Abstract
In response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action and the global movement toward Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDSov), academic repositories are confronting the inadequacies of Western archival paradigms when stewarding Indigenous heritage. This qualitative multiple-case study investigates how contemporary information policy frameworks—specifically the First Nations principles of OCAP® (Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession) and the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance—inform and transform digital data curation practices within Canadian university archives. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 18 university archivists, digital curation specialists, and Indigenous liaison professionals across four U15 research-intensive universities, this inquiry analyzes the tensions between institutional open-science imperatives and community-driven access protocols. The findings indicate that while national policies like the Tri-Council Policy Statement provide broad ethical mandates, institutional execution remains constrained by entrenched metadata standards, technological architectures, and ambiguities surrounding intellectual property. Archival teams are progressively implementing relational stewardship workflows, incorporating Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels, and renegotiating donor agreements to honor provenance grounded in Indigenous legal traditions. This research highlights the urgent need for systemic administrative shifts, demonstrating that ethical curation requires reorienting professional custodial values from unmediated universal access toward community-directed governance and enduring relational accountability.
