Indigenous community access to data, historic documents at auction, and academic audiobooks.
Your weekly dose of wisdom from Animikii’s News River!
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Every week, we hand-pick the most important stories in Indigenous innovation, research, and culture. Stay connected to what matters.
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This week’s stories include:
A story about the Netflix animated series “Spirit Rangers” - with Native showrunner, writers room, and production team - nominated for a Peabody Award.
A book shares the importance of documenting the history of US Native boarding schools and the healing and power of community access to records and archives.
An article exploring the travel difficulties preventing delegates from attending the largest convening of Indigenous Peoples globally.
Feature
Hudson's Bay looks to auction off royal charter that launched company 355 years ago
Anyone who buys the charter will own the 'Holy Grail': Hamilton museum operator
The big picture: The collapsing department store chain known as Canada's oldest company filed a motion with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice late Thursday asking for permission to auction off the royal charter that launched Hudson's Bay Company, issued by King Charles II in 1670, along with its trove of art and historical artifacts, as part of its creditor protection process.
Why it matters: In addition to establishing Hudson's Bay as a fur trading company, the document gave the business rights to a vast swath of land spanning most of the country and extraordinary power over trade and Indigenous relations for decades more.
Key points:
Efforts in recent days are said to have encouraged Hudson's Bay to keep the charter from being auctioned off and instead donated somewhere like the Archives of Manitoba, which already serves as a custodian to some of the company's artifacts.
With that advice going unheeded, he now expects there to be interest in getting the document a UNESCO Memory of the World distinction, which is meant to safeguard documents of historical and cultural importance.
The recognition does not prevent the artifacts from being destroyed or sold but applies a social pressure that helps preserve them, Groat said.
The sale is necessary because the retailer owes millions to creditors, but The Bay hasn't said how much it hopes to raise from the auction.
What they're saying:
"It's 100 per cent their crown jewel. There is no doubt this is the most significant document that the Hudson's Bay Company has access to or that they've ever produced," said Cody Groat, a historian of Canadian and Indigenous history who serves as the chair of the UNESCO Memory of the World Advisory Committee.
"There is zero legislative mechanism in the country to keep this charter out of private hands at this point in time," he said, though Canada has cultural export policies that can delay a sale to a foreign buyer.
What's next: Court documents say the art sales process will likely be run by one of three unnamed but "leading art auction houses in North America" it has had "active discussions with."
Curated Articles
Tech With Respect: AI And Indigenous Community Power
When AI is built on biased or incomplete data, it often defaults to dominant worldviews, misrepresenting or ignoring others altogether. This isn’t just a design flaw. It’s a continuation of colonial patterns in a new digital form. Yet some efforts flip the script. The wâsikan kisewâtisiwin platform, for example, is being designed to recognize harmful or biased language about Indigenous peoples, flag it, and offer respectful alternatives. The tool serves as a digital ally to reduce emotional labor and as a mechanism to ensure Indigenous knowledge and experiences are not overwritten by default AI norms.
Children's Show That Professor Consulted on Nominated for Peabody Award
American Indian studies professor Joely Proudfit consulted on a Native-themed children's show that was nominated for a Peabody Award this week. Joely Proudfit, chair of CSUSM’s American Indian studies department, was the Native production consultant for the Netflix animated series “Spirit Rangers,” which ran for 39 episodes across three seasons from 2022-24. On Thursday, “Spirit Rangers” was nominated for a Peabody Award in the category of “children’s/youth.” It was created by Karissa Valencia, a member of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians and the first California Native American showrunner. The show featured an all-Native writers’ room and Natives in every aspect of production. More than 100 Indigenous people worked on the series. “This nomination honors not just my work, but the entire team’s commitment to authentic Indigenous storytelling.”
Academic audiobook offers new way to experience Indigenous life writing
After winning both a Canada Prize and the Modern Language Association (MLA) Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition: Cree and Métis âcimisowina by Deanna Reder is reaching a new audience: audiobook listeners. While primarily presented in English, Reder incorporates the Cree language throughout the book to convey Indigenous knowledge, develop a literary theory of âcimisowina (life writing), and articulate the unique contributions Cree and Métis intellectuals have made to the autobiographical genre. “My hope is that Cree speakers who might not pick up my book will listen to this,” says Reder. For this reason, she says it was essential to find an audiobook narrator capable of capturing the nuances of the spoken language.
Trump administration makes major cuts to Native American boarding school research projects
The coalition lost more than $282,000 as a result of the cuts, halting its work to digitize more than 100,000 pages of boarding school records for its database. Deborah Parker, CEO of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, and a citizen of the Tulalip Tribes in Washington state, said Native Americans nationwide depend on the site to find loved ones who were taken or sent to these boarding schools. Searching that database last year, Roberta “Birdie” Sam, a member of Tlingit & Haida, was able to confirm that her grandmother had been at a boarding school in Alaska. She also discovered that around a dozen cousins, aunts and uncles had also been at a boarding school in Oregon, including one who died there. She said the knowledge has helped her with healing.
The devastating legacy of Native boarding schools: ‘no way people can apologize it away’
Mary Annette Pember will publish her first book, Medicine River, on Tuesday. A citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Wisconsin Ojibwe, Pember is a national correspondent for ICT News, formerly Indian Country Today. In Medicine River, she tells two stories: of the Indian boarding schools, which operated in the US between the 1860s and the 1960s, and of her mother, her time in such a school and the toll it took. Pember is determined to keep the Indian boarding schools in the public eye. “The goal is to record as much as possible the stories that people have,” she said. “To say: ‘Yes, this happened to you. Let’s document this.’” Describing research at Marquette University in Milwaukee, in the archives of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, she said: “The big thing is to make these records available to people. I can tell you how powerful it is just to see your relative’s name printed.
‘A matter of justice’: 2025 UN Forum on Indigenous Issues begins with visa challenges for attendees
Trump’s border policies are making an impact as this year’s largest gathering of global Indigenous leaders, activists, and policymakers begins in ‘NYC’. The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII, is the largest convening of Indigenous Peoples globally where advocates talk about issues ranging from climate disasters to the effects of critical mineral mining in Indigenous communities. “It’s not a perfect system but it’s the only one that we do have available to us when too often our own issues are not able to be addressed and resolved within our own countries,” she said. Because UN member states also send appointed representatives to the forum, the gathering provides an opportunity for Indigenous advocates to access high-level government officials who might not otherwise be available or responsive to their concerns.
