Continuing the “Disaster Studies” theme of the “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series, Stephanie Russo Carroll, Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear, Randy Akee, Annita Lucchesi, and Jennifer Rai Richards demonstrate the need to understand the role of data as a mechanism of both oppression and liberation. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, Indigenous Peoples are working to gain control of their tribal data to combat the erasure of their communities, and to advance data sovereignty. Through this work in the short-term, the authors describe how control over their own data will support access to needed resources in response to the pandemic. In the longer term, data sovereignty will help advance systemic change, and contribute to the larger goal of dismantling racism.
Annita Lucchesi
Annita Lucchesi (Cheyenne descendant) is a PhD student at the University of Arizona School of Geography and Development. She also serves as founding executive director of Sovereign Bodies Institute, a nonprofit research center that works to address, prevent, and heal from gender and sexual violence against Indigenous peoples. Lucchesi’s academic research is focused on intersections of data, colonial, gender and sexual violence, and critical and Indigenous cartographies. Her current work theorizes data terrorism as it pertains to missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people.