Sacred Sites and Epistemic Sovereignty

Core Concepts

The landscape as archive — and as a site of ongoing politics

Previous modules established that landscapes function as archives: encoded with knowledge, history, territorial governance, and cosmological meaning that exists outside written text. Songlines traverse country as living legal and navigational systems. Place names carry historiography. Monument alignments encode celestial calendars. Ceque systems integrate ritual obligation, territory, and ecological knowledge into a single geographic fabric.

But archives have gatekeepers. And the question of who has the authority to read, describe, copy, or publish a landscape archive is not merely academic — it is a political and ethical question with real stakes for the communities whose knowledge lives in that landscape.

This module is concerned with those stakes.

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1. Sacred vs. public knowledge — a built-in distinction

Not all knowledge encoded in a landscape is meant to be universally accessible. This is not a restriction imposed from outside — it is part of the knowledge system itself.

Songlines, for example, contain layered information: sacred or ceremonial knowledge restricted to those with specific cultural authority and kinship rights, and publicly available information that can be shared more broadly. This knowledge stratification is not arbitrary but deliberate and legal — access protocols for restricted knowledge are part of the Law itself, enforced through customary systems of kinship responsibility and community sanction.

In Warlpiri practice, only the right people can speak for Country. The cultural authority to transmit knowledge about a specific place derives from kinship and ceremonial standing, not from scholarly interest or institutional affiliation. This structure embeds intellectual property protections and access ethics directly into the knowledge system — long before any external institution attempted to regulate them.

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2. The disclose-protect paradox

Here is the structural problem that confronts any scholar, heritage agency, or legal system attempting to protect a sacred site:

Federal and state legal regimes designed to protect Indigenous sacred sites — including the U.S. National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA) — generally require some form of disclosure in order to formally recognize and trigger legal protection for these sites. Coordinates. Descriptions. Cultural significance. A site that is not disclosed cannot be protected.

But the Indigenous knowledge systems and cultural protocols that govern these same sacred sites often operate under principles of restricted knowledge, where detailed disclosure of site location, significance, or ceremonial protocols is itself considered a harm or violation.

The legal machinery designed to protect sacred sites requires the very information whose protection is the cultural mandate.

This is not a failure of implementation — it is a structural paradox baked into the architecture of non-Indigenous heritage law. Research ethics guidelines across Canada and the U.S. acknowledge that the confidentiality of ceremonial knowledge cannot be separated from ethical research conduct, yet federal heritage laws operate under disclosure assumptions.

The paradox runs through multiple jurisdictions and reflects a fundamental mismatch between non-Indigenous bureaucratic categories (notification, registration, public inventory) and Indigenous place-based governance protocols (restricted access, initiation, oral transmission to designated knowledge holders only).

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3. UNDRIP: the international legal framework

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), adopted in 2007 and embraced by all 193 UN Member States, establishes a set of rights directly relevant to landscape archives and sacred sites.

UNDRIP recognizes that Indigenous peoples have the right to:

• Manifest, practice, develop, and teach their spiritual and religious traditions, customs, and ceremonies.
• Maintain, protect, and have access in privacy to their religious and cultural sites.
• Use and control their ceremonial objects.
• Determine how their lands, territories, and resources are governed (Articles 26–32), including prohibitions on forcible removal without free, prior, and informed consent.

The phrase "access in privacy" is not incidental. It establishes that Indigenous authority over sacred sites includes the authority to restrict access and maintain confidentiality about site location, significance, and protocols. The Indian Law Resource Center characterizes this as foundational to international legal recognition of Indigenous sovereignty over sacred knowledge.

UNDRIP also requires states to consult and cooperate in good faith with Indigenous peoples through their representative institutions, establishing effective mechanisms to prevent displacement and ensure just compensation when territories are affected.

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4. Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC)

FPIC is established in UNDRIP and the International Labour Organization Convention 169 as an internationally recognized right requiring states and researchers to obtain consent from Indigenous peoples before adopting measures affecting their lands and resources. Its three elements are:

• Free: consent given voluntarily, without coercion or manipulation.
• Prior: consultation sufficiently in advance of proposed activities.
• Informed: decision-making according to Indigenous customs, values, and norms, with adequate information about what is being proposed.

FPIC applies not only to mining, infrastructure, and displacement — it applies to research activities, including archaeological survey, aerial LiDAR mapping, and heritage documentation. A study can hold national-level permissions and still be conducting research on Indigenous lands without community consent.

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5. Indigenous data sovereignty

Indigenous data sovereignty is the right of Indigenous peoples to control the collection, application, ownership, and use of data about them, their lands, resources, and cultures — including traditional knowledge and any information relating to Indigenous communities.

This right is distinct from privacy rights. It is a collective right, not an individual one. It positions data as a community asset and derives from Indigenous peoples' inherent authority as distinct nations. Data sovereignty is not a request for better data management practices — it is a claim about jurisdiction.

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6. CARE Principles: a framework for Indigenous data governance

The dominant framework in research data management — the FAIR Principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, Reusability) — promotes the broadest possible sharing of data. It was designed for scientific contexts where open data accelerates discovery.

But FAIR principles ignore power differentials and historical contexts of extraction that Indigenous communities have experienced. Making data about Indigenous landscapes maximally accessible is not neutral: it can expose restricted knowledge, concentrate control outside communities, and generate benefits for researchers without returning anything to the peoples whose knowledge was documented.

The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance were developed by the International Indigenous Data Sovereignty Interest Group in consultation with Indigenous nations, scholars, and organizations as a complementary framework that centers Indigenous rights and self-determination:

Fig 1

The key difference from FAIR is the principle of Authority to Control: Indigenous peoples and governing bodies have the right to determine how Indigenous peoples, lands, territories, resources, and knowledges are represented and identified in data systems. This principle is prior to, not a subset of, openness. In archaeological and heritage contexts, the CARE framework provides specific tools for establishing cultural governance protocols for data use that honor restrictions on ceremonial knowledge and require FPIC before access is granted.

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7. Ontological mismatch

Even well-intentioned legal protections for sacred sites frequently fail because they attempt to protect something they cannot conceptually accommodate.

Western legal systems categorize sacred sites through concepts inherited from colonial property law and religious-freedom doctrine: "cultural property," "religious sites," "archaeological sites," "heritage values." These categories assume a subject-object epistemology — the law is a rational text system applied to entities that exist independent of their legal designation.

Indigenous place-based ontologies, by contrast, conceive of land, water, and place as animate, relational, and person-making: as agents in networks of kin relations and responsibilities, not as property objects or resource containers.

When courts and heritage agencies attempt to recognize Indigenous sacred sites, they do so by translating Indigenous concepts into colonial categories. A ceque system — the Andean sacred geography involving ritual obligations, territorial administration, and cosmological knowledge — cannot be reduced to "religious sites" without losing its ontological coherence as an integrated system of reciprocal human-more-than-human relations. Legal geography scholarship documents that this translation is not neutral: it diminishes the full legal and ontological significance of what it attempts to protect.

The mismatch is not just philosophical. Place-based Indigenous legal systems — where legal relationships, obligations, and knowledge are embedded in geographic locations and more-than-human relationships — encounter structural incommensurability with text-based, jurisdiction-bounded colonial law. UNDRIP represents international acknowledgment that this incommensurability exists; it does not resolve it.

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8. Counter-mapping as a community-led response

If colonial cartography produces a particular kind of landscape knowledge — abstract, fixed, jurisdiction-bounded, and authored by external institutions — counter-mapping is the practice of producing an alternative record on Indigenous communities' own terms.

Contemporary Inuit counter-mapping projects reinstate Indigenous place names and depict natural resources, travel routes between communities, and lived experiences, instead of the fixed, abstract representation common to colonial maps. The Pan Inuit Trails Atlas documents the network of routes used by Inuit peoples since time immemorial, with this geographical knowledge accessed orally in everyday use. These projects are simultaneously preservation efforts, sovereignty assertions, and records that make Inuit spatial knowledge officially and visibly accessible — but on Inuit terms.

Counter-mapping is not simply a different aesthetic of cartography. It is a different theory of what a map is for. Colonial maps are authoritative documents that establish legal jurisdiction and resource access for external actors. Counter-maps are instruments of territorial narration, community cohesion, and governance that place the community at the center as both author and audience.

The decolonial framework in landscape scholarship more broadly rejects the assumption that Indigenous knowledge functions as interpretive puzzle-pieces for external researchers to solve. It centers community-led decision-making, benefit-sharing, and respect for restricted ceremonial knowledge — challenging the historical Western dominance of site interpretation.

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9. Statutory protections: partial, inconsistent, and underutilized

U.S. federal heritage law does include confidentiality provisions. ARPA, NHPA, and NAGPRA provide agencies with legal authority to withhold sensitive information related to Indigenous sacred sites at the request of tribes and lineal descendants. 2023 amendments to NAGPRA regulations explicitly authorize agencies and museums to remove requirements for disclosure of sensitive information, and encourage agencies to ensure particularly sensitive information is not made available to the public.

These represent meaningful legal acknowledgment that disclosure requirements can conflict with Indigenous confidentiality protocols. But the authority is inconsistently applied. Federal agencies lack standardized protocols for determining whether information meets statutory criteria for withholding — leaving communities reliant on case-by-case advocacy within institutions that are not structurally oriented toward protecting restricted knowledge.

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Thought Experiment

Consider a documentary filmmaker working on a project about Indigenous land-care practices in Australia. During research, she records interviews with elders about specific songline routes and their associated ecological functions. She learns that some of the knowledge shared in these conversations is public — appropriate for broad sharing — while other knowledge relates to restricted ceremonial routes that only initiated men of specific kinship groups may know.

She has footage of both. She has signed a standard release form with the community organization that hosted the filming. The film will be screened at international festivals and released on a streaming platform.

Think through the following:

1. What does a signed release form actually capture, and what does it not capture? Is a standard consent model adequate for knowledge that has its own internal stratification?

2. If she edits the film to remove the specific ceremonial content but describes the general existence of restricted knowledge, has the disclose-protect paradox been resolved, or only moved?

3. If a linguist later uses the recordings to analyze the Warlpiri language — not the sacred content, but the phonology — do CARE principles apply? Does FPIC? Who is the relevant decision-making body?

4. Is there a version of this project that is fully ethical? What would it require the filmmaker to give up, and what might it give to the community in return?

There is no single correct answer. The value of the exercise is in recognizing where frameworks (consent forms, copyright, broadcast rights) that feel complete actually have gaps — and where Indigenous governance protocols and frameworks like CARE are addressing something those frameworks cannot see.

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Compare & Contrast

FAIR vs. CARE: Two philosophies of data governance

Dimension	FAIR Principles	CARE Principles
Primary goal	Maximize data discoverability and reuse for science	Center Indigenous self-determination in data governance
Default assumption	Open unless restricted	Authority to control is prior to sharing
Who decides access	Data custodians, institutions, publishers	Indigenous peoples and governing bodies
Power differential	Not addressed	Explicitly foregrounded as a historical and ongoing condition
Benefit orientation	Scientific community, secondary researchers	Indigenous communities and peoples
Knowledge stratification	Not a design consideration	Explicitly accommodated (ceremonial vs. public)
Relationship to UNDRIP	No formal relationship	Operationalizes UNDRIP commitments

FAIR and CARE are complementary rather than opposed in design — FAIR addresses technical infrastructure, CARE addresses power and rights. But in practice, when the two come into tension, FAIR's openness assumptions have historically prevailed by default. CARE argues this default must be reversed in Indigenous data contexts: Authority to Control precedes Accessibility.

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Counter-mapping vs. colonial cartography: Two theories of what a map does

Dimension	Colonial Cartography	Counter-Mapping
Author	External state or institutional actor	Community members, guided by Indigenous knowledge holders
Audience	State, legal institutions, resource extractors	Community, governance bodies, external as secondary
Content logic	Abstract, gridded, jurisdiction-bounded	Named places, routes, relational resources, lived experience
Knowledge stratification	Not addressed	Can embed or protect restricted knowledge
Temporal orientation	Snapshot in time	Living, updatable record
Sovereignty function	Establishes state or colonial jurisdiction	Asserts Indigenous territorial presence and governance