About

SquirrelRidge.org

This site and its content are produced by the Squirrel Ridge Observatory Centre, a Canadian federally-registered not-for-profit, headquartered in Barrie, Ontario.

Squirrel Ridge operates from Barrie, on the traditional territories of the Anishinaabeg and Wendat peoples. The data we steward relates to the unceded and treaty lands of Indigenous Nations across what is now called Canada and the northwestern United States. We name these relationships deliberately — a map of Indigenous place names cannot be disentangled from the lands and Peoples whose names they are.

Contact Us

If you are a representative of an Indigenous community, an academic researcher, or a supporter, you can reach us at support@squirrelridge.org. We respond promptly to received emails, and provide data management portal access upon verification of access rights.

Board of Directors

Squirrel Ridge's by-laws mandate a two-thirds Indigenous majority on our board. This ensures that we keep Indigenous interests, ways of thinking, and sovereignty at the core of everything we do. We are convening a Community Advisory Council with representation from the Indigenous Nations whose toponyms appear in our dataset — a distinct governance body whose mandate covers source-community consent and data handling, complementing the Board's direction of the organization.

Jasper Skinnider (Indigenous Director)

Jasper Skinnider is a Plains Cree Indigenous Canadian and a proud member of Sturgeon Lake First Nation in Saskatchewan. Aside from working on data analytics and creating innovative data models for Squirrel Ridge, Jasper brings Indigenous knowledge, cultural perspective, and community-centred leadership. In 2026, Jasper joined the Board of Directors as an Indigenous Director.

Shayla Matteis (Indigenous Director)

Shayla Matteis is Saulteaux and a member of Muskowekwan First Nation in Saskatchewan. She works on engagement and outreach initiatives for Squirrel Ridge, focusing on fostering and sustaining meaningful relationships between First Nation communities and Squirrel Ridge. Through her work, she supports ongoing dialogue and collaboration across diverse outreach efforts. In 2026, Shayla joined the Board of Directors as an Indigenous Director.

Jay Gerbrandt (Executive Director)

Jay Gerbrandt is a settler Canadian entrepreneur, researcher, and developer from Ontario. In 2023, he became passionate about documenting and mapping Indigenous toponyms while living on Vancouver Island. In 2025, he founded Squirrel Ridge as a responsible, respectful language preservation and education-focused organization, and began publishing the Indigenous place name maps on this site. In 2026, Jay recruited Jasper and Shayla to join Squirrel Ridge's board.

Approach

Squirrel Ridge is an aggregator of Indigenous place names in their original languages. We publish maps, games, and other tools which make these names accessible, lifting them off paper and preserving them for current and future generations.

1. We identify toponyms in existing community-developed, academic, governmental, and archival sources.
2. We record these sources, their languages, and the toponyms they contain in a secure, private data system.
3. We cross-reference these toponyms with geographic information to determine their locations for mapping.
4. We embed metadata, such as meanings, cultural significance, and individual elder/knowledge keeper provenance.
5. We publish educational tools, such as maps and games, with limited access to the data on this website.
6. We engage with communities to provide agency and authority over the data they and their members have kept alive.
7. We adjust the underlying dataset to reflect community wishes and insights, keeping sensitive data sovereign.

Why We Do This

Indigenous place names are durable carriers of language, history, and relationship to land. Each toponym encodes knowledge passed through generations — where sturgeon ran, where berries grew, where a story happened, how a place is shaped, who belongs. Colonial mapping systematically overwrote these names on paper and in law, and digital infrastructure now reproduces that erasure at scale through the gazetteers, navigation systems, and search indices that default to imposed toponymy. Recovering and resurfacing Indigenous place names is not nostalgia — it is language revitalization, education, and part of the material conditions on which self-determination is built. Our work is a small contribution toward digital tools that are built around Indigenous names rather than over them.

Commitments

To act responsibly as stewards of data which we recognize as belonging to the communities it is sourced from, we adhere to recognized principles governing Indigenous knowledge.

UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP)

Adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2007 and enacted into Canadian federal law via the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act in 2021, UNDRIP affirms Indigenous Peoples' collective and individual rights to self-determination, cultural heritage, and traditional knowledge. Article 31 is particularly relevant to our work: it recognizes Indigenous Peoples' right to maintain, control, protect, and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions — which includes place names. All of our practices below are designed to operate in accordance with UNDRIP, not merely alongside it.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Calls to Action

Released in 2015, the TRC's 94 Calls to Action identify concrete reconciliation commitments for governments, institutions, and Canadian society. Our work engages most directly with Calls 13–14 (preservation of Indigenous languages), 62–65 (education and language revitalization), 67–70 (museums and archives, including the repatriation of cultural heritage and knowledge), and 77 (national archives and records). We treat these as obligations, not aspirations.

OCAP® First Nations Data Principles

Ownership — We affirm that the data held by Squirrel Ridge, including toponyms, source records, language information, and other metadata, is the communal property of the communities from which it came.

Control — We affirm that First Nations communities have full discretion over the publication and use of their data, and provide management tools to enable this. By surfacing public sources, we provide a filtering layer which allows communities to restrict, delete, modify, or add to them.

Access — We affirm that the Nations whose toponyms appear in our dataset have the right to access that data — not just the public-facing surface, but the underlying records, metadata, and provenance. We provide portal access on request, and commit to doing so without cost or gatekeeping.

Possession — On request from a rights-holding community, we will provide a complete copy of their data in a format of their choosing, relocate it to community-controlled infrastructure, or remove it from our systems entirely.

CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance

Collective Benefit

C1: For inclusive development and innovation — By providing communities on-demand access to their data, we support and enable community-led value creation on their terms.

C2: For improved governance and citizen engagement — By aggregating information scattered across many community, academic, and archival sources, we enable citizens of Indigenous communities to learn at their own pace. Community members can consult their Nation's place-name record and verify, correct, or contextualize entries — contributing to both individual language learning and collective data stewardship.

C3: For equitable outcomes — We do not monetize, advertise against, sell, or otherwise commercialize this data. We provide it as a service for language preservation and knowledge enhancement.

Authority to Control

A1: Recognizing rights and interests — We serve as a layer between Indigenous communities and existing public sourcebases, and do not claim ownership of the data we collect. These data have already been collected and published, and we enable community-level discretion over what is shared.

A2: Data for governance — We centre toponyms in modern orthographies and surface community-provided meanings, resisting the colonial pattern of overwriting Indigenous names with imposed ones. In doing so, we equip communities with data that reflects their own worldviews rather than an external gaze.

A3: Governance of data — We affirm Indigenous Peoples' right to develop cultural governance protocols for their data, as recognized in UNDRIP. Our platform is being built to support community-defined sharing rules, designated approved users, and ongoing community leadership in decisions about how their data appears and is used.

Responsibility

R1: For positive relationships — We source only from publicly published materials: academic, governmental, community-produced, and archival. We review sources for their positionality and flag data we know to have been collected without community consent. We commit to acting on community requests for removal, restriction, or correction promptly and without precondition.

R2: For expanding capability and capacity — We strive to provide easy-to-use data management and export tools for community partners, and develop custom solutions where requested to enhance Indigenous uses of Indigenous data.

R3: For Indigenous languages and worldviews — As a multilingual Indigenous data provider, we surface community knowledge captured in published sources, in the languages it was recorded in, using modern orthographies chosen by those communities where available. Our meanings map provides granular insights into the worldviews of specific communities.

Ethics

E1: For minimizing harm and maximizing benefit — We avoid outdated language and perspectives in our dataset, and centre our work on Indigenous language learners. We also aim to make the depth of Indigenous knowledge visible and respected by non-Indigenous audiences.

E2: For justice — By providing language tools that surface the complexity of knowledge across communities and jurisdictions, we transcend artificial barriers raised by colonial processes and substitute an equity-centred perspective.

E3: For future use — Restricting access to the data, and designing our tools with awareness of bad-actor risks, helps us build a foundation for future knowledge without exposing culturally sensitive information to outsiders. Each record in our database is tied to its source, provenance, and — where known — the conditions under which the original data was collected.

FAIR Guiding Principles for Scientific Data Management and Stewardship

Findable — Each record is assigned a globally unique identifier and associated with all available metadata. Our public interfaces (map, lookup, per-language views) are searchable; the full underlying database is not published openly, to respect data-sovereignty concerns.

Accessible — Through the interfaces on this website, we strike a balance between total openness and responsible sharing. For communities, and helpers they approve, we provide data management tools to enable sovereign control over the contents of our dataset.

Interoperable — We rely on standardized open referencing systems, such as Glottolog codes, ISO 639-3 language identifiers, and geographic coordinates. Our data is not shareable by default, limiting interoperability for sovereignty's sake.

Reusable — We embed diverse metadata and maintain them consistently across our toponym, source, language, and orthography tables. Our schema enables ease of reuse and extensibility for communities and their approved users.