Colonialism’s and postcolonialism’s fellow traveller: the collection, use and misuse of data on indigenous people

Abstract

Data sovereignty (DSov) is a somewhat narrow twenty-first-century concept from commercial law relating to the protection of digitalised individual, governmental and corporate information, and also to the safeguarding of the national security apparatus from nefarious actions. This chapter, using Aotearoa/New Zealand as a case study, extrapolates from this idea in several ways. DSov is defined here in a much broader way to include the notion of the supremacy of systems of data collection and use. It is essential to recognise that, before contact with imperial powers, indigenous peoples had their own vibrant, meaningful bodies of data, over which they had