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.