The Australian Universities Accord Final Report offers a historic yet insufficient opportunity to advance Indigenous self-determination in higher education. Its goals will remain hollow without dismantling the entrenched colonial foundations embedded in universities’ governance and data practices. This paper demands that Indigenous Data Sovereignty—the inherent right of Indigenous peoples to control data about their communities, knowledge systems, and territories—become the unyielding cornerstone of university transformation. Building on the critical work of Indigenous scholars and decolonial theorists, it presents a radical agenda: (1) advance Indigenous data governance despite systemic constraints, (2) overhaul exploitative research protocols, (3) embed Indigenous knowledge systems, (4) invest in Indigenous data infrastructures, and (5) forge alliances that centre Indigenous nationhood. This agenda challenges universities to abandon symbolic reforms and confront their colonial legacies. By embracing Indigenous data sovereignty, universities can honour their obligations and lead the charge toward a just, humane, and decolonised future.
Keywords: Indigenous data sovereignty, decolonisation, higher education, Indigenous knowledge, data governance
Introduction
The Australian Universities Accord Final Report sets forth a transformative vision for tertiary education. Central to this vision is the ‘strong commitment to the principle of self-determination’ for the First Nations people (Department of Education, 2024, p.246). The report emphasises building objective structural conditions, representation in governance and leadership, increasing staff and student ratio, and nativising epistemological, pedagogical modelling and research. Regarding the latter factors, the Accord puts forward recommendations that include but are not limited to more government-supported positions, increased scholarships, embedding indigenous knowledge and belief systems and ‘devise new learning models that are led by and for First Nations people’ (250). However, as Indigenous scholars like Maggie Walter, Michele Suina, Kukutai and Taylor argue, realisation of self-determination (both material and symbolic) hinges upon a critical, yet often overlooked, factor: Indigenous data sovereignty.
Indigenous data sovereignty, as articulated by luminaries such as Walter, Kukutai, and many others, is the principle that Indigenous peoples must control the collection, ownership, and application of data about themselves and their communities (Walter & Suina, 2019; Kukutai & Taylor, 2016). It is a matter of both individual and collective rights, with profound implications for political, economic, social, and cultural well-being (Rainie et al., 2019). This is particularly crucial in the age of artificial intelligence, where, as Rana (2024) argues, digital colonialism poses a new and significant threat to Indigenous communities, potentially perpetuating historical inequalities through automated systems and algorithmic bias. In an era where data shapes everything from resource distribution to public perception, Indigenous data sovereignty has become the critical terrain on which Indigenous peoples and their allies are fighting for their survival and resurgence.
For Australia’s universities, embracing Indigenous data sovereignty is not just an aspirational ethical goal or a good pedagogical technique, what Paulo Freire would call the ‘problem-posing system’(Freire, 1970, p.67). It should also be a key pillar of their objective—to produce enlightened subjects for a rational, humane, secular and equitable society. Yet, as astutely argued by Indigenous scholars such as Moreton-Robinson (2013) and Carlson (2016), the academy has long been an ideological technique and apparatus that strengthened and justified the colonial project of dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their lands, culture, and identities. They argue that higher education’s research practices, curricula, and institutional structures have privileged Western knowledge systems and capitalist and statist ideologies while erasing or distorting Indigenous realities (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012; Nakata, 2007). Far from being neutral, data has been weaponised as a tool of colonial domination, defining Indigenous peoples as ‘dilemmas’ and ‘problems’ to be solved through consent assimilation and control (Walter, 2016). We have then a dialectical contradiction: the Accord’s new vision, and the need to reorganise knowledge production including digital and the old colonial legacies and ideological and repressive systems that aim to reproduce history.
Through a close hermeneutical analysis, the paper epistemologically examines the dialectical relation between data sovereignty and governance in Australian universities, challenging the dominant Eurocentric epistemological paradigms, colonial discursive apparatuses, and neoliberal capitalist commodification of education. The paper exposes how these structures, under the nominalism of ‘colonial legacy’, perpetuate systemic inequities, misconceptions, misrepresentation, prejudices, and biases, undermining First Nations subjectivity, agency, and collective emancipation and self-determination (Bodkin-Andrews & Carlson, 2016; Riley, 2019). Drawing on the works of Indigenous scholars and activists like Carlson (2016) and Prehn (2023) and others, the paper presents a compelling case for Indigenous data sovereignty as a non-negotiable prerequisite for First Nations self-determination in Australian higher education. It calls for a radical reimagining of the sector, empowering First Nations people to chart their course and shape their destinies through, not only, the material ownership of their nature, land, resources, and labour, but also the transformative power of their socio-technical output, namely, technologies and data.
The paper challenges policymakers, university management and leaders, and researchers to confront the uncomfortable truths about the ongoing legacy of imperialism and colonialism and the profit-motive-driven inertia in higher education and to take concrete steps towards redressing these racist and discriminatory injustices. Only by embracing Indigenous data sovereignty as a fundamental principle can Australian universities hope to fulfil the promise of the Accord and create a truly inclusive, equitable, and self-determined future for First Nations people.