Boozhoo News River Readers,

We’ve made it to the edition of NewsRiver where we announce our winter closure - wow!

The Animikii team will be on break for the holidays from December 22nd - January 4th. If you’ve found some space to inquire about our services during this time, you can still visit https://animikii.com/contact and you’ll hear back from us when we all return. Our office hours will resume as usual on Monday January 5th, 2026. 

If you are working with us already and face an issue that needs to be addressed quickly, please email support@animikii.com directly.

You can still expect NewsRiver in your inbox on Wednesday Dec 24th and 31st, as we’ll be resharing the stories from 2025 that were most resonant with you, our valued readers!

We always appreciate the time you spend here and we hope you’re able to connect with the people and activities that feel nourishing for you in the coming weeks - now onto the news,

This week’s stories include:  

• To Make More Space for Indigenous Worldviews, Start Here

• NZ’s Privacy Regime – Growing Tensions Around Māori Data Rights

• The right to health: indigenous data sovereignty in Canada during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic

Niiwin DataBack Fellowship applications extended to Jan 14

The big picture: We opened applications for this Fellowship a month ago, and since that time we’ve been learning from the feedback and applications we’ve received to date. There’s much broader interest than we initially anticipated - so we’re extending the deadline and amending the invitation slightly. It’s still clear who is best suited to join the year-long Fellowship. Groups within Nations who manage data related to Survivors stories and related IRS records reclamation will still be prioritized.  

Why it matters: However, folks are at different places within their data reclamation journey. We’ve heard from people who are not yet attached to organizations with capacity, and they would still benefit from joining the Fellowship as part of their learning journey. So we’re expanding the Fellowship to include individuals with relevant interests and the application to join will remain open until Jan 14, 2026.

Key points: 

• The education portion of the Fellowship will start in February. This will include 6 learning sessions over 12 weeks, held every other Wednesday, and accepted applicants will receive specific details.

• You’ll start with Indigenous data sovereignty: what it means, why it matters, and how it shapes every decision you'll make in Niiwin. From there, we move into practical territory. 

• How do you organize community data in ways that make sense to your people, not just to software? We'll work through data models and taxonomies designed to complement Indigenous ways of knowing and organizing information. 

• You'll learn approaches that let your community's logic guide how data gets structured, searched and shared. By the time you open Niiwin, you'll understand what data you need to collect, how to get it and take steps to building a way for others to access this information.

• DataBack Day is also on Feb 20th, and you'll hear from organizations actually doing the work - with special guest speakers we’re excited to announce in the new year!

Apply here: Learn more about Niiwin, the platform Animikii built to manage Indigenous data, and join the #DataBack Fellowship here. 

Curated Articles:

The right to health: indigenous data sovereignty in Canada during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic

Indigenous data sovereignty, which recognizes the right of Indigenous Peoples to govern their own data, has been identified as essential for achieving self-determination and improving health outcomes. We focus on British Columbia (BC) given its unique health and data governance structure with First Nations. This policy paper examines the challenges related to health data management that arose during COVID-19 in BC, and the regulatory barriers hindering Indigenous health equity. We present four policy recommendations that address data issues as a promising avenue to reducing health inequities in Canada.

A dynamic biome-specific governance approach that integrates indigenous knowledge and pluriversal thinking

Conventional sustainability governance relies on universal, compartmentalized models and often ignores the ecological complexity and Indigenous worldviews. This paper introduces the Dynamic Biome Governance and Knowledge Exchange (DyBiomGov) framework developed for managing rapid socio-ecological changes across global biomes. DyBiomGov methodologically proposes to integrate Indigenous governance principles, remote sensing diagnostics, and peer-reviewed climate projections. This pluralistic, adaptive framework supports communities, policy makers, and researchers to develop governance aligned with biome-specific changes, facilitate cross-biome learning, and uphold the rights of Indigenous Peoples in environmental decision-making.

NZ’s Privacy Regime – Growing Tensions Around Māori Data Rights

In Aotearoa, privacy law provides important protections for personal information – but for many Māori, there is growing concern that current rules and practices do not sufficiently recognise Indigenous perspectives on data, identity and taonga. As digital technologies and data-sharing become more entrenched, debates over privacy are increasingly entwined with issues of sovereignty, cultural values and Treaty-based obligations. However, while the law covers general personal information, compliance with its obligations does not necessarily assure culturally appropriate handling of data significant to Māori. For many Māori, data is more than just a collection of personal facts – it is a form of taonga, imbued with cultural significance, whakapapa, identity, and communal value.

To Make More Space for Indigenous Worldviews, Start Here

Liam Midzain-Gobin is an associate professor of political science at Brock University in St. Catharines, ON. A scholar of settler-colonial studies and settler-colonial states, such as Canada, Midzain-Gobin is focused on questions of sovereignty. How is it justified? How is it reified? In part, by imposing a new way of seeing the world, Midzain-Gobin argues in Settler Colonial Sovereignty, a heady and high-concept challenge to the notion of what he calls “settler common sense.” In this dizzying, dense, but surprisingly easy-to-follow debut, Midzain-Gobin exposes the violence of settler-colonial worldmaking, deconstructs the logic of improvement and assails the hegemonic narrative — or ‘hegemonologue’ — that settlers have imposed to overwrite, and thus erase, non-Western ways of knowing and understanding the natural world. What do we lose when we centre dominion and power instead of relation to people and land?