Data sovereignty is youth sovereignty: Rewriting the rules of Al and open data

I promises to “know” everything—but who decides what can be known, and by whom? Asa young leader, I am honored to be part of One Young World’s Indigenous Advisory Circle and to work alongside thousands of Indigenous youth who are advancing data sovereignty in our communities. For us, data is not raw material. It carries story, ceremony, and responsibility. When algorithms scrape the internet and call it “open,” they often ingest our culture without consent. The fastest way to make AI safer is also the most ethical: let Indigenous peoples govern our own data—starting with youth who will live with the consequences the longest.

- ANNA MAE YU LAMENTILLO

Indigenous Data Sovereignty means our peoples decide what information about us—our lands, languages, kinship, and knowledge—gets collected, how it is stored, who can use it, and under what conditions. Consent is not a checkbox; it is an ongoing relationship with obligations on both sides. In practice, that looks like community-controlled rules for collection, access, use, sharing, and benefit across the full data lifecycle, with the authority to say yes, no, or not yet.

When our datais treated as ownerless, harm follows. Sacred songs are mislabeled as “folklore” and fed into models that remix them into novelty. Location and ecological records expose sacred sites and hunting grounds to trespass and exploitation. Health or justice datasets, shared without governance, become tools of surveillance. “Open” is mistaken for “free to take,” and our languages and teachings are used to train systems that return nothing to the people who created them. Even well-intentioned platforms erase us by standardizing our names and territories until identity is rounded off for the sake of accuracy.