Joseph M. Yracheta is an Amerindigenous Scientist (P’urhepecha y Raramuri from Mexico) at the Native BioData Consortium, the first non-profit sample and data “safe-harbor” storage facility, which exists within the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation (Sioux) of South Dakota. Mr. Yracheta has been a scientist since 1990 where he started as a bench biotechnician and worked across many biomedical disciplines. In 2014 he graduated from the UW-Seattle with a master’s of Pharmaceutics and Bioethics under Drs. Ken Thummel and Wylie Burke. He is currently finishing a Dr.P.H. in Environmental Health and Engineering from Johns-Hopkins under Drs. Ana Navas-Acien and Paul Locke. Mr. Yracheta is passionately working to achieve Indigenous Data Sovereignty by performing all the roles necessary, such as:
- Biomedical business management
- Helping to design Indigenous sovereign data systems
- Consulting on legal, ethical & policy conundrums in the face of machine learning and artificial intelligence
- Working on Indigenous Health Disparities via genomics, omics, gaps in health outcome data, epidemiology, increasing interventions and tailored implementation from data in health care systems, public health prevention/intervention
- Global efforts at decolonization and amelioration from systemic racism
- Creating curricula and instructor teams that educate funders and academics on the rights of Indigenous peoples, the laws that support those rights and the responsibility and existing frameworks that allow non-indigenous researchers to automate CARE (https://www.gida-global.org/care) and OCAPTM (https://fnigc.ca/ocap-training/) principles.
With over 60 scientific and humanities publications, 100s of speaking engagements, and multiple worldwide indigenous partnerships, Mr. Yracheta believes that ALL data and resources must be seen as unforeseen futures, where their value and governance must and will constantly change. He feels this data must be secured for Indigenous economic and cultural sustainability. This extension of Indigenous primacy and revitalization of sovereignty is the epitome and manifestation of “survivance” that Dr. Gerald Vizenor, Anishinaabe writer and critical semiotics theorist, envisioned for Indigenous resiliency and futures (https://books.google.com/books/about/Manifest_Manners.html?id=ey7-xcwvHbQC).
