Second U.S. Indigenous Data Sovereignty Summit Encourages Scholars, Leaders, and Data Warriors to ‘Come Home’

More than 500 individuals gathered online and in person on the lands of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe and the traditional homelands of the Tohono O’odham Nation for four days of programming and discussions on Indigenous data sovereignty and governance.

Born in 1944 in Pueblo de Cochiti in what is known today as New Mexico, 82-year-old Joseph Suina told a crowd at the 2026 U.S. Indigenous Data Sovereignty & Governance Summit that he is “old enough to remember the old ways.” 

The former governor of the Pueblo de Cochiti, professor emeritus at the University of New Mexico’s College of Education, and former director of the Institute for American Indian Education explained that technology was often late coming to the reservation lands where he grew up, so Suina was still a boy when electricity became commonplace in his Pueblo. A bevy of powered gadgets soon followed – television, air conditioning, clock radios, refrigerators.  

All at once, Suina says, about 80 years of technology swept into his world over a stretch of about a decade. Of course, these conveniences had their benefits. Who among us could imagine our lives today without access to the internet, let alone without the lights that allow us to carry on at night with activities that once were, by necessity, reserved for hours when the sun was shining? 

But, Suina says, with the lights came light bills. And, just like that, a subsistence existence built around community, agriculture, and ceremony was no longer enough to get by. Now the Pueblo people needed paper money. And, to get it, they had to participate in the colonial economy that seemed to be closing in on them more and more each day. 

From left, IDA board officers Malia Villegas (Afognak), Donald Warne (Oglala Lakota), and Tai Pelli (Taino).

Every technological advancement offers a burst of hope for the myriad potential applications of that technology. But, without fail, the costs of those advancements become clear sooner or later. 

The automobile made travel easier and exponentially faster, but with cars came car payments, insurance bills, and cities that were increasingly impossible to navigate on foot. The invention of the internet promised to connect us all to each other and to provide instantaneous access to all the world’s information, but with it came yet another monthly bill, the need to upgrade our technology constantly, and misinformation campaigns from near and far. Today artificial intelligence (AI) offers a promise of increased productivity and the offloading of some of our intellectual burdens to digital assistants. At the same time, companies are replacing human workers with AI while experts worry about potential declines in our ability to reason while questioning whether sentient robots will one day wipe out humankind completely.   

“We are the data, but a lot of Indigenous Peoples do not know... the impact that our data is having right now.” –Tai Pelli (Taino), IDA Board Officer

Read the full article at NATIVE NATIONS INSTITUTE