” she explains. “The literature review doesn’t capture the orality of Indigenous languages in the written productions, because they’re all text-based and they are limited in our case to the English language.”

As the research team began to look at ways to capture the oral nature of ancestral languages, questions arose about how audio and video recordings — and other data collected by researchers — would be stored and used. Those questions sparked some important conversations.

“Many of those language holders asked right away, ‘Who will own this work?’” she explains. 

“We had said, ‘It’s going to be owned by the community,’ but we didn’t know what that was going to look like, because we weren’t there yet.”

In the past, Glanfield explains, researchers would have to detail their data management plans for five years as part of their studies. After that, the data would belong to the institution. 

“We never had to think about anybody else ‘owning’ or ‘stewarding’ the data. It was from the researcher’s and the university’s perspective,” she says.

And that, she explains, needed to change.

“Universities have long held lots of information about [Indigenous Peoples], but as peoples, nations and communities exert their sovereign rights, they are saying, ‘Whoa, how come these other people or institutions own it? Why don’t we get to own it?’” she says.

“We’re being asked challenging questions. And we have to find a way to respond to that as an institution.”

To identify the most suitable data management practices, SILR’s research team sought the guidance of the advisory council, made up of diverse language holders from groups including Anishinaabe, Bushland Cree and Michif, Dene Tha’ and Cree speakers. The council was asked to determine how the data and stories collected by researchers could be stored and used, now and into the future. 

Guided by the advisory council, the research team set to work creating the university’s first-ever Data Sovereignty Declaration and Caretaking Directives. The agreement sets a new standard for the institution, allowing research participants to actively participate in how their data is managed once it has been collected.

“The participants decide if they will share it with their families and communities, but they decide it, and they’re deciding how they want it to be shared. The researcher isn’t deciding,” Glanfield says.

For participants in the Search for Wellness Through Ancestral Languages, the agreement meant they could actively decide how their recordings would be used. Some asked for their records to be shared with their family or community, or kept for personal use. Others asked the university to care for their data, acting as stewards under direct guidance from the participants. This arrangement within the university was made possible through a partnership with the University of Alberta Library and Museums. The Library and Museums were a signatory on each agreement, ensuring participants’ data was archived according to their directive.

In all cases, participants maintained control over their information, who could access it and for what purpose it could be accessed.

“They have control of that data, those stories — not only now, but in the future, in perpetuity. It doesn’t transfer, I don’t own the data as the principal investigator, which is another change in thinking for university researchers because we’ve been trained that if we’re collecting the data, we own the data,” says Glanfield.

In September 2024, the responsibilities of stewardship for Indigenous research participants’ data were officially entrusted to the vice-provost (Library & Museums), the chief librarian and the vice-provost (Indigenous programming and research) at a ceremony called ‘Kechi Tawin’ (Creation). They were presented inside a birch bark container — the one now sitting prominently on Glanfield’s desk.

“This birch bark satchel contains my responsibility for this work,” she says, holding it up reverently. The birch bark satchel holds and preserves the spirit and sacredness of the agreements and are opened every seven generations to renew the holders’ commitment and responsibilities.

And although the agreement sets an important new standard at the U of A, Glanfield knows there is more work ahead to change the traditional, extractive research practices often used in academia.

“We have many amazing researchers across this institution who have been working with Indigenous communities for a long time, within the colonial practices,” she says.

“We’re all learning about what it means to decolonize ourselves.”