For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples have passed down their traditions and culture through oral storytelling. Now, an Indigenous community in Canada is using a data centre to help preserve its heritage.
The Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory in rural Ontario installed a small data centre as part of efforts to modernise its record-keeping systems. Among the digital files it holds are video recordings of Anishinaabe people speaking their native language.
“Our language is one of the biggest things that most First Nations across the country are losing,” said Wiikwemkoong Chief Tim Ominika. “We will have our knowledge keepers, our language speakers who may be moving on to the spirit world, but their legacy is still going to be protected for many years to come by having our own data systems in place and protecting that.”
The concept of digital sovereignty has gained momentum in places such as Europe, where leaders are wary of the widespread influence of American big technology companies. For the Wiikwemkoong First Nation and other Indigenous communities, it is also about asserting control over their own information after historically being excluded from its collection and use by colonisers.
About the size of a single-car garage, the data centre, installed last year, also stores the community’s corporate documents, residents’ health data and security camera footage.
“The purpose of all of this is having the ownership, access, control and possession of our information,” Ominika said. He said the aim was to prevent others from “having authority or setting their guidelines on what they could do with our data”.
The First Nation has been transferring all its information from a Microsoft data centre in Toronto, about 190 miles (305 km) to the south, said Michael McCormick, the community’s chief technical officer.
Wiikwemkoong is situated at the eastern end of Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron, an area known for its rugged wilderness, extensive waterways and Anishinaabe cultural attractions. The reserve describes itself as Canada’s only “unceded territory” because it never signed a treaty surrendering its land.
The data centre, which supports the modernisation of the community’s administrative services, has also paved the way for new public safety infrastructure, including a fleet of drones and a network of surveillance cameras. A backup data centre on the mainland and public Wi-Fi transmitters are also planned for the community, which has about 4,000 residents. Ominika declined to disclose the cost of the projects.
Efforts to improve data storage gained urgency after a flood in 2022 resulted in the loss of some digital records that had been scattered across various offices.
“That information is very important to us. And in order to protect it, keep it safe, we said, 'Why can't we look at developing and creating and implementing our own data sovereignty program?'” Ominika said.
Wiikwemkoong’s upgrade programme is among the first of its kind for Indigenous communities in Canada, which include First Nations, Inuit and Métis. Delegations from other Indigenous communities in Ontario and neighbouring Manitoba have visited the site to learn about the project, McCormick said.
Ominika said he often had to explain to visitors that the community’s data centre was unlike the giant facilities used by artificial intelligence companies, which require vast amounts of land and water.
The data centre is housed in a secure bunker next to the administrative office and can be accessed through a facial recognition scanner. Its four racks of computer servers are cooled by two fans rather than water, giving it “a relatively small carbon footprint”, McCormick said.
In the United States, a few Native American tribes, including the Navajo Nation, have operated their own data centres for local infrastructure services for years.
Wiikwemkoong’s facility is believed to be the only data centre on Indigenous territory in Canada. McCormick said, however, that Indigenous leaders were becoming increasingly aware of the importance of controlling their data. The Chiefs of Ontario, which represents 133 First Nations in the province, held a data sovereignty conference earlier this year, including a panel on artificial intelligence and data centres.
For generations, Indigenous communities worldwide have had little say in how governments, researchers and institutions collect, interpret and store information about them, said Carmen Jones, director of research and data management for the Chiefs of Ontario.
“As more information is collected and stored, it is critical that First Nations determine how that data is accessed, managed, and used,” she said.
Since the data centre was installed, McCormick’s team has added 700 surveillance cameras across the community and a dozen drone docking stations on the roof of the administrative office. The stations house a fleet of drones supplied by Chinese company DJI.
The drones are used to locate people who go missing in the area’s wooded hills, monitor criminal activity, including drug deals and break-ins, and watch for forest fires.
Ominika said there had been “a little bit of resistance” to the drone programme from residents concerned about privacy.
DJI drones have been blocked in the United States over national security concerns. McCormick said all footage captured by Wiikwemkoong’s drones would be stored locally. Ominika said he wanted to ensure that information collected by the drones “is going to be protected” and not “used against us, moving forward, by China”.
First Nations in Canada recognised the importance of data sovereignty decades ago, drawing up their own data governance principles in 1998 because they were often the subjects of research by outsiders that did not benefit their communities. Similar concerns feature in current criticism of big technology companies developing artificial intelligence language models by scraping text, video, images and other material from the internet, often without permission.
Ominika said community leaders would be cautious and thoughtful when considering the use of artificial intelligence.
“Once we start to realise and understand that there is a potential for any kind of resistance or harm towards our community, then we would put a stop there,” he said.