A First Nation’s data centre helps safeguard its language and heritage

Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory in Ontario, Canada, is preserving video recordings of Anishinaabe language speakers in its own data centre, helping keep cultural knowledge under community control.

Installed in 2025, the facility is about the size of a single-car garage and serves a community of roughly 4,000 people on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron. Alongside language recordings, it holds residents’ health information and administrative documents. The community has been transferring its data from a Microsoft facility in Toronto.

Chief Tim Ominika says the recordings can help preserve the legacy of language speakers and knowledge keepers for years to come. Keeping those files in community-owned systems is also about deciding who can access the information and how it can be used. That principle, often called data sovereignty, gives the project significance beyond modernising recordkeeping.

A flood in 2022 added urgency to the work after some digital records, scattered across community offices, were lost. A backup data centre on the mainland is now planned.

The project has drawn visits from other Indigenous communities in Ontario and Manitoba interested in learning from Wiikwemkoong’s experience. Its compact facility brings together two priorities: protecting the information needed for everyday services and preserving language and knowledge for future generations.