OCAP®: Data Sovereignty and the Business of Selling Culture in Lagos
Recently as part of my global indigenous coalition building work through the IndigeLab Network, I have been completing a training called OCAP® by FNIGC (First Nations Information Governance Centre). OCAP® — Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession — asserts that Indigenous communities hold sovereign rights over data and knowledge collected about them, rather than external researchers or institutions. It is a framework for critical action around indigenous data sovereignty, focused on the ethics around who owns, controls, accesses, and possesses cultural knowledge.
This is a great pinnacle moment in my interest in questions around who owns shared resources, what belongs to whom, and what gets extracted or taken without consent in the context of cultural knowledge production in Lagos.
Specifically, the lack of ethics around indigenous data related research, collection, dissemination, the unethical lack of reciprocity practices, etc by many designers, filmmakers, etc in Nigeria. Whose core mechanism of capital generation (both social and otherwise) is through the selling off of indigenous cultural data access to global monied (usually white) audiences, platforms, and industry such as the luxury fashion industry. The practices range of course from unethical use of indigenous data, or a lack of conscious agreements with indigenous stewards, to the siphoning of grant money.
It has been powerful to examine how witnessing these structures of internal extraction, dominated largely by wealthy Nigerians, has triggered my own sense of resource scarcity and injustice around resource access. I have had a multi-decade long wound of asking "who gets stuff and why not me." But that wound/deficiency laden question is now shifting into neutrality in its structural examination. Who gets grant money in Lagos, on what basis, and is it actually earned or is it extraction dressed up as authenticity and stewardship.
Shifting from my own anxious questions of "do I get to have resources," to "does the resource allocation system itself have integrity," which is a much bigger and more powerful question. I think that this is a shift that is needed for many and why questions of decolonisation are critical for our stories about self worth and our moving towards our desires. Shame is the opposite of projection. When we internalise structural bias as personal failure we lose agency. And of course, we internalise accountability meant for someone else.
My hope as I continue to work through OCAP®, is that it gives me a foundation to work through with rigour, documented methodologies, practical criteria, that both institutions and individuals ought to reckon with. I plan to share my discoveries as this journey continues and sitting with the need to not reform the system gently, but name and disrupt specific mechanisms by which power and resources move unjustly.
This is the first of what I hope will be a more regular practice of writing in public. I'm building this blog as a dedicated space for thoughts and short-form writing related to my research. My Substack will stay active, but expect more frequent reflections to start showing up here.
