Toward Data Sovereignty: Justice-oriented and Community-based AI Education

Just as food sovereignty is the innate right of all individuals, we argue that data sovereignty should also be treated similarly. We take a critical approach and have leaned on Indigenous scholarship that focuses on rights, control, and power related to data sovereignty. Peoples of the world should have access to, have ownership of, and be decision-making stewards of their own communities' data. We discuss the importance of data sovereignty, implications of a possible 'data apartheid', and ways to possibly achieve data sovereignty in this paper. We present examples of justice-oriented and community-based AI education to serve as starting points.