Tribal water security • Data sovereignty • Indigenous futures

About me

Yá’át’ééh. I am Clarita Lefthand-Begay, a Diné scholar, educator, and community-engaged researcher. My work examines how Tribal nations and communities exercise governance, stewardship, and self-determination across land, water, knowledge, data, and technology.

My research is grounded in long-term partnerships with Tribal nations, communities, students, and interdisciplinary collaborators. Across these relationships, I conduct community-engaged research that is accountable to community priorities, responsive to Indigenous knowledge systems, and useful beyond the academy.

The questions that continue to guide my work emerged during my doctoral research on Tribal water governance and water security. Working alongside Tribal communities, I examined how Tribal nations navigate environmental policy while protecting water according to their own cultural values, responsibilities, and priorities. Valuing the plurality of Indigenous knowledge systems has remained central to my scholarship and has guided my collaborative work with Tribal nations across the United States.

That experience deepened a principle already shaped by my lived experiences and upbringing. Indigenous communities possess deep expertise about the lands, waters, knowledge systems, and futures they steward. However, decision-making structures too often fail to recognize, support, or create space for that expertise.

As I continued working with Tribal nations around water security, I found myself increasingly drawn to questions about knowledge itself: how it is protected, how it is shared, who is responsible for it, and what obligations accompany its use. These questions eventually led me to Tribal Institutional Review Boards (TIRBs) and other Tribal research review processes.

When I joined the University of Washington Information School as an Assistant Professor, I began thinking more deeply about TIRBs as contemporary governance mechanisms that carry generations-long Tribal values. While the structures and language of these review processes may appear contemporary, they are grounded in enduring Tribal responsibilities to community wellbeing, cultural continuity, and the protection of knowledge systems. Studying Tribal research review applications became one way for me to better understand these values through a careful and non-intrusive approach.

This work has continually returned me to questions about cultural boundaries and responsibilities. Some knowledge can be shared publicly. Some knowledge should not be shared. Navigating these distinctions requires attentiveness to community priorities, relationships, governance structures, and cultural protocols. Much of my scholarship sits at this intersection of research, ethics, governance, and responsibility.

Over time, these conversations have become increasingly connected to Indigenous data sovereignty. I see Indigenous data sovereignty as an important intellectual and practical framework for articulating long-standing Tribal responsibilities around knowledge, information, privacy, consent, ownership, access, and governance. While the terminology is relatively new, many of the underlying questions have long been present in Tribal communities. The growth of this field has brought renewed energy, new methods, and new opportunities to advance conversations that Tribal nations have been leading for generations.

In 2025, I was promoted to Associate Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. In this next phase of my work, I am advancing research on Tribal water security, continuing to engage questions of Indigenous data governance, contributing to theories, methodologies, and methods that align with Indigenous ways of knowing, and exploring how these conversations intersect with emerging technologies. More recently, this has included collaborative work with AIAN community members, students, and colleagues to think critically about artificial intelligence, Indigenous governance, and Indigenous futures.

At the center of my scholarship is a commitment to collaborative research. Rather than extracting knowledge from communities, I work alongside Tribal leaders, elders, knowledge holders, and research partners to develop questions, methods, and outcomes that reflect community priorities and contribute to Indigenous self-determination.