Authors Positioning
Before proceeding with our analysis, we must address our structural and subjective positionality with both transparency and humility. As non-aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scholars – an AI ethics researcher and a political economist (of global indigenous background) – we recognise the inherent identitarian tensions and socio-political limitations of our engagement with Indigenous data sovereignty. We write this not merely as a perfunctory acknowledgment, but as a necessary existentialist and ethical foundation that shapes how we epistemologically and politically approach this work. We are acutely aware of the risks of perpetuating what Tuhiwai Smith (2012) identified as “colonial systems wrapped in Indigenous packaging” (p. 203)- where well-meaning non-aboriginal and Torres Strait actors can inadvertently water down or appropriate Indigenous sovereignty, knowledge and subjectivity through shallow academic engagement or superficial co-design approaches. Our role is not to speak for Aboriginal and Torres Strait peoples or claim or appropriate Indigenous knowledge, but rather to use our privilege in the international division of labour and power within colonial capitalist institutions to support the radical democratic efforts of the working people and Indigenous-led transformations while remaining accountable to Indigenous scholars, communities, and social movements.
This epistemic and subjective positioning-taking makes it incumbent upon us to be absolutely clear about the scale of the challenge. Australian neoliberal universities are not merely influenced by capitalist and colonial structures – they are constitutively colonial and exploitative institutions. Their very governance frameworks and ideological make-up, embedded in the market framework, the Westminster system and required by government law, ensure Indigenous peoples remain alienated, exploited and repressed in decision-making bodies like faculty councils, academic senates, councils, executive team, and the wider apparatuses of power. Without these colonial governance structures and the matrix of domination, universities would lose accreditation and funding. Recognising these deeply embedded colonial power relations strengthens our conviction that supporting Indigenous data sovereignty and their real concrete sovereignty requires more than surface-level reforms – it demands a fundamental transformation of university governance and wider socio-economic power structures.
New Manifestations of Colonialism in the Digital Age
To grasp the transformative potential of Indigenous data sovereignty, we must first reckon with the dark history of colonialism and its ongoing manifestations in the data practices of contemporary institutions, including universities. As Kukutai and Cormack (2019) incisively argue, “Colonialism was, and continues to be, a data project” (p. 202). From the earliest days of European invasion, settler colonial powers, apropos what Louis Althusser calls the ‘ideological and repressive apparatuses’(Althusser, 1970, p. 143), have relied on data to define, categorise, and govern Indigenous peoples (Walter, 2016). Neither the brutal state nor the mechanisms of the capitalist market could function without techniques and technologies that disciplined and punished the bodies and means of cultural production. The settler-colonial project in a sense required mechanisms such as the census, blood quantum rules, and eugenic pseudo-science, data was deployed to erase Indigenous identities, sever connections to land and culture, and justify violent policies of dispossession and forced assimilation (Carlson, 2016).
This colonial logic remains deeply embedded in the institutions’ power relations, their pedagogical and epistemological models, and also in their data infrastructures. Universities, positioned as producers and arbiters of ‘legitimate’ knowledge, have played a central role in perpetuating this ‘data colonialism’ (Walter & Suina, 2019). The curriculum structure and the research practices of academics, often extractive and unaccountable to Indigenous communities, have treated Indigenous peoples as passive subjects to be studied, measured, and problematised through a deficit lens (Rigney, 2001; Tuhiwai Smith, 2012). The resulting data and knowledge products – quantitative metrics, ethnographies, and historical narratives – have systematically misrepresented, and distorted Indigenous realities. This ideological obfuscation functions to justify indigenous bodies and knowledge to be exploited, repressed if not completely erased through the violence of neo-colonialism (Walter, 2018).
Even ostensibly benevolent inclusion efforts, such as the push to increase Indigenous student enrolments and research on Indigenous issues, often reinscribe colonial power dynamics. Indigenous people and knowledge are subordinated within Western-centric institutions and disciplines, or packaged and tokenised as exotic others (Nakata, 2007). Other times, the practices of hiring and putting on a pedestal Indigenous subjects tend to ideologically and socio-economically be aligned more with the system rather than the community. Hence, Indigeneity becomes flattened into a simplistic, essentialist ontological caricature defined solely through the framework of the state’s need to absorb it or the market’s whims of exploiting it. In the university, this combines under the nebulas patronising hierarchical concept of ‘disadvantaged’. The ideological and practical outcome is an obvious one: the Indigenous student or academic remains an anomaly, an outsider forever at the margins, not a rightful producer and owner of knowledge.
As such the ramifications of this structural data inequity reverberate far beyond the academy. Universities are powerful institutions, shaping policy debates, public discourses, and resource flows at the meso and macro-level of society. The knowledge they produce about Indigenous peoples – decontextualised, deficit-focused, and controlled by outsiders – directly influences the life chances and material conditions of Indigenous communities (Bodkin-Andrews & Carlson, 2016). These reproduced the division of labour, the existing unequal property relations but also the hierarchical social relations. Universities thus cannot be treated as neutral or benevolent spaces. They are sites of active struggle, where the misrepresentation and appropriation of Indigenous data continue the unfinished business of colonisation.
