While reading Jennifer Guiliano and Carolyn Heitman’s article, “Difficult Heritage and the Complexities of Indigenous Data,” I was struck by how the open access movement — an ostensibly well-intended shift toward a more democratic approach to using/sharing data — can pose a threat to historically marginalized communities by perpetuating colonial practices of producing and preserving knowledge.

In Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s book Data Feminism, the authors describe a map that I believe exemplifies what Guiliano and Heitman frame as an “Indigenous-centric approach” to (re)constructing cultural memory. The map was researched and designed by Dr. Margaret Pearce, in collaboration with First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities across Canada, and is titled “Coming Home to Indigenous Place Names in Canada.” The boundaries of the mapped landmass mirror that of the Anglo-Western conception of Canada, but the place names on the map reflect those used historically and contemporaneously by the Indigenous communities that inhabit(ed) those lands.

At multiple points, the map protects or obscures knowledge, as a means of preserving the privilege of knowledge for a select few, rather than as a right for all. The exact locations of place names are not given, so as to limit the ability of outsiders to gain access. (This is achieved through the map’s massive scale of 1:5,000,000, which allows for a certain level of descriptive ambiguity.) Furthermore, in some cases, place names are not translated into English. 

Additionally, as a measure to prevent decontextualization and misuse, the map may not be reproduced at all unless the relevant communities are consulted. As Klein and D’Ignazio describe in Data Feminism, “Each time the map is reproduced…Pearce writes to the communities to whom the names belong, explains the proposed context of the names, and requests permission for the names to be reproduced in that context.” This allows for and maintains the agency and oversight of the communities who have consented to the use of their place names — and disrupts the tendency for open-access platforms to allow “for objects to be divorced from their conditions of production and contexts of interpretation for all forms of reuse” (Guiliano 18).