Earth data science for Indian Country, built with Tribal data sovereignty from day one.
We build open-source tools, teach Earth data science at Tribal Colleges and Universities, and develop governance-aware data infrastructure for Tribal Nations and mission-driven partners. Our work is grounded in the territories and communities we serve, not extracted from them.
James Sanovia, MS and Lilly Jones, PhD
We teach.
Earth data science workshops at TCUs, Tribal land and water offices, and with community members. The repositories in this organization are curriculum as much as they are research infrastructure. We partner with AIHEC, MS-CC and other partners to reach Indigenous students and practitioners across Indian Country.
We build.
Open-source geospatial toolkits, environmental monitoring series, historical reconstruction tools, and governance-aware data pipelines. Everything is built on public data, fully reproducible, and designed to transfer to Tribal stewardship, not to create dependency on us.
We convene.
A hackathon series across Indian Country, working toward the first National Tribal Hackathon with a dedicated Tribal data sovereignty track where participants leave with concrete actions on their own data, not just certificates.
| Repository | Focus |
|---|---|
| tribal_water_monitoring | Groundwater, streamflow, and water quality monitoring |
| tribal_fire_science | Post-fire watershed vulnerability across Tribal territories |
| tribal_ag_sd | Agricultural Earth data science, traditional plants, and bison habitat restoration |
| Indigenous Data Sovereignty | Python toolkit: TK/BC labels machine-readable in geospatial workflows |
| tribal_datacube_tutorial | Earth data cube methods for Tribal land analysis |
| Ed-py | Tutorials, lessons, notebooks for students |
| Tribal_soils_geology | Soils and geology |
Every repository implements these frameworks from the first line of code:
| Framework | What it does in our work |
|---|---|
| OCAP® | Ownership, Control, Access, Possession: community authority over data describing their territory |
| CARE Principles | Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics: the ethical obligations that FAIR alone does not cover |
| Local Contexts | TK and BC labels embedded in data pipelines so they travel with data through transformations |
| IEEE 2890-2025 | Provenance of Indigenous Peoples' Data: every record documents its source, steward, and governance status |
| FAIR | Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable: the technical baseline |
We hold a researcher account with Local Contexts and are actively building pathways for our Tribal partners to authorize labels on their own data through the Local Contexts Hub.
We work with Tribal Nations, TCUs, federal agencies, and research institutions on:
- Environmental monitoring systems: water, fire, habitat, land cover, built under Tribal governance frameworks
- Historical reconstruction: mining, land use, disturbance, grounded in territorial and treaty context
- Earth data science curriculum: workshops, short courses, and open repositories designed for Indigenous contexts
- Governance-aware data infrastructure: OCAP®, CARE, and IEEE 2890-2025 implementation in operational pipelines
- Hackathon design and facilitation: regional and national events with a Tribal data sovereignty track
If you are a Tribal Nation or organization exploring what data sovereignty looks like in practice, we want to hear from you.
Daear (day-ar) is the Welsh word for earth.
If you are looking for our academic work, visit Lilly's GitHub or Jim's GitHub. If you're looking for the Earth Data Science Hub we're building for Oglala Lakota College visit Oglala Lakota College