From dialogue to action: Advancing advocacy, scholarship, and international policy
On September 16 - 17, 2026, the IBI Crosscultural Working Group convened the workshop "From Principles to Practice: Operationalising Indigenous Data Sovereignty in the Age of AI and Neurotechnology" at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, with participants joining both in-person and online.
The workshop was chaired by Dr. Minerva Rivas Velarde (University of Geneva), co-chaired by Dr. Hervé Chneiweiss (Sorbonne Université), and co-hosted by Judy Illes (Neuroethics Canada, University of British Columbia) and Melissa L. Perreault (University of Guelph), with support from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research - Institute of Indigenous Peoples' Health, Neuroethics Canada, the Brain-Heart Interconnectome, and the Canadian Heart Function Alliance. It brought together Indigenous scholars, neuroscientists, ethicists, and legal experts from Canada, the United States, South Africa, New Zealand, Cameroon, Mexico, the Netherlands, Romania, Norway, Spain, Germany, and Japan to address a persistent gap: while binding instruments now exist on neuroethics and on Indigenous rights, evidence on how to implement them remains thin.
Through lightning talks, international comment periods, and working-group writing sessions, participants mapped operational gaps and began co-designing implementation models for consent, sovereignty, and governance, guided by five cross-cutting concerns: epistemic justice, ongoing colonial risks, ethical and legal grounding, geopolitical fragmentation, and the closing window to embed Indigenous rights in emerging AI and neurotechnology governance.
The workshop concluded with agreement on three deliverables: (1) advocacy tools to enable dialogue and action with the Canadian Minister, led by Dr. Malcolm King and Ms. Kajia Whelan; (2) academic pieces that enable action research, for example, editorial pieces, led by Drs. Melissa L. Perreault and T. Ryan Gregory; and (3) an international policy contribution to interregional organizations, led by Drs. Hervé Chneiweiss and Minerva Rivas Velarde. The group leads will coordinate follow-up actions in the coming months.
To learn more about the IBI Crosscultural Working Group’s initiatives and publications, please visit: https://www.internationalbraininitiative.org/crosscultural
