ABSTRACT
Commodity peanut butter is like trying to put on your high school jeans after years of binging on frybread, honey and powdered sugar; everything just kind of crumbles and falls apart. But if you put about a teaspoon of syrup and mix it together you can make some knockoff JIF (brand-named peanut butter). Natives are the syrup to the stiff consistency of our society because we can make the best of anything. I take the same approach to data. In this chapter, I examine a case of Indigenous Data Sovereignty in practice, using the example of my tribal higher education department (Quechan). I describe our efforts to establish data sovereignty, solutions we found to create enough data to establish statistical power and effort to lift our community voice to inform education policies. Lastly, I describe challenges our community experienced going through the process of establishing more comprehensive data sovereignty.
