The Fight for #DataBack: Reclaiming Indigenous Memory from Colonial Buckets

Opinion: For too long, the tech industry has viewed Indigenous knowledge as a raw material to be mined, processed, and sold back to the very people it was taken from. This isn't just a technical glitch in data management; it is a continuation of colonial extraction. The push for Indigenous data sovereignty is a necessary rebellion against a system that treats living stories as inanimate zeroes and ones.

In a recent interview with BetaKit, as first reported, Jeff Ward, the founder of the BC-based national Indigenous tech firm Animikii, argues that the concept of sovereignty is not a new buzzword for Indigenous nations. Ward, a software developer and product designer from Manitoba’s Sandy Bay Ojibway First Nation, is leading the #DataBack movement. He describes this effort as a push to move data out of "colonial buckets"—systems not designed for Indigenous people and over which they have no control—and returning it to the possession and control of the community.

According to BetaKit, Ward views data not as a sterile object, but as "memory or stories" that connect living people to their ancestors, including language, traditions, and culture. To facilitate this, Animikii has developed Niiwin, a platform that allows Indigenous organizations to collect, analyze, and protect their data using secure systems. The Niiwin platform utilizes a relational database and a no-code interface to allow for bespoke, complex data structures, avoiding the biases inherent in off-the-shelf software. To further ensure sovereignty, Animikii offers a hosted solution in a non-US-owned data centre located in Quebec.

Ward points to the OCAP principles (ownership, control, access, and possession), created by the First Nation’s Information Governance Centre, as the guiding framework for the movement. He notes that sovereignty extends beyond where data is hosted to include choices about what data is collected and how it is structured.

The urgency of this movement is amplified by the rise of artificial intelligence. Ward tells BetaKit that there is a corporate race to capture as much data as possible to train large language models (LLMs). This creates significant risks, including the scraping of privileged information and the potential for LLMs to produce inaccuracies that could damage cultural revitalization efforts. Ward is explicit about the danger of digital colonialism: Indigenous communities do not want their languages and cultures used to train models that are then sold back to them as products for the economic benefit of major corporations.