Every evaluation, every dashboard, every survey makes a quiet decision about who owns the resulting data and who gets to use it. Usually that decision is invisible, made by default in favour of whoever commissioned the work. In Indigenous health and social services, making that decision invisibly is itself the problem.
Data about communities has, historically, been collected from them and used on them; to justify policies they did not choose and to tell stories they did not author. Indigenous data sovereignty is self-determination applied to information: the principle that Indigenous peoples have the right to govern the collection, ownership, and use of data about their own communities.
In a First Nations context the working expression of this is OCAP®, a set of principles established through the First Nations Information Governance Centre. The letters stand for Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession: the community owns its information; controls how it is collected and used; has access to its own data; and has a say in where that data is physically held. They are not bureaucratic hurdles. They are the difference between research done with a community and research done to one.
An evaluation that cannot answer "whose data is this?" is not neutral; it has made a choice, just an invisible one.
This connects directly to the larger shift in the field. As Indigenous nations move toward self-government over child and family services and health, jurisdiction over the services implies jurisdiction over the data those services generate. You cannot affirm a community's authority to run a program and then quietly retain ownership of the evidence about it.
For anyone designing measurement in this space, the practical takeaway is simple and non-negotiable: settle ownership, control, access, and possession at the start, in writing, with the community, not as fine print at the end. Build it in, and the data becomes a tool for self-determination. Bolt it on, and you have rebuilt the old extractive pattern with nicer charts.