Digital Territories: Entwining Technology with Indigenous Knowledges

Mainstream digital technologies tend to be designed without reflection on how the way they structure knowledge can decontextualise it from its surroundings, affecting different cultural groups. In this work, we discuss how community-led databases could be created while accounting for Indigenous values and land-based wisdoms, following a collaboration with Radio Tosepan Limakxtum, an organisation of Masewal People. Emerging from metaphors of sowing, growing and harvesting, a series of activities entwining technology with traditional knowledge systems were crafted. In response, exploratory roles and assemblies were created as data practices, reimagining the ancestral self-organisation processes, language and views that have shaped Masewal autonomy and self-determination. The work demonstrates how Indigenous knowledges can reframe ways of thinking about technology, creating a digital territory that extends intricate relations with the land as a living entity. This study contributes relational approaches to data, technologies and participation, emphasising community context, Indigenous research methods and collective wellbeing.