Every AI tool and cloud contract quietly claims the right to ingest, retain, and train on what it touches. We translate CARE and OCAP into terms a contract can enforce, so your nation keeps authority over its own data before anything gets signed.
AI counsel for tribal governments › Tribal data sovereignty
A vendor pitches an AI tool or a data-center partnership. The demo is impressive. What no one reads aloud is the section of the terms where you grant the right to ingest, retain, and reuse whatever the system touches: enrollment records, health data, cultural knowledge, financials. Under the default contract, that authority moves off the reservation the moment leadership signs.
The CARE Principles and OCAP describe how Indigenous data should be governed, but a commercial contract has no idea they exist. Sovereignty only holds if someone writes it into the language the vendor is bound by. That is the work: reading the terms, and rewriting the ones that give your data away.
Keep restricted grant and beneficiary data out of public models while AI speeds your CPF, ARPA, IHS, and BIA reporting.
Read more ›An independent read on whether your IT vendor or MSP is honoring the data terms you negotiated, or quietly working around them.
Read more ›Tribal data sovereignty is a nation's right to govern the collection, ownership, and use of its data. Most AI tools and cloud contracts claim the right to ingest, retain, and train on what they touch, which quietly moves control off the reservation. The terms are where that control is kept or lost.
CARE (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics) and OCAP (Ownership, Control, Access, Possession) are the recognized frameworks for Indigenous data governance. Neither has any default expression in a commercial AI contract, so they have to be written in.
Yes. The moment you sign, the vendor's default terms govern your data unless you have changed them. The policy and the contract language come first, before the signature. This is part of AI counsel for tribal governments.
Only if the contract says so. We negotiate retention limits, no-training clauses, downstream-sharing restrictions, and a documented right to refuse, so the answer is enforceable rather than a promise.
No. Those are compliance floors that apply to specific data. Tribal data sovereignty is about the nation's authority over its own data, which goes beyond any single regulation.
Send us the agreement, or the pitch you're weighing. We'll tell you exactly what it does to your data, and what it should say instead.
No pitch deck. No sales process. Just a straight conversation about what you're facing.