Primum Non Nocere: Before working with Indigenous data, the ACL must confront ongoing colonialism

Anonymous

Abstract: In this paper, we challenge the ACL community to reckon with historical and ongoing colonialism by adopting a set of ethical obligations and best practices drawn from the Indigenous studies literature. While the vast majority of NLP research focuses on a very small number of very high resource languages (English, Chinese, etc), some work has begun to engage with Indigenous languages. No research involving Indigenous language data can be considered ethical without first acknowledging that Indigenous languages are not merely very low resource languages. The toxic legacy of colonialism permeates every aspect of interaction between Indigenous communities and outside academic researchers. Ethical research must actively challenge this colonial legacy by explicitly acknowledging and centering Indigenous community goals and Indigenous ways of knowing. To this end, we propose that the ACL draft and adopt an ethical framework for NLP researchers and computational linguists wishing to engage in research involving Indigenous languages.