Meshing with Maps: Empowering Indigenous Communities
Since time immemorial, people have gathered in common spaces to discuss land treaties, trade agreements, share stories, discuss problems, ideate solutions, and transfer knowledge. Congresses such as these are home to the most uplifting stories, heart-shattering issues, and innovative ideas. This past week, in Montreal on the traditional territories of the Abenaki, Haudenosauneega, Huron-Wendat, Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) First Nations, hundreds gathered to discuss issues like traditional knowledge preservation, data sovereignty, climate change, geo-spatial tooling, networking solutions, and community empowerment through technology at the 2018 Indigenous Mapping Workshop.
This article is an attempt to summarize my experience (as someone who admittedly has very little experience with GIS) at the 2018IMW, to draw attention to some issues of which — until approximately a week ago — I was completely unaware, and lastly to provide an overview of a multi-year collaborative project powered by Right Mesh to empower and connect northern Indigenous communities.
The Indigenous Mapping Workshop
Self-described as the largest international geospatial conference for Indigenous governing bodies and communities on Indigenous-led geospatial research, the 2018 Indigenous Mapping Workshop was home to more than 300 participants, more than 40 speakers, and more than 35 hours of presentations and concurrent workshop sessions. Perspectives from across the globe were represented, each different but with similar thematic goals and challenges.
Dr. Daniel Gillis (Associate Professor at the University of Guelph School of Computer Science and Scientific Adviser for the RightMesh Project), Nic Durish (Research Assistant on the eNuk project), and I were invited to facilitate a two (2) day workshop and present an opening keynote.
When you think of maps, you probably don’t also think of mesh networks, decentralization, incentivisation or blockchain of all things. Why would you? What does cartography have to do with mesh networks or cryptocurrency?
This was the sort of topic we were tasked with addressing — and despite organizational issues, uninformative sessions descriptions, and being shoved in literally the least discover-able room of the conference centre — it got people pretty darn excited.
(If you haven’t already, it might be helpful to familiarize yourself with the Right Mesh project to understand why blockchain is involved here, but it’s not necessary for understanding the rest of this article.)
Running the Workshop
I’d never run a workshop before, so I didn’t really know what to expect once people started to show up, but the plan was as follows:
- spell out connectivity issues in Canada;
- explain why the infrastructure demands of conventional internet are leaving remote communities unconnected;
- introduce RightMesh, an infrastructureless wireless mobile mesh network;
- get people thinking about problems and ideating solutions in their own communities that could be alleviated (at least in part) by local meshes.
This served two main purposes:
- to demystify communications technology so that connectivity issues are understood by the people who are most affected by them;
- to inspire and empower individuals with realistic, purpose-built technological solutions.
So what came out of this?
A few major issues stuck with me after collaborating with some of the workshop participants — especially things that I take for granted everyday, or would otherwise never think of. Common themes that were explored included health, safety, and response systems that participants identified as critical for the well-being of the communities on their reserve land, and elsewhere. Some of these points were pretty shocking to me, especially considering that Canada is a developed nation and global leader on human rights.
- First Nations in Canada do not have reliable sources of clean water
- Poaching and wasteful hunting practices are rampant in the north
- Communities need alert systems where there is no cellular coverage
The last point comes up as a generalized need extrapolated from the previous points. To help contextualize the situation, I’ll elaborate on the first point.
One workshop participant expressed that in their Northern Ontario community of Matachewan, occasionally the water treatment facility in the area just stops working. In the event of a power-outage, if the backup generator isn’t maintained properly or doesn’t have enough gas (and siphoning is problematic), the facility shuts down. When this happens, as it has several times in the past decade, a report is generated at the facility and hand-delivered to each home in the area, instructing families to boil water before drinking it. This process is inefficient at best, and I could see how the health of children and elderly could be at risk — not only because the water quality is not reliable, but because the advisory system is archaic. It was also mentioned that when the advisories are over, it takes an equal or longer time to receive the green light that says, “Hey, water is safe to drink now.” It was expressed how this was frustrating, because people would be effectively boiling water for no reason — wasting time, and making people feel awful for the wasted efforts.
A follow-up call informed me that in the area there is clean, high-ground, natural spring water — but access to it was completely cut-off when this facility was installed approximately 13 years ago, forcing reliance on this unreliable infrastructure.
As someone who is privileged enough to live in a densely populated city, the situation that was described to me was alarming. A quick web search for ‘clean water in Canada’ revealed the problems experienced by the Metachewan First Nation are far from unique.
The query brings up a generic sounding government plan for clean water across the nation, and a couple articles about poor water quality in Ontario First Nations, including a particularly well written opinion piece from the Globe & Mail about the state of water quality in the Grassy Narrows First Nation of Western Ontario.
The Globe & Mail also reports that, as of 2016, there were 158 similar drinking water advisories in 114 First Nation communities across Canada.
The federal government funds water budgets at a deficit, meaning that communities often do not have enough money to keep systems in good working order.
Dig around on the Indigenous and Northern Affairs Government of Canada website, and you’ll come across a page describing the the Safe Drinking Water for First Nations Act which identifies the problem, and outlines some legislation that mandates solutions.
Ensuring First Nation communities have access to safe and effective water and wastewater systems on First Nation lands is a priority for the Government of Canada.
But why, if this is indeed a priority, was it expressed at our workshop that communities are not being effectively alerted about boil-water advisories? Why is this a problem in so many First Nations? How is it that there isn’t infrastructure in place for effective alerts — even if there really isn’t a budget for effective water treatment?
In an interview with MacLeans, toxicologist Lalita Bharadwaj of the University of Saskatchewan explains:
One of the big issues, in my opinion, is that we don’t recognize First Nations as unique groups of individuals; the issues around water are not the same for each community. As a result, money being spent, for example, to increase training or education about how to operate a water system may work for some communities but not others. Another example [is] geographic location and remoteness: Putting money toward a treatment plant may work for one community, but not another, where it may break all the time because of permafrost.
So if water treatment facilities are breaking because of power outages and permafrost, and natural springs are no longer accessible, and the processes used to alert communities of these problems are ineffective, what can you do?
A naive solution would be to attach something like an SMS-blast to the report generation process — but what if there’s insufficient cellular coverage? Matachewan coverage is “spotty at best,” and many northern communities are completely unserviced.
Poor internet infrastructure? Bad cellular coverage? This is exactly where RightMesh would be a good drop-in replacement for the infrastructure needed for a reporting system. The solution is simple: sensors in the water treatment facility pick up that the quality has dropped below standard, a message is forwarded by something like an low-power IoT device or Raspberry Pi running RightMesh (backed by a battery store in the event of power failure), and a broadcast alert is sent to devices in the local meshes of the communities the facility is responsible for. RightMesh would enable such a system to be automated and greatly improve the efficiency and efficacy of alerting communities when boil-water advisories start and end. It certainly doesn’t solve the water crisis, but it would at least slightly improve quality of life through effective reporting.
Thinking beyond this particular problem, a set up like this could be abstracted to work under a variety of situations. Add in multi-directional reporting, and suddenly there’s a system which can be used to broadcast geo-location aware advisories from peers in the network. Referring back to point 2, you could enable Inuit communities to report cases of poaching — a prominent problem where rough cuts of Caribou are illegally taken and the carcasses are left to rot.
You could build heat-maps of safety issues and use them to inform policy, ensuring that communities aren’t left behind by legislature.
Mesh networking in the North
Over the past year, Dan, Nic, and I (along with a long list of community partners, multi-disciplinary academics, and developers from RightMesh — credits at the bottom of this article!) have been working on updating a health and environmental monitoring application to make use of Wireless Mobile Mesh Networks to mitigate connectivity issues in particularly vulnerable areas of the Circumpolar North.
The eNuk Project was started to address similar issues that were explored during our workshop — but rather than water quality or poaching alerts, it has been purpose-built to inform users of physical safety hazards related to climate change, and the corresponding impact on community mental and physical health.
eNuk is designed by, with, and for the community of Rigolet, Nunatsiavut, Labrador. Rigolet is geographically located on the edge of arctic, in perhaps one of the most sensitive areas to climate change in the world. Community members rely on the quality and safety of ice for transport and hunting, among other things, and the impact of climate change leaves them in a particularly vulnerable situation.
“It’s making sure that we have, that we still have things in the future that we have now and we can still use them the same way. Understanding the fact that things are gonna change, ice is gonna change, weather’s gonna warm up, but make sure that what we can protect now we should continue to protect.”
The University of Guelph, Memorial University Labrador Institute, and RightMesh have partnered with Rigolet not only to create a monitoring system that provides insight into the changes happening in the area, but also to provide connectivity where there is none.
So, with a beta application launched and development and research still very much underway, a portion of our team (Dan, Nic, and I) were invited to share our experience, our motivation, and our application at the 2018IMW the morning of Wednesday Aug 22.
I’d like to say that it went over pretty well, since it was requested of us to run our workshop again after the keynote (though this was, unfortunately, not possible).
It was an incredible experience to share our work with the conference, but most important to me was that over the course of these 4 days, our approaches were consistently questioned, praised, criticised, and validated. Left, right, and centre applications for our mesh network seemed to appear as discussions were had and facilitated with people from polarizing backgrounds, vastly different experiences, and wildly variant political stances. Connection, education, inspiration, and empowerment are universal concepts, and I am so glad to be part of a revolution as we #meshtheworld.
Truly Awesome People: Credits, Collaborators, Community Partners & Leaders
The discussions that I took part in at the Indigenous Mapping Workshop absolutely would not have been possible without standing on the shoulders of giants whose work came before me. The eNuk Project has been the result of collaboration across institutions, organizations, and communities, and was well established before I become involved late last year. The RightMesh team is highly talented, has grand vision, and their work is enabling a better future for people across the globe. I feel incredibly privileged to be involved in both teams, and would like to thank everyone that has been involved.
This list might be incomplete — if I’ve missed you, please let me know.
eNuk research leads, assistants, developers, and community leaders:
Dr. Dan Gillis, Dr. Ashlee Cunsolo, Dr. Sherilee Harper, Dr. Jason Ernst, Inez Shiwak, Charlie Flowers, Oliver Cook, Nic Durish, Fraser Seymour, Keefer Rourke, Alexandra Sawatzky, Jacqueline Middleton, David Borish, Amy Kipp, & Michele Wood
RightMesh developers (directly working with the eNuk project):
Dr. Jason Ernst, Fraser Seymour, Keefer Rourke, Benjamin Hughes, & Sachin Raturi
Community and Organizational Partners:
- The Rigolet Inuit Community Government
- The Government of Nunatsiavut
- Right Mesh AG
- Left Inc.
- Health Canada
- Polar Knowledge Canada
- Canadian Institute of Health Research
- The University of Guelph
- Memorial University Labrador Institute
