News River Express is back this week with three articles worth your time.

We introduced this summer format so we can spend a bit more time outside with our plants and the people we love, and still deliver the best curated links to your inbox

This week, all three stories have a link to Indigenous Data Sovereignty.

In Australia, Worimi Professor Kirsten Thorpe argues the right to control data means little without the governance structures to exercise it. At McMaster, three researchers show what happens when ethics boards decide for communities and entire populations disappear from the health evidence shaping care and funding. And in Nova Scotia, a Mi'kmaw father and son answer the question by building the tool themselves: wildfire simulation software they intend to keep Indigenous-led.

Governance key to realising Indigenous Data Sovereignty

National Indigenous Times

Delivering the NAIDOC Oration at UTS, Worimi Professor Kirsten Thorpe traced Indigenous Data Sovereignty back to the Maiam nayri Wingara collective's 2018 Canberra summit, and further back to data's use as a colonial weapon. Records held by Protection and Welfare Boards, she said, "were used to surveil, and they were used to marginalise communities." Thorpe drew on her own experience of alienating archive reading rooms:

"I learned early on that archives have the power to support people or really damage them."

For Thorpe, governance comes down to decision making: who decides, and whether communities have the data they need to control their own futures.

The ethics of being left out of health research

McMaster / The Conversation

Sonia Anand, Gina Ogilvie, and Vanessa Watts argue that research ethics boards, built to protect participants from coercion and exploitation, can produce the opposite injustice: locking out the racialized communities, Indigenous Peoples, and newcomers whose health needs then go unmeasured.

Canada's Tri-Council Policy Statement already names this: "over-protectionist attitudes or practices of researchers or REBs, whether intentional or inadvertent, can exclude some members of society from participating in research," and such exclusion "may constitute a failure to treat them justly."

The authors point to Indigenous-led ethics and data governance infrastructures as the alternative. The fix for a history of extractive research, they argue, is better research: more respectful, and more accountable to Indigenous priorities.

Mi'kmaw father and son develop software to test wildfire protection strategies

CBC News

Barry Stevens, an engineer, and his son Noah, a filmmaker and coder, both of Wasoqopa'q First Nation, spent seven years building FireGuardian through their company 3D Wave Design. The 3D program combines topographic data, weather, and forest inventory so communities can simulate fire spread and test mitigation like fire breaks, zoomed in to the level of "your house or the band office or the school." It grew out of their flood mapping work after Hurricane Juan, and has been tested by Nova Scotia Community College's Applied Geomatics Research Group and in trials with the Department of National Defence.

"We developed this software right from the ground up so we can ingest and democratize the data," Barry said.

They present to the AFN's Emergency Management committee in Ottawa next week, and Barry is clear the tool should stay Indigenous-led.

Ps. If you need a data store compliant with the new Canada's Tri-Council Policy Statement related to Indigenous Data Sovereignty? Contact us, Niiwin can help!