February 25, 2026
WHILE MILLIONS AROUND THE WORLD HAVE USED AND LEARNED FROM A SEARCHABLE MAP of Indigenous territories, languages, and treaties created in BC in 2015, exciting redesign and new uses of technology are great reasons to return to Native Land Digital again and again.
Since its 2018 federal non-profit incorporation, Native Land Digital (NLD) has been in a continuous state of transformation through an expanding web of partnerships and deepening reliance on “the ethics, methodologies, and teachings of Indigenous ancestral mapping.”
Through it all, “our purpose remains clear,” write the NLD Research whanau (“family/community”)—“ to unflatten the map by layering Indigenous knowledge systems.”
More than a decade of development, started in 2015 by founder and “resident tech guy” Victor Temprano, is documented on the blog.
Ever-more-ambitious projects include rollouts in 2025 of a conversational AI territory acknowledgments helper, a relationship-focused constellation map, an international Indigenous nations placenames map, and a reciprocity map of “actions happening in Indigenous nations around the world”. The classic territories map remains available.
The downloadable Digital Teacher’s Guide shows educators how to use Native-Land.ca “as a starting point for learning about Indigenous territories, languages, treaties, and, most importantly, the relationships Indigenous peoples have with Land & Waters.”
Since 2025, NLD’s open-access digital API—which permits users to make or add to their own maps using constantly-changing NLD digital data—has been governed by a binding Indigenous Data Sovereignty Treaty to uphold OCAP® (Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession) principles from the First Nations Information Governance Centre.
Temprano explained that the initial request to provide an API came from the Canadian Encyclopedia. Since then, many researchers, students, and developers have made beautiful and interesting use of the NLD API dataset in diverse contexts. Here are just a few: National Geographic; Digital Democracy; the New York State Geographic Information Gateway; the Local Contexts IP project; Upstream Tech; Lindsay Cuff’s Writing Place: A Scholarly Writing Textbook; UBC Library Research Commons “Introduction to APIs” workshop; and a land acknowledgement bot available by texting or online through Code for Anchorage.
Image source: Native Land Digital
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We acknowledge that the land on which we work is the unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples, including the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.