Māori peoples are taking back sovereignty of their data storage from the uncertainty of cyberspace amid a brand new Aotearoa decentralised online network.

Entirely independent of all New Zealand government organisational sites, Te Kāhui Raraunga — the operational arm of a data iwi leaders' group — plans to put data back in the hands of Māori people to ensure storage does not "stop at the server door".

The group was established in 2019 to ensure iwi, hapū and whānau kinships have ownership, control and protection over their governance and data access.

The Te Pā Tūwatawata storage network will be available to Māori organisations wishing to store their data within their own cultural protection protocols.

Principal advisor of the network, Erena Mikaere, told interested parties at the recent launch the Te Pā Tūwatawata was a commercial storage service designed specifically to meet the Indigenous sensitivities of the iwi, hapū and marae traditions.

The project was built on open-source technology and was driven by both Māori scientists and Māori engineers while being grounded in historic tikanga Māori customary practices.

"Central to everything from its architecture to its initial conceptions to the values that drive it, and then also to our customer service delivery, it's really about doing things in a very Māori way that is based on a Te Ao Māori worldview," she said.

"And so, to that end, we didn't just want to offer like an automated store with us and push this button and register your name and company, and here's the invoice type of style - it starts with a conversation, it starts with a kōrero, like all good things.

"And so that means that we can provide them with a really tailored service."

The storage network provides end-to-end encryption of data, which Ms Mikaere said would ensure only Māori who submit data to the platform have the "keys" to decrypt it.

There had been ongoing inquiries from iwi keen to advance their archiving ambitions.

"What it does is it provides a safe place for some of our data that we might consider, or that whānau and hapū, are some of our most sensitive sets of mātauranga," Ms Mikaere said

"It provides a way in which we can protect that and ensure extra restriction, say over another data set, which perhaps isn't as sensitive.

"Much of our data, you know, if we think about some of our audio files and video files from back in the day, are held by others, and this is an opportunity for iwi to be that one true source of their information."

Ms Mikaere said the launch of Te Pā Tūwatawata has been a significant step towards regaining data sovereignty for its people.

"For us and all Indigenous peoples, really globally, sovereign digital systems aren't and shouldn't be a technical preference," she said.

"They are a precondition for self-determination, for rangatiratanga."

The network also protects against any possibility of exploitation of the layers within its digital ecosystem.

Ms Mikaere said without it every app, platform, or AI model trained on Indigenous knowledge, data remained vulnerable to foreign jurisdiction and to outside corporate interests.

This has similarities to their cultural past, which has impacted the Māori people before the technology was ever around.

"There's a track record of others treating our data as a resource to extract, not to steward and not to protect, but to extract," she said.

"You know, the same way that land was once extracted, and the same way that language was also extracted, and in the same way that children were even extracted from the arms of their whānau and placed into systems that were never built for them.

"So, the pattern of that isn't new - the medium is.

"Te Pātuwatawata provides a solution to stop that."

Ms Mikaere said that pattern was already occurring, with large AI models giving answers in te reo Māori, or answers about things in Te Ao Māori, which were not always correct.

"One of the other significant solutions that we must ensure is having Māori governance over the data," she said.

"I'm not sure if everybody truly understands that AI is built on data.

"So, without data governance, there is no AI governance.

"Without data infrastructure, there is no AI infrastructure."

Te Kāhui Raraunga had produced a Māori data governance model and, more recently, a Māori AI governance framework, which Ms Mikaere said provided great blueprints for how to ensure safety as technology continued to change.