Many of us within academic institutions exist “with or around a legacy of causing harm to Indigenous communities by conducting research without informed consent or by gathering and disseminating data in ways that may cause physical, emotional or spiritual harm,” said Chance White Eyes, Oregon State University (OSU)’s Director of Tribal Relations, in his opening to the January 22, 2026 webinar “Who owns the data? Centering Indigenous sovereignty in academic-community collaborations.” He went on to give thanks for the opportunity to do better to empower Indigenous communities and undo the harmful legacies of the places where we stand—a central goal of the webinar, which was co-organized by Jamie Donatuto, a clinical associate professor in the University of Washington Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Science and the Co-Director of the EDGE Community Engagement Core and Diana Rohlman, an Associate Professor in OSU’s Department of Environmental and Molecular Toxicology and Co-Leader of the Community Engagement Core for the OSU/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Superfund Research Center with Donatuto.
Featured panelists were Patrick Freeland of the Wind Clan of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma and Senior Tribal Climate Resilience Liaison with the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians and Will Makoyiisaaminaa of the Blackfeet Nation of Montana and Assistant Professor of Education Leadership at Western Washington University (WWU).
What is Tribal sovereignty?
Makoyiisaaminaa started off by emphasizing that since the time before European visitors arrived in what is now known as the Americas, Native communities have “held their own governance structures, carried their own values, perspectives and belief systems and lived in harmony and balance with the cosmos.” Native communities have always been sovereign nations, he explained, and their sovereignty became part of western law with the establishment of treaties after the founding of the United States in 1776.
Freeland explained that Tribal sovereignty is often treated as something to be addressed as a way to reduce liability, but that true sovereignty is more than a sociopolitical framework or legal status, but is something inherent. “Sovereignty is best equated to self-determination which applies to the individual, the community, the nation, the nations and even the environment itself,” said Freeland. Knowledge sovereignty means allowing for a plurality of worldviews. “I think more and more scientists are starting to wake up to the reality that knowledge production is always relational,” he said.
Why the need for Tribal Institutional Review Boards?
Makoyiisaaminaa described a lightbulb moment for him when he was a student in a doctoral program at WWU working with a tribal community. At first, he wondered why he was required to obtain a separate approval from the Institutional Review Board of the Northwest Indian College (NWIC) after he already had approval from within all levels of the Tribal community with which he was working and approval from WWU’s IRB. Then he sat down with William Freeman of NWIC to go through the IRB application and realized “This isn’t about me and my struggles and challenges in the IRB process. This is about being in community with this tribal community that’s allowing me to be in their space on their reservation working with their tribal community members and honoring the relationship through accountability and making sure that I was preserving the data in a way that honored what their desires were and how they wanted to protect that data.”
Through that process a Data and Materials Sharing and Ownership Agreement (DMSOA) was created with the legal department. Makoyiisaaminaa shared an example of what a DMSOA can look like.
Freeland shared his own experience as a graduate student being trained that the way to do good science is through a method that is utilitarian (focused on the greatest good for the greatest number), inductive (moving from specific observation to broader hypotheses), positivist (holding that objective, value neutral knowledge exists independent of relationships) and also in discord with the worldviews of most Indigenous cultures.
The implications of these assumptions for Tribal nations are significant. For one, Tribal members are always a minority and their interests may be overridden in a utilitarian context. Also Indigenous perspectives emphasize pluralities of knowledge, place-based relationships and the interconnectedness of living systems—putting them at odds with inductivism and positivism. The worldviews don’t have to be separate, emphasized Freeland. "There is a powerful confluence that can happen with these,” he said. “It's like looking at the world with [only] one eye. Sure, I can see color and shape and form and texture, but with a broader perspective things have depth.”
Tribal IRBs exist to help evaluate research with that broader perspective. Makoyiisaaminaa explained that the Northwest Indian College (NWIC) IRB process is in line with the values of the Lummi Nation that chartered NWIC and specifically honors respect, reciprocity and relationality. These are the “three Rs” of Indigenous-based research and they extend not just to people but to non-human relatives as well. With this emphasis, tribal IRBs exist to protect all aspects of living systems, not just human participants. Thus, Tribal IRBs go beyond what is mandated in the Common Rule. The Common Rule is the U.S. federal policy (45 CFR 46) that was created to protect human research subjects by establishing baseline ethical standards for federally-funded research including requirements to obtain informed consent and maintain privacy. It mandates IRB oversight.
Additional considerations
Freeland encouraged researchers seeking Tribal IRB approval to consider the concept of beneficence or ensuring that the participating Tribal community receives more benefits than it confers. Simple harm reduction is not beneficence. Considering who is responsible for the data is one example of an important consideration. In most cases not all data needs to be shared.
Rohlman and Donatuto discussed their experiences obtaining university and Tribal IRB approval, sharing that Tribal IRBs can look very different depending on the community involved, may require more context, may be required even when university IRBS are not and often catch harms that university IRBs may miss.
Then Mackenzie Allison and Grace Galles, doctoral students with the OSU/PNNL Superfund Research Center, presented about ways to preserve Tribal biospecimens, emphasizing that these samples can carry cultural and historical meaning and have been misused in the past. Allison emphasized that discussions about what to do with biospecimens should be done early on and be led by Tribal communities. Final details of what will happen to biospecimens should go into a DMSOA which should be signed by all parties. Galles outlined repository options that researchers could consider, taking into account things like type of data, accessibility and cost.
The webinar concluded with an engaging question and answer session for the 60 participants and the suggestion that more webinars on this topic will be developed in the future, as this is an evolving topic. A full recording of the webinar is available here.
- Community Engagement
