Concerns over US economic hostility and threats of annexation have turned sovereignty into a buzzword in Canada. But for Indigenous nations, conversations about sovereignty are nothing new.
“What we’ve built within Indigenous communities is now even more relevant to the broad conversation.”
Jeff Ward has been at the helm of Animikii, a BC-based national Indigenous tech firm, since he founded the company in 2003. Ward is a software developer and product designer by trade, and hails from Manitoba’s Sandy Bay Ojibway First Nation, with which Animikii recently inked a pilot partnership around Indigenous data sovereignty.
Ward’s company has been focused on Indigenous sovereignty for more than two decades, and has been at the forefront of what it calls the #DataBack movement, releasing a platform called Niiwin that provides Indigenous organizations with secure systems to collect, manage, protect, and analyze their data.
BetaKit caught up with Ward last week to chat about Indigenous data sovereignty, #DataBack, and how Indigenous tech’s long history of sovereignty building can help Canada and the world meet the current moment.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What is #DataBack?
You might have heard of #LandBack. Well, why not #DataBack? From a non-Indigenous lens, data is sort of an inanimate, zeroes-and-ones kind of object. But for a lot of the communities we work with, they like to use the word memory or stories—things that represent people that are living and stories that are living and connected to our ancestors. When we are working with communities, the so-called “data” means a lot more. We’re not just protecting data; we’re protecting people’s stories, culture, traditions, and language.
A lot of the time, for Indigenous people, our data is stored in colonial buckets, or we’re forced to shoehorn our data into these other buckets that were not designed for us and that we have no control over. So when we think of #DataBack, we think of getting that data back into the hands of the community; into their control and possession.
#DataBack is part of a broader Indigenous data sovereignty movement. What does that movement look like in practice?
We like to think of data as being of collective ownership. If I bead some moccasins, is that intellectual property mine, or is it connected to a broader cultural collective ownership? It’s this interesting, fine line to navigate when there is data about a people or community: who owns that data, which groups have rights over that collective data, and how does governance work?
In Canada, we have the OCAP principles—ownership, control, access, and possession—which were developed by the First Nation’s Information Governance Centre. Sovereignty means choice over where data is hosted, but also over what kind of data is collected or not collected, and how the data is designed and structured.
What role does Animikii’s Niiwin platform play in achieving data sovereignty?
Niiwin has a few pillars to it. The first thing is the design of data structures.
I mentioned earlier that sometimes we have to put our data into other people’s buckets. Well, there might be bias in how those buckets are designed, and so again we found ourselves for many years supporting communities building custom, bespoke data structures when people would show up at our doorstep because they wanted to manage the data in a way that maybe wasn’t available in off-the-shelf software.
“We don’t want these language models to be trained on our languages and culture and then sold back to us as a product.”
With Niiwin, you can design very complex structures. It’s a relational database, so you can design more complex data structures through a web-based, no-code user interface. When you design that data, it gives you an interface to manage that data, and then the data governance piece, which lets you control any roles within an organization and decide which roles have access to which data and with pretty fine-grained control to that data governance.
We also offer a hosted solution of Niiwin in Canada with a non-US-owned data centre in Quebec. Most of the time, communities want us to manage that infrastructure, but we can deploy Niiwin anywhere.
What’s the broader impact of having sovereign control over data?
Well, sovereignty supports nationhood: the community gets to author its own story, to manage its own data, and it gets to bring control over things that were extracted from communities in the past. It’s a sense of pride and ownership, control, access, possession, all of that continuity and stewardship over these stories, memories.
How does AI factor into data sovereignty?
AI needs a lot of data to train models, so there’s this race to capture as much data and information as possible. We have communities with protected information, privileged information that maybe shouldn’t be made available to a large language model (LLM) scraping the internet. There are issues around accuracy—some of these LLMs will make up words when you ask it to help you learn a language like Ojibway—so that’s a risk that can be damaging from a cultural revitalization perspective. Something Indigenous peoples are grappling with is: how accurately is it representing languages and culture when people are using these models? We don’t want these language models to be trained on our languages and culture and then sold back to us as a product.
At the same time, LLMs are potentially scraping and extracting Indigenous data for the benefit of major corporations to benefit their economics rather than the community itself.
Niiwin uses AI, though, doesn’t it?
There are a lot of communities and organizations we work with that are grappling with how to responsibly connect their LLMs and use AI in a way that’s hopefully not as harmful for the environment, that’s more accurate, and that doesn’t just further a sort of digital colonialism model of big tech.
“When we are working with communities, the so-called “data” means a lot more. We’re not just protecting data; we’re protecting people’s stories, culture, traditions.”
We are positioning Niiwin within the broader ethical AI data ecosystem. The reality is that community groups want to use these technologies. Within Niiwin, we are building in MCP (model context protocol) and API (application programming interface) endpoints so that people can use their language models, and within the Niiwin interface itself to ask questions of their data. But within Niiwin, it’s not just like you’re asking a broader question of the entire internet, it’s referencing the data you have in your sovereign data store.
We’re looking at using open-weight and locally based language models and AI so that data can be fully offline, but you can still benefit from these tools.
It sounds like a lot of the issues around Indigenous data sovereignty are really mirrored by broader conversations around data sovereignty happening globally right now.
I’m grateful to be part of the Global Partnership on AI on their experts panel. I’ve spent the past few years connecting with folks around the world who are concerned and who are building technologies around multilingual and multicultural AI. Last year, I was in Tokyo meeting with a group of experts, including a doctor working on Indigenous languages in rural and remote India. He was explaining that AI is actually accelerating the loss of their languages. He just as easily could have been talking about communities in Canada. So, yeah, the conversation is global.
Do you think that conversation presents an opportunity for a platform like Niiwin or a company like Animikii to grow globally?
We’ve been grappling with the notion of sovereignty and data sovereignty for a long time as Indigenous people and as an Indigenous technology company. That’s been our focus for the last 20 years, and now we’re finding our place in this broader conversation where it’s capital S sovereignty, nation-to-nation. People may remember First Nations saying no relationship is more important than that nation-to-nation relationship with Indigenous people in Canada, so we’re already thinking of the work that we do from a sovereignty perspective as that capital S sovereignty. It turns out that what we’ve built within Indigenous communities is now even more relevant to the broad conversation, and the technology we’re building with Niiwin is an opportunity for us to bring our Indigenous technology to the world.
BetaKit’s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YEGAF, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.
Feature image courtesy of ALL IN.