Boozhoo News River Readers,

Summer is officially here and we’d like to introduce the seasonal News River Express! 

No worries, it’s the same as your weekly newsletter about Indigenous tech, innovations and our go-to source for all links Indigenous Data Sovereignty related… just featuring the three key stories of the week. 

This abbreviated format lets us spend a bit more time outside with our plants and the people we love, and still deliver the best curated links into your inbox. (And, we’ll be back to our regular format in the Fall!)

Here are this week's three key articles:

In the Arctic, Coproduced Maps Help Find Balance Under Pressure

Often described as the world’s thermostat, the Arctic reflects solar heat and regulates the global jet stream that dictates weather patterns far beyond the North Pole. Climatic conditions in the Arctic have implications for the rest of the planet. But the Arctic’s critical cooling system is under immense strain. The region is warming at a rate nearly four times the global average, sparking the potential for more extreme weather and rising sea levels that threaten communities in every latitude. For the Indigenous Peoples who have stewarded the Arctic for millennia, this crisis is compounded by a dual pressure: the rapid physical collapse of their environment, as permanently frozen ground—called permafrost—thaws, and the encroaching footprint of industrial resource extraction and development. At Woodwell Climate Research Center, cartographers and geospatial experts with the Permafrost Pathways project recognize that navigating this unprecedented breaking point requires more than just remote monitoring.

Researchers call for conservation genomics to respect Indigenous data sovereignty 

A research team at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is urging the scientific community to reform how it uses genetic technologies for wildlife conservation

In two new publications, researchers from the Centre for Indigenous Science (CIS) argue that modern conservation genomics must move away from top-down academic and corporate approaches, instead centring Indigenous communities, ecological knowledge, and data sovereignty. The collaborative initiatives, published in the journals Conservation Biology and Ethnobiology Letters, address the ethical deficits surrounding nonhuman biobanking and high-profile corporate “de-extinction” projects.

AI must be built with Indigenous Knowledges, not against them | Pursuit by the University of Melbourne

As Australia marks 50 years of NAIDOC Week, honouring the world's oldest living culture, humanity's newest technology is yet to reckon with a simple principle: "nothing about us, without us". The concern is that artificial intelligence (AI), like so many technologies before it, will become another extractive force that ‘takes’ Indigenous Knowledges without consent, credit or return. The tension behind that question has reached the global stage. In his first encyclical, the Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV cast AI as one of the defining moral tests of our age. He talked about the dangers of AI becoming a tool for oppression, emphasising its potential to discriminate against minority groups, marginalised populations and Indigenous peoples. He ultimately said we need to confront fundamental questions about the ownership, governance, accountability and distribution of the spoils of AI. Our research found a dual reality: while AI is empowering, it also carries significant risks of entrenching existing and historical biases.

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