Webinar: The Intersection of Sovereignty, Data, and Privacy Across Indigenous Contexts

Register below for this webinar, held on October 7, 2026 at 2pm PST.

Register Here

Due to team time limitations, any registrations received after OCTOBER 6th @2PM (PST) will not be reviewed.

About this Webinar:

This presentation will feature a discussion with prominent Indigenous Data Sovereignty Practitioners across disciplines, and Indigenous contexts (protected and unprotected sovereignties). A moderator will ask four panelists (A Hawaiian Genomicist, A Lakota Data Security and Telecom specialist, A Dine’ Public Policy expert, and A Cherokee Data Security and Legal Consultant) to opine on the following questions:

  1. How do Tribal Sovereignty (ies), Data (ex. DNA data), and Privacy intersect
  2. How do you solve the problem of “dual” citizenship in the USA and the Tribe with Individual rights and Communal asset management?
  3. Is privacy a thing anymore? After Dobb’s decision and the DOD’s stance that we live in an algorithmic circular dynamic (you have the right to encrypt and they have the right to break your ciphers)?
  4. Can ML/AI help or hurt Indigenous protections?

Moderator:

Joseph Yracheta (Executive Director at Native Bio Data Consortium) is a career biologist who currently works on ethics, law and policy around Indigenous Data Sovereignty and the technical solutions to enforce the principles of CARE and OCAP.

Featured Speakers:

Keolu Fox, Ph.D., Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) is an assistant professor at University of California, San Diego, affiliated with the Department of Anthropology, the Global Health Program, the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, the Climate Action Lab, and the Indigenous Futures Lab. He holds a Ph.D. in Genome Sciences from the University of Washington, Seattle. Dr. Fox’s multi-disciplinary research interests include genome sequencing, genome engineering, computational biology, evolutionary genetics, paleogenetics, and Indigenizing biomedical research. His primary research focuses on questions of functionalizing genomics, testing theories of natural selection by editing genes and determining the functions of mutations.

Guthrie Ducheneaux (Director of Digital Infrastructure and Telecommunications at Native Bio Data Consortium)

Moroni Benally, Ph.D. is a Government Affairs Consultant at Navajo Nation.

Jim Sill (President at Insight Forensics Consulting, Inc.) is a Ph.D. Candidate and Researcher in Cyber Studies. Jim has an M.S. in Computer Engineering with a Cybersecurity focus and is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP).

This webinar is a collaborative effort involving the Indigenous Data Alliance (IDA), the Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance, the Indigenous Data Exchange (IDX), the IndigeLab Network, the Indigenous Data Law Lab at NYU, the Sovereign Soils Research Collaborative, and the Native BioData Consortium.