Shoufeng Cao
The study addresses the intersection of indigenous food sovereignty and data sovereignty in the digital era by exploring community-governed digital infrastructures for indigenous bushfood systems. It explores the use of blockchain networks as a digital commons to safeguard transparent, tamper-proof records and ethical access to indigenosu data or knowledge. Through a participatory design approach embedded in cultural protocols and practices within the Australian bushfood sector, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were designed to uphold indigenous sovereignty and collective benefit from the research, commerclisation and trade of bushfood species and derived products. This study presented a blockchain-enabled NFT infrastructure incorporating traditional owner tokens (TOTokens) for representing resource and cultural custodianship and enabling usage tracking, and authentic provenance tokens (APTokens) for tracing bushfood provenance and associated traditional ownership. This dual NFT infrastructure design enables the unique digital representation of bushfood and associated traditional ownership, while also provides a socio-economic mechanism to monetise traditional ownership across bushfood research and commerce scenarios. This dual NFT infrastructure is underpinned by smart contracts that enable the tradability and/or transferability of TOTokens and APTokens to automate governance rules, ethical access and collective benefit sharing, without reliance on external authorities. A proof-of-concept was piloted and tested on Polygon a public blockchain demonstrating its technical feasibility. The blockchain-based NFT infrastructure aligns with indigenous data sovereignty principles, CARE and FAIR data frameworks, and can integrate with Internet of things (IoTs), AI, machine learning and data analytics to conduct culturally grounded and ethics-controlled deep eResearch for business innovation and industry practice.