A First Nation community in Canada is using a data center to preserve its heritage

WIIKWEMKOONG UNCEDED TERRITORY, Ontario (AP) — For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples have passed down their traditions and culture through oral storytelling. Now, a Canadian Indigenous community is using a data center to help preserve its heritage. The Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory in rural Ontario installed a small data center as it modernized its recordkeeping systems.

Among the digital files it holds are video recordings of Anishinaabe 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 idea of digital sovereignty has gained momentum in places like Europe, where leaders are wary of the widespread influence of American Big Tech.

For the Wiikwemkoong First Nation and other Indigenous communities, it is also about asserting authority over their own information after historically being excluded from its collection and use by colonizers. About the size of a single-car garage, the data center installed last year also stores the community’s corporate documents, health data for residents, and security camera footage. “The purpose of all of this is having the ownership, access, control and possession of our information,” Ominika said.

It’s about preventing anyone else 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 center in Toronto, about 190 miles (305 kilometers) south, said Michael McCormick, the community’s chief technical officer. Other Indigenous communities have been taking an interest Wiikwemkoong is on the eastern end of Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron, an area that attracts visitors with its rugged wilderness, extensive waterways and Anishinaabe cultural offerings. The reserve prides itself on being Canada’s only “unceded territory,” because it never signed a treaty surrendering its land.

The data center, which underpins a modernization of Wiikwemkoong’s administrative services, also has paved the way for new public safety infrastructure, including a drone fleet and a network of …