Abstract

Mayan organizations and collectives are working to develop instruments of resistance to the predatory data extractivism of governments, political parties, media outlets, academics and non-governmental organizations. This article presents the Canicab Charter, a community created document about equitable data governance and a direct response to data extractivist practices.  The paper also documents the Canicab tsikbal, a multi-generational dialogue of community stakeholders that gave rise to the Canicab Charter. The tsikbal is an exercise in democratic dialogue that draws on traditional oral practices to make meaningful responses to our contemporary media saturated contexts. Our experiences contribute to the general conversation about how social movements and historically marginalized communities can address data justice by developing local data governance protocols.

Keywords

Mayan People, Tsikbal, Extractivism, Data Governance, Canicab Charter

In this era of digital networks and tools, it is easy to overlook the power of community dialogue, central to a conception of a public commons, where people can come together to contemplate and solve problems together. In Mayan communities, we have a long-held tradition of the tsikbal which is a multigenerational, multisectoral dialogue that unites us and gives us the time and space to critically engage with one another and to imagine better social, political and environmental outcomes together. The tskibal is horizontal and circular: we leave perceived hierarchies at the door, and we include all of the voices present in the collective vision and understanding that results from the process. We call people together in a tsikbal when there is a perceived need to act together in common cause, particularly in moments when our collective practices and identity are threatened by conditions or actors beyond our immediate control.

For a long time, we have dealt with the appropriation of our voices, visual repertoires, and representations more broadly by outside forces such as government figures, NGOs, academics, authors, journalists, and media producers. Alongside indigenous peoples worldwide, over the past few decades we have begun to assert our need to govern our own data. With the rapid uptick of digital data harvesting strategies today, our long-standing concerns have morphed into a more acute crisis. As members of an indigenous data governance research project called “Working Toward Self-Determination Together” led by Dr. Lana Ray, an Anishinabek colleague at Athabasca University in Canada, we held a number of consultations with stakeholders in our local communities, and these deliberations led to the decision to hold a tsikbal in Canicab, a small community outside of the city of Merida in the state of Yucatan, Mexico.

Given the long history of dispossession, exploitation, extraction and distortion of our knowledge and heritage, the ideas of autonomy raised here are not just rhetorical but must lead to the creation and use of protocols controlled by the Mayan communities. The Canicab tsikbal, and the resultant Canicab Charter, took place in the context of Yucatecan Mayan people having suffered extractivist practices by governments, political parties, media outlets, academics and predatory non-governmental organizations for far too long. An authentic tsikbal should not be left primarily in the hands of expert individuals or institutions but rather in the hands of the same organized communities that are vigilant about the problem at hand. Thus, our role as academics working on a data governance project was secondary to our position as auditors around the circle. The tsikbal leads to the tactical and strategic use of the media as instruments of resistance to extractivism by Mayan individuals, organizations and collectives. The tsikbal is based on principles of collective engagement and its authenticity is judged by the following principles:

Test of power and control. When the tsikbal is dominated by one person, or several, who do all the speaking while everyone else only listens, it is a false tsikbal. Furthermore, if the speaker is seeking a position of power, then the proof is conclusive; it is a spurious use of the tsikbal.

Test of money and greed. Among Mayan people and perhaps all the peoples of Yucatan, Mexico, the Americas and the world, the cycles of existence of certain parasitic beings are well known: they are born, exploit others, reproduce and try to be reborn in the next generation of organisms that continue to live at the expense of others, feeding on them and impoverishing them. For this reason, legend has it that none of these false prophets of the tsikbal had left the task entrusted to them poorer than when they entered. Enrichment at the expense of “the struggle” is another proof of the false use of the tsikbal.

The influencer’s test. In times like these, when surrounded by YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X, WhatsApp, Google Scholar, Research Gate, Academia Edu and Linked In, it is easy to be a famous “keyboard revolutionary.” This test helps us remember that the media are means, not ends or principles. That is why the true tsikbal is the one that begins in the community conversation and ends with the execution of collective decisions to defend our heritage. What we publish and authorize to be published about ourselves on the Internet must pass through the filter of our community’s political decisions. In times like these, where being decolonial is a mantra in certain parishes of knowledge, we must be careful because not everything that is said to be dialogical is so. The proof is that some famous people rarely share even half an hour of honest sweat in the work that creates and sustains life with those for whom they speak.

Making meaning in a digital era. The above tests about the authenticity of the tsikbal are examples of how Mayan people have begun the work of what Harnell (2023) calls “the creation of a grassroots media ecosystem to counter the existing one.” Given that social media have precarious guardrails and that existing content verification tools do nothing to counter data extraction and cultural appropriation from Mayan communities, our experience can contribute to the conversation about how “social movements and historically marginalized communities [can] use the Internet as a vehicle for expression and mobilization.” That is why we explore how the Internet can and should become, through the political action of organized Indigenous communities, part of an ecosystem (almost a media microclimate) for collective reflection where notions of the common good, governance, and protection of our heritage undergo revision, critique, and test. This heritage only becomes common after assuring Mayan patrimony.

We are not unaware or naive about the difficulties inherent in the use of proprietary platforms and media on the Internet and other media that can distort our efforts for autonomy and authentically represented conservation of our heritage assets, our data, our narratives and our forms of relationships. We dedicate our reflections to this set of challenges derived from our own experiences and those of other Mayan individuals, collectives, and organizations of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. The tsikbal on these experiences resulted in a synthesis that we titled “The Canicab Charter,” the text of which we reproduce below.

The Canicab Charter: Data governance amongst Maya People. (Translated from Spanish by Amarella Eastmond). December, 10, 2022 

We Maya people, accompanied by Maya scholars and allies, came together for a conversation in the town of Canicab, to gather our thoughts on an issue that concerns us as Maya people: the governance of our data.

Convened through the project “Working together towards self-determination: Indigenous research and data governance in Canada, Ecuador and Mexico”, we came from the Maya villages in the three states of the Yucatan peninsula, to participate in the conversation held on the 3rd of December 2022.

We consider the conversation to be a way of expressing our thoughts, to talk about our experiences, good and bad, our defenses and struggles to conserve our way of inhabiting the territory, to manage our information in the face of others who come to our communities, not always to enrich themselves from our way of thinking, but frequently to impose their other way of living and to extract our information.

In this conversation we agreed that in our Maya towns there has been a continuous extraction of our thoughts, of our material and immaterial creations, which are a demonstration of our identity. This extractivism has been a constant practice, carried out by educational institutions, civil organizations, private and public institutions.

In the 33rd session of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) General Conference (2005), recognition is made of the importance of traditional knowledge as a source of immaterial and material wealth, in particular of the knowledge systems of indigenous peoples, and of their positive contribution to sustainable development, as well as of the need to guarantee their protection in an adequate manner.

There is also recognition of the need to adopt measures to protect the diversity of cultural expressions and their content, especially in situations where cultural expressions may be in danger of extinction or serious impairment.

Consent

Those of us gathered here believe that knowledge should be universal and should be shared. However, few people come to Maya towns with the intention of collaborating, respectfully and working together. Due to requirements, in many cases from other countries, especially from funding sources and scientific journals, those who arrive in the communities tend to ask people for their informed consent, but this has not always been beneficial for the governance of our information. It has been observed that informed consent has been used as a legal instrument by some to protect themselves against future lawsuits accusing them of extractivism.

Informed consent has not always been prior and presented in a culturally adequate way which has generated mistrust in Maya people, especially when outsiders seek to profit from the information extracted from the community. The forms generally used by foreign universities to obtain informed consent are in fact for the protection of the university itself and not to protect the rights of the indigenous people.

Faced with this problem, the first proposal was made: Create a protocol to give access to those who want to carry out work in the community with the people. The documents delivered to the community should be written in Maya and there should be audio recordings for those who cannot read.

Audiovisuals

One of the ways national, international, and even local television stations work is to go ahead without prior permission from the communities. Even if permission does exist, the television stations usually do not explicitly communicate how the information is going to be used, and in the end, these companies deny access to it since they intend to commercialize it.

There is a latent disagreement with respect to the diffusion of the products that are the results of collaboration between people in the community and the film or television producers. Even if the videos reach an international audience, the community where the project was carried out and the surrounding communities are not necessarily given access to them. For this reason, it is necessary to give priority to returning information to the communities where the research is done. 

On the other hand, there is also a cultural issue regarding the mass production of indigenous peoples` cultural expressions such as clothing or dolls. These should be protected or guarded by something or someone. However, what happens in the case of the community coexistence practices? How can you address the problems related to the image with which the people are represented? How can you be serious about these issues? How can you control the image with which a community is represented?

Indigenous peoples frequently do not feel represented by what is seen on a screen, they relate it to something foreign to their daily life, as if it were a movie seen in the cinema. The image that the media uses to represent indigenous people, causes them insecurity because it might affect the community. This is the result of the freedom that the media has to publish and express things without restrictions.

Documentary scripts are conceptualized to use people. The scriptwriter writes the script from above, what the scriptwriter thinks is what the person says, scriptwriters come from outside with a pre-established text. The problem in this case is that the text is not a construction that has been negotiated with the community.

It is known that the film industry is colonial and that it was created for evangelical purposes. Its colonial dynamic has not changed until now, it is governed by structural regulations that are not transparent to the people involved. From the beginning of a project, several documents are requested that protect the funding agency. 

It is not enough for the film and audiovisual producers to return what they released in an edited form; it is not enough to just show up and say that the work will be beneficial to the community.

We believe that it is important to create a peninsular Maya organization to carry out audiovisual projects that benefit the community, and that have goals and clear commitments to allowing the indigenous people to make their own productions. But to get there, you need to have control of your own media. 

Biocultural data

The system is designed in such a way that there are researchers from universities, who arrive at the herbal centers, remain for several years extracting information; later they join with other research centers to create networks, developing a multilevel system of extraction. Some researchers work in the following way: lacking time to create close relationships with the indigenous people, they use a person they know who works at the local level in the community to act as bait. They prepare and encourage this person so the extraction can be carried out from within, based on the community’s preexisting trust. 

Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are known to have exercised extraction in the communities. They design projects to be financed by foundations, which in some cases are part of a development strategy. Companies can infiltrate the communities through such organizations to obtain information about natural resources, tangible and intangible cultural heritage, collective organizations, the distribution of land, all of which can be used to implement tourist projects and exploit the resources. The NGOs act as the means of extraction as they do not inform the community about the financial resources assigned by the foundations for the project, nor do they reveal the amounts of money assigned for different activities and salaries.

Usually, the extractors of information are insistent about achieving their objective regardless of the community`s decision. This implies a violation of privacy, and it frequently occurs in relation to local knowledge when videos are made of local practices. 

Generally, the community expects some recognition or contribution, which, however, rarely comes.  On most occasions there is no knowledge of where the information that has been shared ends up. The community is unaware of the extent to which its image is exploited for academic or other purposes.

Part of the extractivism discourse is to take advantage of the damage that colonialism has caused through discrimination, exclusion, and the imposition of shame in relation to our knowledge. This discourse comes from those who are not Maya allies but who present themselves as the saviors of our heritage who are doing the community a favor by documenting it. In most universities teaching is based on a colonial way of thinking which highlights the idea that our heritage must be ¨rescued¨ and research projects are therefore designed accordingly. 

Faced with the real problem of the loss of knowledge transmission to the new generations, the extractivists arrive under the pretext of rescuing this knowledge and, due to the communities´ desire to preserve their traditions, they often agree to this type of project.

However, now the Maya communities are aware of these extractivist practices they have chosen to close the door to students, who might even be Maya, but who come with an academic plan. The communities express their disagreement with the Maya students for not having shown an interest in working with the community prior to their studies and for only wanting to work with them in order to obtain their academic degree.

The training of students in universities is based on colonialist schemes and extractivist methodologies. Often, the students arrive with a preconceived idea of what the indigenous village and its people are like when in reality they have never coexisted with them. 

One of the academic extractivist techniques that researchers use is to send students to do their work. These techniques have become invasive in a short period of time. Up to 40 students might be sent to obtain information in a few days, thus saving the researcher years of work within the community.

Mayan academics have been identified who have taken advantage of their knowledge and closeness to the community to carry out extractivist work. In many cases, to achieve the promised results, they manipulate the information or the sociocultural dynamics of the community and create narratives that are alien to the community but beneficial for their research results.

There must be agreements between the academics and the communities to carry out projects that benefit both. For this, it is necessary for the community to be very firm in several ways: to whom access is given, the way in which work is carried out and what benefits the community expects from the link with the researchers.

Because of extractivism, a grudge is generated in the town. This makes communities reject projects where there could be mutual benefit. We must not allow ourselves to change our thinking about sharing our knowledge, but instead seek tools that allow us to work for the benefit of all. Academics and other stakeholders in the community must be taught about reciprocity, sharing, not stealing information, and the consequences that their narratives can cause.

As a consequence of the narratives with which extracted information is presented in various media, a false image of the community is created and more people are invited to come to the community, either with good or bad intentions.

Agreements

It was stated that knowledge should be universal and shared. The exchange of knowledge exists in the community because it is necessary in order to preserve it. 

We agreed that there have been various ways in which our information has been extracted. The biocultural diversity of Maya people’s knowledge is one of the main interests for collecting our information.

As a first step we must eradicate victimization. The second important point is to identify and exhibit the people who profit from our culture and the representation of indigenous cultures.

There is an urgent need for the construction of protocols which can function as community contracts, to determine what contribution there should be to the community and what the commitments are. Maya people should have our own instruments of consent for dialogue. The texts must not only be in Spanish, but they should also be translated into Maya. A translator should always be present to read the content of the document in Spanish and Maya.

The community has a phrase that says: “u waats’ ek t’aane’ yaanu muuk” (Our word has value). Thus, people say that they do not need to sign a piece of paper because their voice is worth more. The agreed consent can also be by voice, recorded instead of signed.

The ideal way to carry out research is for the Maya community to participate in the entire process, from the conception of the research to the data collection, interpretation and publication.

Care must be taken regarding journalistic practices because they can put people at risk and result in the extraction of information. Given the idiosyncrasies of journalists, it has been decided to follow certain protocols such as dialogue to find out what their intentions are before entering the town, why they want to possess the material and, in general, care should be taken as to what information is shared.

There are companies that have agreements that work in a different way and that are not beneficial for the communities. Therefore, there must be regulation regarding the community to find out what people are feeling and how they would like to work.

We propose the following for the governance of our data:

• Communities should have control over what academics do in their territories.

• The government, self-appointed indigenous governments, political parties, and politicians are not allies.

• For every researcher who enters the community, there should be two members of the community keeping track of what he or she is working on.

• Projects must be the result of processes of co-development between academics and the community. For this to happen, the community should create community spaces for collaboration.

• The communities should be protagonists and administrators of their knowledge, having control over their information. For this to happen they will create, by themselves or in collaboration with other communities, the concrete means for the use, transformation, and care of their data.

• It is urgent for the Maya people to organize themselves in order to create a data collection protocol for use in indigenous communities.

• A historical debt exists with the Maya people which means that not only what was taken from them should be returned but also that there should be a commitment on the part of educational institutions (public and private), civil and government organizations and communication media to establish and respect the protocols for the collection, use and publication of indigenous peoples’ data.

The effects of the Canicab Charter

The Canicab Charter clearly reflects the complex dialogue that we must establish within our local communities and with those who, through different means, wish to collaborate with us in supportive and non-extractive ways. Here, we share the voice of the Yucatecan Mayan people organized to defend their data and biocultural heritage. We do so hoping that other world people will join us in this task. 

The Canicab Charter was distributed in Spanish, Mayan and English through different media. As mentioned at the beginning, the lack of protocols or codes of ethics developed in co-creation with the Mayan people has often led to effective extractivist actions. To turn the tide, groups such as Narrativas de Mayanidad have used the Canicab Declaration as an introduction to the governance position they have assumed, especially with funding agencies that have approached the group.

The distribution of the Canicab Charter among Mayan language activists has allowed us to identify projects in which knowledge was extracted delicately, in non-perceptible forms, but which, in light of the reflections expressed by Mayans in the Charter, have been identified as examples of extractivism, such as often the case in candid interviews for audiovisual productions.

Ours is a democratic exercise incorporating media, platforms, digital languages, and the Internet. The tsikbal supports the tactical and strategic use of the media as instruments of resistance to extractivism by Mayan individuals, organizations and collectives. The following link provides a link to videos that we have produced to open the discussion on different forms of extractivism that we have suffered from different people, organizations, and institutions. This set of five videos were produced as a capstone for the “Working together towards self-determination” project. They are intended to be used as educational resources in our communities and elsewhere. We encourage you to view the videos and to share this link with your networks: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb4smrrXNMULs2SBo4OR9l6KM4HpLBNCj

The Canicab Charter is also intended to address predatory practices in academia. It is vital that a Code of Ethics in Research by and for Indigenous Peoples be developed for use by academics across the Americas and elsewhere in the world. With the Charter as an example and cornerstone, creating such a Code of Ethics was approved by the Network of Intercultural Studies of the South-Southeast Region of ANUIES (National Association of Universities and Higher Education Institutions), Mexico. The process is being elaborated following the participatory and horizontal methods the Canicab Charter, another product of co-creation between academia and indigenous peoples of the south and southeast of Mexico. The Canicab Charter has begun to attract attention as an example of an intercultural methodology which can be replicated in Latin America and the Caribbean (Vizcarra de los Reyes & Sánchez Suárez, 2024).

The Mayan people’s quest for a meaningful role in data governance is an arduous task, but it has already begun, and we hope it will be fruitful not only in the Yucatecan Mayan towns but also across Mexico, the Americas, and beyond. As we argued at the outset, to uphold the concept and practice of the commons, we need to undertake a series of measures that address inequitable extractivist practices normalized over centuries of unequal relations between indigenous communities and colonial peoples and institutions.  The Canicab Charter, both as a co-creation process and a framework for indigenous data governance, is a step forward.

References

Canicab community members (December 1-3, 2022). Canicab Charter. (Unpublished). Canicab, Yucatan. 

Harnell, R. (November 28, 2023). Radical media literacy: Self-defense in the communication age. The Journal of Media Literacy. https://ic4ml.org/journal-article/radical-media-literacy-self-defence-in-the-communication-age/

Sánchez Suárez, A. & Mijangos Noh, J. C., 2023. Data governance in Mayan Communities (video series). https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb4smrrXNMULs2SBo4OR9l6KM4HpLBNCj

Vizcarra de los Reyes, M. & Sánchez Suárez, A. “Pueblos originarios de México, pensamiento filosófico y patrimonio cultural” (Indigenous peoples of Mexico, philosophies and cultural heritage”). 2024 ICOMOS Scientific Symposium, Ouro Preto, Brazil, Nov. 15, 2024.