Mainstream digital technologies tend to be designed without reflection on how the way they structure knowledge can decontextualise it from its surroundings, affecting different cultural groups. In this work, we discuss how community-led databases could be created while accounting for Indigenous values and land-based wisdoms, following a collaboration with Radio Tosepan Limakxtum, an organisation of Masewal People. Emerging from metaphors of sowing, growing and harvesting, a series of activities entwining technology with traditional knowledge systems were crafted. In response, exploratory roles and assemblies were created as data practices, reimagining the ancestral self-organisation processes, language and views that have shaped Masewal autonomy and self-determination. The work demonstrates how Indigenous knowledges can reframe ways of thinking about technology, creating a digital territory that extends intricate relations with the land as a living entity. This study contributes relational approaches to data, technologies and participation, emphasising community context, Indigenous research methods and collective wellbeing.

This paper analyses practices of data perception and usage, as well as ongoing and envisioned community technology projects carried out by a Masewal Indigenous group in Mexico through their union of cooperatives, Tosepan. Through fieldwork interviews, Masewal participants expressed how they have been appropriating existing technologies for their people’s self-determination. During a workshop, they imagined how diverse knowledges and lived experiences of their worldview, passed down through generations, could be represented and translated into digital practices more broadly. We draw considerations for the HCI community to embrace novel approaches to data and information systems from the community’s concept of Cosmovision, and develop Micro-, Meso- and Macro- lenses within it. Through these lenses, we discuss how technologies could be designed for specific individual practices and connections with nature (Micro-cosmos) while supporting communal actions for autonomy and self-determination (Meso-cosmos), and considering broader worldmaking processes and implications for identity, prosperity, ecology and plural representations (Macro-cosmos).