Supporting Indigenous Data: Introducing the Traditional Knowledge and Biocultural Labels

Concerns over Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Indigenous rights under the Nagoya Protocol underpin the development and application of Traditional Knowledge and Biocultural Labels/Notices. The Local Contexts system which delivers the Labels and Notices, is focused on implementing Indigenous provenance, protocols, and permissions into digital infrastructures.The Labels and Notices are designed to provide a persistent and durable connection between collaborating Indigenous communities and researchers, research projects, genetic resources, Digital Sequence Information (DSI), and associated traditional knowledge, that exist as metadata in sample/data repositories .

The Biocultural Labels support Nagoya Protocol expectations around the disclosure and origins of genetic resources (i.e. Provenance Label) and help to define and communicate Indigenous community expectations and consent about appropriate and future use of genetic resources and derived benefits. Importantly BC Labels may only be applied by an Indigenous community, and they are both human readable and machine readable. Each Label has a persistent unique identifier and the Label metadata (as text) is customized to each community context.

This presentation will introduce the Labels and Notices and explore the responsibilities that universities and researchers have to practically implement mechanisms that enable transparency around Indigenous rights and interests in support of Indigenous data sovereignty.

About People, Plants and the Law Online Lecture Series

The People, Plants, and the Law lecture series explores the legal and lively entanglements of human and botanical worlds.

Today people engage with and relate to plants in diverse and sometimes divergent ways. Seeds—and the plants that they produce—may be receptacles of memory, sacred forms of sustenance, or sites of resistance in struggles over food sovereignty. Simultaneously, they may be repositories of gene sequences, Indigenous knowledge, bulk commodities, or key components of economic development projects and food security programs.

This lecture series explores the special role of the law in shaping these different engagements, whether in farmers’ fields, scientific laboratories, international markets, or elsewhere.