INSTRUCTIONS:  This section offers Indigenous context setting for data justice work. It also offers the metrics guiding the Healing Continuum and Policy/ Project Assessments in a format that is more easily integrateable into current data sets.  The dashboard below contains indicators that can integrated into organizational metrics/ indicators/ data collection. They also offer decolonized metrics for Community Health Needs Assessments, Community Health Improvement Plans, Equity assessments, etc. Lastly, they are offered as an advocacy tool for national, state, and other standardized data sets that currently uphold data genocide practices.

What is Decolonizing Public Health at the Level of Data?

(offered by the Indigenous Health Equity Institute, May 2024)

In Indian Country, there is a reclamation of culture, community, traditions, knowledge, driven by a broader values-based movement of Indigenous Resurgence and Decolonization. With regard to public health this means replacing systems of settler colonial harm maintained and replicated by white supremacy, settler logic of elimination, settler status quo, and anti-Indigenous racism, so that there is an end to systems of Indigenous erasure and genocide. This is a pathway to promote a generative cycle to heal the lasting impacts of colonialism that promote and sustains the health and wellness of the entire collective [Natives and non-Natives] across all of the generations.This bold and worthy pathway requires efforts to build institutions that are socially just and life affirming, where Indigenous sovereignty is honored and strengthened, and Indigenous peoples, knowledges, and futures thrive. This form of recognition and transformation requires investment into dismantling settler denial of ongoing settler colonialism, to build and implement a decolonizing praxis that centers Indigenous peoples, knowledge and science, and promotes the repatriation of Indigenous land and life. Importantly, because the experiences of Indigenous people are not only about racism, but also about ongoing colonialism, constructing anti-racist and equity initiatives on colonizing frameworks, fail to name and address colonialism and are thus complicit in maintaining settler colonial harm and the elimination of Indigenous life and futures. 

A solution is to build a decolonizing praxis to identify and replace the social and organizational norms, conditions, values, and practices that maintain, reflect and reinforce settler colonialism. 

Building a decolonizing praxis offers the promise of engaging at the individual-, system-, and institutional level to decolonize. Decolonization is “the ongoing process of dismantling colonial regimes, structures, practices, and discourses” (Kuokkanen, 2008, pg. 143). She continues that “decolonization refers to the present struggle for political but also intellectual, economic, and cultural self-determination; it includes reclaiming their rights to autonomy, land, identity, language and worldviews”. Because colonial systems cannot decolonize, it is our responsibility to lessen the harm that they cause and encourage them to take action to become more socially just. 

Research shows that Western Data Systems (AKA: Colonial data systems) are embedded with harmful colonial practices that undermines efforts for eliminating health inequities. By design, such data systems produce outputs and deficit based narratives about Native peoples and communities as inadequate, only experiencing disparities, lacking, dysfunctional, dependent, and lacking history and solutions. Suboptimal data collection strategies and tools result in the misclassification of data that leads to undercounts or a lack of data in general. These are issues of invisibilizing the true health needs of Native peoples, and lack of data for decision making, prevention and intervention has resulted in preventable deaths and morbidity.

The following sections informed by the Native community and Native scholarship1.

Strategies to decolonize data: 

1) Reclaim Indigenous values and practices of data collection, analysis, and research 

2) Generate data informed by, centered on, and led by Native people, knowledge, and priorities 

3) Create data ecosystems that describe the strengths, contributions, and values of Indigenous peoples and life ways 

System Level Intervention to Decolonize Data: 

1) Acknowledge harmful settler data practices heal and replace those practices 

2) Recognize the a data infrastructure constructed on settler colonialism is insufficient to produce data in which to adequately describe the health needs and health promoting solutions of Native peoples 

3) Data governance and data sovereignty help ensure good institutional practice as demonstrating commitment to advance conditions to uplift and sustain thriving Indigenous futures 

4) Realize that data analysts often have limited relationship with Native peoples and communities to counter the damaging effects of stereotypes and social misconceptions that may drive methodologies and interpretations of the data 

5) Honor that decolonizing is a collective responsibility that requires understanding and addressing colonial harm at the individual-, system-, and institutional-levels. 

6) Implementation of strengths based, community driven data efforts that honor and build strong Indigenous sovereignty 

7) Incorporating Indigenous values, including reciprocity within data ecosystems and practice 

8) Disaggregation of data by race, ethnicity, and multiple races 

9) Accurate reporting of race and ethnicity 

10)Exploring and refining small populations methodologies 

11) Replacing data systems that produce deficit narratives of disparity, dysfunction, dependency, and lack about Native peoples and communities 

12)Infuse relational orientations to the data that stretch across the community, history, social context, and futures 

13)Honor community knowledge and science, and invest in data capacity and future building as centered on and driven by the Native community 

14)Understand data as relational and has the ability to infuse and help heal the profound impact of historical, cultural, and intergenerational trauma resulting from ongoing colonialism and settler denial of colonialism 

15)Relationships with data, community and building trust is the cornerstone of decolonizing data and implementing a decolonizing praxis upheld by non-Native allies and comrades

Footnotes: 1 Developed by the Indigenous Health Equity Institute; resources “Urban Indian Health Institute, Decolonizing Data Toolkit (https://www.uihi.org/projects/decolonizing-data-toolkit/); Gordon, H. S. J., & Around Him, D. (2024). Understanding racial equity in research with Indigenous Peoples: including anti-racism and decolonization approaches. Identities, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2024.2318975’; Decolonizing Equity,2022; Gordon, H. S. J., & Around Him, D. (2024). Understanding racial equity in research with Indigenous Peoples: including anti-racism and decolonization approaches. Identities, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2024.2318975;Kuokkanen, R. (2008). Reshaping the university: Responsibility, indigenous epistemes, and the logic of the gift. Vancouver, Canada: University of British Columbia Press.; Jacob, M. M., Gonzales, K. L., Chappell Belcher, D., Ruef, J. L., & RunningHawk Johnson, S. (2021). Indigenous cultural values counter the damages of white settler colonialism. Environmental Sociology, 7(2), 134–146. https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2020.1841370; Indigenous Health Equity Institute community and staff engagement.