Mapping & GIS

Maps can be a powerful visual representation of a Nation’s land use, rights and interests, giving added leverage in consultations and negotiations with governments and industry or in regulatory and environmental assessment processes.

Connect with Us

What We Do

Mapping is a critical foundation of our work with Nations, especially in our Indigenous knowledge research, planning, and ecology studies. We work closely with community members to map out the locations they and their families rely on for teaching, hunting, trapping, fishing and other important activities. Using state-of-the-art software, we analyze this information and use multi-media approaches to clearly and visually display a Nation’s rights and interests on the land, and how these could be affected by industrial development or land management policies.

Experience

Firelight’s mapping and GIS team includes professional cartographers and GIS developers with decades of experience working with Indigenous Nations to map their knowledge and land use in culturally appropriate ways. This includes operating drones and processing imagery and lidar data, as well as modelling and evaluating Cumulative Effects. Further, we have developed strategies, frameworks, protocols, and infrastructures around the governance and management of data. We also have extensive experience providing training and workshops to Nations related to desktop, web, and remote mapping.

Training

We provide one-on-one and small group mapping training and on-going support to enhance Nation's research and data collection, both in interview settings and out on the ground using GPS. We also co-host large-scale Indigenous Mapping Workshops, during which we deliver technical training on mapping tools (Google, QGIS, ESRI) so participants can collect, manage, share, and publish their own map data.

Contact

Julia Conzon - Mapping & GIS Program Manager

MSc Data Science

Remote - Kelowna, BC

Email: julia.conzon@firelight.ca Phone: (778) 772-9288

"When we sit down with community members, the first thing we say is that we work for them – nobody else… This is especially important when people are sharing information about the land; they must have the opportunity to control what is said or not said."

Steve DeRoy

Mapping and GIS Team Lead

Example Projects

Apple Maps

Firelight has worked with Apple to represent Indigenous lands and place names into their Map platform. As seen in the image below, across Canada First Nations, Inuit and Métis treaties, land claims, and more are represented on Apple Maps. Firelight is now working with Apple to incorporate the communities’ place names into Siri.

Nunatsiavut Government - Indigenous Data Governance Strategy and Framework

Firelight has worked closed with the Nunatsiavut Government to develop an organizational strategy and framework on the governance of their data. This included meeting with staff across all departments from the self-governing Indigenous government to understand their needs and issues, then providing recommendations and protocols on how the data lifecycles and ecosystems of Nunatsiavut Government can be generated, collected, organized, stored, retained, archived, accessed, shared, and analyzed between their local and cloud servers to respect data sovereignty.

First Nations Technology Council - GIS Course

Over the past five years, Firelight has been leading a GIS course for the First Nations Technology Council's Foundations program, which is a 12-week exploratory program offered online. During the GIS portion of the program, Firelight introduces students to the foundational knowledge necessary to map their traditional territories and pursue a career in GIS/GPS mapping.

"[Our instructor] showed tremendous patience with us as a class and should be honoured for that... We as... students are greatly indebted and grateful for all he did to get us through this course."
- Student, First Nations Technology Council's Foundations Program

Foundations Program