How should we design and encode taxonomies for digital projects committed to decolonization and indigenization? Drawing on work with the forthcoming Decolonization and Indigenization (DNI) bibliography project, this paper examines the technical and ethical challenges of building structured, navigable TEI-encoded data without reinscribing the hierarchies that such projects seek to unsettle.

The paper emphasizes the ethical and political aspects of schema design and TEI encoding. Rather than focusing on the mechanics of schema customization, it treats taxonomy organization, metadata encoding, and user interface design as sites of epistemological negotiation. Through examples from the DNI project, it explores how decisions about categories, controlled vocabularies, and hierarchical encoding structures shape how works, authors, and communities are represented and made discoverable. These decisions, which are often hidden in the background and treated as politically neutral, become central to the decolonizing aims of the project.

Engaging existing scholarship on decolonization and indigenization, including Gaudry and Lorenz’s spectrum of indigenization, the paper also reflects on where decolonial digital projects and their taxonomies sit within attempts to decolonize our institutions and considers the work that remains to be done. Rather than proposing a universal model, it offers a set of technical and ethical considerations for practitioners working on decolonial projects, emphasizing consultation, attentiveness to diverse user needs, and reflexivity about our own positions as technical experts.