Boozhoo News River Readers

Every week, we hand-pick the most important stories in Indigenous innovation, research, and culture. Stay connected to what matters. 

If you enjoyed the stories in this week’s News River - invite others to join the conversation - forward this email to a friend or colleague!

This week’s stories include: 

• TMU students to safeguard Residential School Survivor testimonies

• Five headlines from a major NWT health privacy report

• Cultural, ethical, legal, and social considerations in genomics research with Indigenous Peoples

Our 2025 Social Impact Report is live! 

The big picture: If you're old enough to remember VH1's Pop Up Video, you already know the format. If not, ask someone born before 1990. We added pop-up facts to our videos this year because our impact keeps popping up all over the place. And because our board member Diane reminded us that laughter is good Anishinaabe medicine.

Why it matters: This report covers a year of carrying Indigenous data sovereignty to global stages, protecting sacred community data, and showing up where it counted.

Key points:

• Niiwin is protecting what matters. The Survivors' Secretariat uses it to build the most complete Truth and Reconciliation database in existence. The Digital Witness Blanket uses it as a living digital archive. Edmonton Public Schools uses it to deliver decolonized curriculum province-wide.

• Jeff Ward took Indigenous data sovereignty global. OECD in Paris, GPAI in Tokyo, RES in Las Vegas, North Forge in Winnipeg. When Indigenous tech leaders are in the room, the conversation changes.

• We built Kuu-us Crisis Line Society a new website. Pro bono. Crisis support shouldn't wait for a budget.

Click around. Catch the pop-ups. Hopefully you smile.

Read the whole report at:  2025.animikii.com

Curated Articles:

TMU students to safeguard Residential School Survivor testimonies

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Connie Walker leads the charge with law and journalism students’ support. Roughly 38,000 accounts of abuse at Indian Residential Schools are set to be destroyed by September 19, 2027, by order of the Supreme Court of Canada. As the most comprehensive archive of Survivor testimony about atrocities committed against children in Residential Schools, these testimonies were collected between 2006 and 2012. They will be gone forever – unless Survivors request their records be preserved. The problem is urgent: Many Survivors and their families don’t know this deadline exists. These testimonies were gathered through the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement and the Independent Assessment Process (IAP) – but many people have no idea their records are at risk of being erased. Connie Walker is a Pulitzer-prize winning Cree journalist and a member of the Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan on a mission to create a new national archive, while raising awareness about the coming destruction of the IAP accounts. Now a professor and the Velma Rogers Research Chair in the School of Journalism at TMU, Walker is leading the Indian Residential School Records Project. The initiative works in partnership with First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities to build this new national archive of Survivor accounts, testimonies and court filings.

Five headlines from a major NWT health privacy report

Ten years after NWT health privacy legislation came into force, an overview shows how often issues are arising and where the next problem areas are. The 10-year report on the NWT Health Information Act – tabled in the legislature this week – shows privacy breaches happen in the territory’s healthcare at the rate of six or seven a month. The report expresses concern about “snooping” – the act of healthcare workers prying into medical records they shouldn’t be accessing – and finds the current legislation inadequate for some uses, like cancer screening or getting departments to work together more closely. In a news release that noted the report’s publication but did not engage with its contents, the NWT government said it was a “key part of the GNWT’s broader work on privacy.” Here are some of the report’s headlines… Indigenous data sovereignty isn’t addressed in the legislation. “There is great interest by Indigenous governments and organizations to have access to information of their members,” the report notes, but no Canadian jurisdiction has taken action on that yet.

Cultural, ethical, legal, and social considerations in genomics research with Indigenous Peoples: A scoping review

Indigenous communities are under-represented in genomics research, contributing to inequitable health-related knowledge, outcomes, and benefits. Under-representation reflects enduring consequences of colonial research practices that have engendered cultural, ethical, legal, and social (CELS) concerns among communities. Researchers must understand, navigate, and address these in their research practices. This study aimed to identify and synthesise CELS considerations to inform Indigenous genomics research practices. A systematic scoping review was conducted, including peer-reviewed papers on genomics that discussed cultural, ethical, legal, or social matters relevant to Indigenous Peoples globally. Cultural considerations included cultural harm, significance of blood, and the need to integrate Indigenous knowledges. Ethical considerations included consent, data access and sharing, privacy, and confidentiality. Legal considerations included laws protecting Indigenous interests, control of genomic samples and data, biovalue and DNA as a commodity, genetic discrimination, and the use of genomic data in constructing and defining racial identity. Social considerations included collective decision-making, genetic determinism, and stigmatisation, and the importance of contextualising findings within wider social determinants of health frameworks.

Youth level up at Indigenous Games Day

The Hadiya'dagénhahs First Nations, Métis and Inuit Student Centre along with Brock's Department of Digital Humanities and the Library Makerspace welcomed Indigenous students from local school boards to campus on Monday, March 2 to playtest games and learn about game design. Indigenous game developers Paul Boyko and Jeremy Nelson facilitated games for visiting students and provided feedback to fourth-year Game Design students on their capstone projects. Boyko and Nelson also spent time playing games with a group of fourth-year Brock Game Design students before sharing their perspectives on Indigenous gaming during a roundtable conversation with the Brock community.

Data Centers and AI Are a Betrayal of Indigenous Lifeways

In a series of articles exploring the large-scale development of data centers and the implications of artificial intelligence (AI), this initial offering by Dr. Nichole Keway Biber considers the broader context of Indigenous cultural continuity despite destructive colonial norms. The Seven Fires Prophecies central to the teachings of the Anishinaabe people confirm that we have collectively reached the time of the Seventh Fire, when we revive the knowledge and practice of our traditional lifeways by “picking back up what was left behind on the trail.” The Seventh Fire is also the moment when humanity reaches a crossroads and must choose between two paths. One path leads to the destruction of life on Earth. The other lights the Eighth Fire of true brotherhood by restoring relationships with our living planet. As the multi-billionaire oligarchs of Big Tech and Big Oil push a dystopian vision of autonomous war machines and humans reduced to little more than sources of data, we—the people on the ground—must choose another path: protecting and restoring our real-world dependence on water, food, and wildlife. 

We’re grateful to have our headquarters on traditional territory of the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Lkwungen, Songhees and Esquimalt) Peoples of the Coast Salish Nation.

Animikii Inc: theDock Centre for Social Impact 100-722 Cormorant St Victoria, BC V8W 1P8

You're receiving this because you signed up for the Animikii News River. You can unsubscribe at any time.