Boozhoo News River Readers,

This week we’re sharing about youth empowerment, woven legacies, and land stewardship! Thanks for being here, we’re always grateful for the time you spend reading News River.  

This week’s stories include: 

• UBC researchers find Indigenous lands can outperform protected areas on conservation

• Digital pathways into the University Art Collections - a new Vault collection

• Addressing forced resilience: Indigenous experiences with genomic medicine in B.C.

Jeff speaks at Indspire Soaring 2026

The big picture: This week Jeff Ward, Founder and CEO of Animikii Indigenous Technology, took the stage at Indspire’s Soaring in Halifax!

Why it matters: This annual Indigenous Youth Empowerment Gathering welcomes Indigenous high school students from across the country to learn about career and post-secondary education options by participating in interesting, informative, and engaging workshops, either in person or virtually.

Highlights: 

• Jeff spoke about: Birchbark scrolls. Star mapping. Trade networks. Language. He spoke about how the technology and the tools change, but our values shouldn't. 

• He starting using technology as a tool for change and to bring more equality to Indigenous people, and left them with an important message that they can do all of this from exactly where they are.

Learn more: visit Indspire’s event page here.

Curated Articles:

Digital pathways into the University Art Collections - a new Vault collection

Woven Legacies is a new digital collection of historical and contemporary baskets made by Indigenous artists and currently in the care of the University Art Collections (UAC). This featured collection highlights 20 baskets from Indigenous communities across Turtle Island (colonially known as Canada), with a primary focus on works made by Nuu-chah-nulth and Interior Salish weavers. It stems from the 2019 exhibition We Carry Our Ancestors  that sought to connect baskets with their community of origin and memorialize the weavers whose names were once known. In continuation of this work, Woven Legacies digitally activates these belongings in the University Art Collections. It presents the community-based work carried out to identify several of the makers and communities associated with these belongings and foreground the potential of these belongings for further research, teaching and engagement. To learn more, browse the collection and select individual basket pages for further details.

Addressing forced resilience: Indigenous experiences with genomic medicine in B.C.

A newly published study examines how systemic barriers in health care shape Indigenous families’ views about genomic medicine in British Columbia. The findings, recently published in Genetics in Medicine, show that physical and relational barriers to access, experiences of racism and persistent demands for self-advocacy impose resilience as a condition of care for Indigenous families. The study describes this dynamic as forced resilience, highlighting how it undermines equitable access to genomic medicine. The study was co-led by an Indigenous Advisory Council and researchers from the Regulatory Science Lab at the UBC Faculty of Medicine and BC Cancer Research Institute, including principal investigator Dr. Dean Regier and health economist Morgan Ehman, and conducted in partnership with the First Nations Health Authority. It is part of the Silent Genomes Project, which is seeking to address the ‘genomic divide’ caused by the lack of background genetic variation data for Indigenous populations in Canada.

UBC researchers find Indigenous lands can outperform protected areas on conservation

A new study led by UBC researchers has found that lands managed by Indigenous Peoples consistently protect forests, biodiversity and carbon stores at levels equal to or greater than government-designated protected areas—yet most of these lands remain inadequately recognized or resourced. The paper, published recently in People and Nature, is the largest study of its kind to date. It analyzed 111 peer-reviewed papers examining forest cover, biodiversity, carbon storage, wildfire activity and other conservation outcomes across the Amazon, Asia-Pacific, Africa, Canada and other regions. Three-quarters of those studies found a positive relationship between Indigenous lands and conservation. “Indigenous Peoples are among the world’s most effective land stewards, yet many are still fighting for basic recognition of their rights to lands they have protected for generations. The science is clear—we need to catch up,” said Dr. William Nikolakis, lead author of the study and assistant professor of Indigenous land and natural resources governance at UBC. The study also highlights a major gap in the research itself: only seven per cent of the 111 papers included Indigenous authors.

Bobbie Racette built her new startup around a simple idea: be the support she never had

If Bobbie Racette could split herself into “a million pieces” as a mentor, she would. She’s an Indigenous, queer woman in tech, and the first Indigenous woman in Canada to raise a Series A round for her now-exited startup, Virtual Gurus. “I have a lot of founders, especially Indigenous entrepreneurs, who reach out to me daily,” Racette told Syntax Strategic founder Jennifer Stewart on stage. “They need support, and I can’t support them [all], so I thought, why not build a platform that can support them?” That’s the motivation behind her new startup, Tapwi. Racette explained that Tapwi, Cree for “truth,” will contain all the resources she needed to build her previous startup. It will function as a search fund, acquiring small businesses (“from gas stations to tech”) for underserved founders-in-training. The pupils will run those businesses under Tapwi for a few years, until they can take the business over themselves. Tapwi’s waitlist is sitting at over 700 industry partners, Racette said.

AI Data Centers Are The New Plantations Unless We Build Them Differently

AI can support livelihoods, prosperity and culture, but only if island communities have a real say in how it is built and governed. Plantations reorganized the entire ecosystem of Hawaiʻi to serve distant markets, concentrating land and water under a few owners while exporting wealth off-island. The result was ecological simplification, cultural disruption and long-term dependency. Today, the commodity is no longer sugar or pineapple or sandalwood. It is machine intelligence — computer, data and the infrastructure that powers them. We are a collective of university professors in fields of AI and genome sciences, nonprofit leaders, and community organizers, asking a simple but urgent question: As AI data centers are proposed to come to Hawaiʻi, who will own the data, control the resources that power them and hold these systems accountable? In rural places around the U.S. and Malaysia, as well as abutted to urban centers in Singapore, data centers now operate at a scale that rivals — and in some cases exceeds — the extractive intensity of 19th century plantations.