Indigenous Peoples are increasingly being sought out for research partnerships that incorporate Indigenous Knowledges into ecology research. In such research partnerships, it is essential that Indigenous data are cared for ethically and responsibly. Here we outline how the ‘CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance’ can sow community ethics into disciplines that are inundated with extractive helicopter research practices, and we provide standardized practices for evolving data and research landscapes.

To what extent do extractive and industrial development pressures affect Indigenous Peoples’ lifeways, lands, and rights globally? We analyze 3081 environmental conflicts over development projects to quantify Indigenous Peoples’ exposure to 11 reported social-environmental impacts jeopardizing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Indigenous Peoples are affected in at least 34% of all documented environmental conflicts worldwide. More than three-fourths of these conflicts are caused by mining, fossil fuels, dam projects, and the agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and livestock (AFFL) sector. Landscape loss (56% of cases), livelihood loss (52%), and land dispossession (50%) are reported to occur globally most often and are significantly more frequent in the AFFL sector. The resulting burdens jeopardize Indigenous rights and impede the realization of global environmental justice.

Greater engagement and representation of Indigenous voices, knowledges and worldviews in the biological sciences is growing globally through efforts to bring more Indigenous academics into scientific research and teaching institutions. Although the intentions of such efforts may be admirable, these spaces often become sites of great personal tension for the Indigenous scholars who must ‘bridge’ or ‘facilitate’ a dialogue between Indigenous and settler-colonial (predominantly Western) knowledge traditions and worldviews. We are a small collective of early career Indigenous scholars from Australia, the United States and Aotearoa New Zealand, and we have gained insights into this situation through the unique experiential learning afforded by navigating such tensions. Here, we discuss tensions that bear remarkable similarities across geographies, cultures and settler-colonial contexts. In doing so, we aim to support other Indigenous scientists and scholars navigating settler-colonial and Western research institutions, while offering guidance, suggestions and reflections for the scientific community to allow the development of more nuanced strategies to support Indigenous academics than simply increasing Indigenous representation. We imagine transformed, innovative research and teaching agendas where Indigenous knowledges can thrive, and Indigenous scientists can apply themselves with mutual and balanced respect and reciprocity.

Addressing complex social-ecological issues requires all relevant sources of knowledge and data, especially those held by communities who remain close to the land. Centuries of oppression, extractive research practices, and misrepresentation have hindered balanced knowledge exchange with Indigenous communities and inhibited innovation and problem-solving capacity in all scientific fields. A recent shift in the research landscape reflects a growing interest in engaging across diverse communities and ways of knowing. Scientific discussions increasingly highlight the inherent value of Indigenous environmental ethics frameworks and processes as the original roadmaps for sustainable development planning, including their potential in addressing the climate crisis and related social and environmental concerns. Momentum in this shift is also propelled by an increasing body of research evidencing the role of Indigenous land stewardship for maintaining ecological health and biodiversity. However, a key challenge straining this movement lies rooted in colonial residue and ongoing actions that suppress and co-opt Indigenous knowledge systems. Scientists working with incomplete datasets privilege a handful of narratives, conceptual understandings, languages, and historical contexts, while failing to engage thousands of collective bodies of intergenerational, place-based knowledge systems. The current dominant colonial paradigm in scientific research risks continued harmful impacts to Indigenous communities that sustain diverse knowledge systems. Here, we outline how ethical standards in researcher practice can be raised in order to reconcile colonial legacies and ongoing settler colonial practices. We synthesize across Indigenous and community-based research protocols and frameworks, transferring knowledge across disciplines, and ground truthing methods and processes in our own practice, to present a relational science working model for supporting Indigenous rights and reconciliation in research. We maintain that core Indigenous values of integrity, respect, humility, and reciprocity should shape researcher responsibilities and methods applied in order to raise ethical standards and long-term relational accountability regarding Indigenous lands, rights, communities, and our shared futures.

In the age of big data and open science, what processes are needed to follow open science protocols while upholding Indigenous Peoples’ rights? The Earth Data Relations Working Group (EDRWG), convened to address this question and envision a research landscape that acknowledges the legacy of extractive practices and embraces new norms across Earth science institutions and open science research. Using the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) as an example, the EDRWG recommends actions, applicable across all phases of the data lifecycle, that recognize the sovereign rights of Indigenous Peoples and support better research across all Earth Sciences.