Whose Knowledge, Whose Rules? Adapting Canada’s Indigenous Data Governance for Taiwan’s Libraries

Abstract

For Taiwan’s sixteen officially recognized indigenous peoples, their oral traditions, ceremonial knowledge, and linguistic heritage sit in libraries across Taiwan, stored and circulated largely without community input. This ongoing project analyzes why this problem persists and what can be done about it. Its findings so far reveal that the frameworks designed to help are in fact part of the aforesaid problem.

Two widely applied indigenous data governance frameworks exist: CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) and Canada’s OCAP® (Ownership, Control, Access, Possession). Both argue that communities should govern their own cultural information, but both were built for settler-colonial contexts where indigenous peoples hold formal treaty rights. Taiwan’s indigenous communities have survived different successive colonial histories and now function under domestic law built on entirely different legal foundations.

Canada serves as the most effective comparison case with OCAP® origin’s there and Canada’s indigenous rights system being among the world’s most developed. Yet, direct application fails. Most critically as the CARE’s Authority to Control assumes tribal sovereignty structures that simply is not applicable in Taiwan’s legal system. This ongoing project thus builds an effective practical, locally grounded framework that libraries across East and Southeast Asia can actually apply.