RDM
Issue 1 2026 – Chiefs of Ontario Advocate magazine 
14  l
Walker, a citizen of Six Nations of the 
Grand River, is a Tier II Canada Research 
Chair in Indigenous Health Data and 
Aging at McMaster University. Her work 
moves between First Nations data gover-
nance and research on aging, dementia 
and cognitive health. What joins those 
worlds is the question of what informa-
tion can do for communities. 
“In all research, we have to think about 
impact and knowledge mobilization, but 
also data governance and how data is used 
to drive change and decision-making, and 
support self-determination and sover-
eignty,” she says. “It’s kind of what I think 
about all the time.”
D
r. Jennifer Walker was 
alone in a hotel room, 
preparing to open a confer-
ence on First Nations data 
sovereignty, when the story she needed 
arrived from home.
Her husband had started sending 
videos, small scenes of family life. In one, 
their eight-year-old son made his way 
through deep snow, following a partly 
broken trail that still demanded effort 
with every step.
“My son was just slogging along and 
actually, at one point, just fell, because 
he was this eight year old who was tired 
from walking in the snow,” Walker 
recalls. “But then the dog picked up the 
trail and kept ploughing along.”
For Walker, the video became more 
than a sweet moment from home. It 
offered a way to understand the growth 
of First Nations data sovereignty: the 
people who break trail, the people 
who continue it and the importance of 
building a path wide enough that no one 
has to carry the work alone. 
“It doesn’t have to be a small group of 
people making a path,” she says. “There 
have been lots of people making a path 
that so many people now can carry on 
with, and we can take turns. We don’t 
have to tire each other out.”
Opening drum song at the Powering Up Data Sovereignty Conference with 
Akwesasne Ratirennenhawi (Akwesasne Men’s Singers).
Powering Up  
Data Sovereignty:
First Nations chart the path forward
BY ANDREW ST. GERMAIN

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