Knowledge Keeper

In 2016, over 100,000 resource and development consultations occurred between the government, industry, and Indigenous communities. Since then, the number of consultations has only grown as the court mandated Duty to Consult Indigenous communities has become more entrenched in Canadian law and practice.

The primary beneficiaries of these consultations are law firms specializing in this area, with mostly non-Indigenous firms potentially earning over a billion dollars annually. Moreover, these consultations strain the resources of Canada's 600+ First Nations governments, with each First Nation in BC and Alberta handling 200 or more significant consultation requests per year.

The volume of these consultations often prevents due consideration, putting culturally or environmentally sensitive areas at risk due to unchecked development. This risk and subsequent destruction lead to conflict.

In ideal circumstances, win-win agreements can be forged between First Nations and industries, unlocking significant value for communities through payments, contracts, job creation, and even equity stakes. However, establishing these fruitful partnerships becomes increasingly difficult in a climate of distrust and miscommunication .

In 2020, a single conflict with industry boiled over in Canada, leading to nationwide protests and blockades that shut down the rail system and cut 0.3% off of Canada’s GDP. This isn’t an isolated incident. Ongoing resource conflicts exist in both Canada and the United States, costing billions of dollars in cost overruns. 

Knowledge Keeper offers a low-cost solution to prevent these issues early in the planning stage. While detailed consultation reports will remain a part of project planning in Canada, their high cost (tens of thousands of dollars) currently results in their completion too late in the project timeline. By reducing the cost and time to produce an Indigenous Impact Assessment, Knowledge Keeper enables these assessments to occur earlier in the process, identifying critical areas for Indigenous communities before significant costs are incurred.

Large companies have internal consultation teams, but smaller companies often rely on lawyers, costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. For these smaller firms, unexpected Indigenous resistance can be disastrous. Knowledge Keeper targets this market—comprising over 1,200 mining companies, hundreds of forestry firms, and thousands of property development firms—which represents the majority of the 100,000+ annual consultations.

With 50% of these consultations in Western Canada and an estimated cost of $30,000 per report using current methods, the existing market is estimated at $1.12 billion. By offering our service at 1/10th of the current baseline, we can access a market of over $100 million.

Our unique partnership model with First Nations for information sharing could grant us privileged market access. Within five years, we envision becoming a preferred referral partner for dozens of First Nations across Western Canada. This partnership could ultimately create a network effect between First Nations communities and businesses, propelling Knowledge Keeper into a market-leading position, surpassing offerings by current operators.

Knowledge Keeper is a web application, available on a subscription basis to businesses that are looking to invest in industrial or resource projects. 

Knowledge Keeper uses the MonkeyLearn NLP tool to process data from Indigenous oral and written histories, as well as to parse data from previous consultation reports. This data is then combined into a single database and locations are recorded and plotted onto a map using Mapbox API. This comprises the back end of the application. On the front end, users will have the ability to select a location on a map, and produce an Indigenous Impact Assessment for that specific location.

Using the support of generative AI APIs, Knowledge Keeper will produce an easy-to-read summary of oral histories and previous consultations for the region; it will indicate overlapping claims, and use a colour-coded heat map to indicate the importance - to Indigenous people - of the location in question. 

Reports of this kind already exist, but cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce. With help from machine learning, the cost of this task is reduced more than 20-fold, and the timeline for producing such a report goes from weeks or months to days. The process isn’t reactive, it’s proactive - with the data uploaded, processed, and ready when it’s needed.

Knowledge Keeper stands apart from existing providers, not just in cost, but in our connection and partnership with First Nations communities. We source our information from Reserve archives and dedicate 10% of net income for communities whose data is used to produce a specific report. 

When a client produces a report, they will see if the area they are looking to build in is viable, or if it is hotly contested and identified by First Nations as an area of primary concern. Companies will be able to understand the types of concerns that are in the area, and learn how to adapt their project at the planning and decision making stage, rather than in the midst of construction when sunk costs lead to bad outcomes for all.

Our goal is to build close partnerships with First Nations, by respecting their ownership of their data, and by using this tool to extend their land use plans outside of the reserve boundaries and out to their entire traditional territories. With close partnerships, we will work to become a preferred referral partner for Nations, so that businesses looking to build in their territory, will go to Knowledge Keeper first, before taking any other steps in their planning process.

Knowledge Keeper serves both resource development businesses, and Indigenous communities in the areas in which these development firms operate. 

Essentially what Knowledge Keeper does is create what are in effect ‘land use plans’, and takes them beyond the limits of reserve land, and out into the entire traditional territory. In doing so, those parcels of land with critically important cultural or economic significance to First Nations communities stand a greater chance of being preserved for future generations.

Currently, where projects go ahead without a tool like Knowledge Keeper, Indigenous communities are forced to react with expensive and time consuming consultation reports, often produced at their own expense. The sheer volume of consultation reports required of a First Nation means that few can receive serious consideration. For band councils the the time required for consultation reports competes directly for foundational issues, like health, housing, and getting our land back 

With Knowledge Keeper, businesses will make less contentious (and less costly) choices, leading to simpler consultation processes, and therefore lessening the demand on the administrative resources of First Nations government. 

Indigenous government will save money and time, the community will be saved from conflict, and important sites will be preserved for future generations. The whole Indigenous community  ultimately benefits from a tool such as this. 

Currently this type of Impact Assessment is done on an ad hoc basis by non-indigenous consulting firms which charge huge fees and have no inherent incentive to innovate and lower costs. It is very likely that potential new entrants to this market lack the insider knowledge from the Indigenous government perspective to understand the depth of resources available, or how they can be employed to solve this problem. This type of sacred and proprietary knowledge is held by very few people - exclusively Indigenous people - members of community, who have experience within Indigenous lands administration.

When there is a conflict over land use on Indigenous lands, we see communities lose out on current and future development partnerships, we see culturally important sites destroyed, and worst of all, we see our best and most community connected Indigenous people criminalized by the justice system for participating in resistance activities. 

Lastly, when a project starts off on the right track, the chances of a benefits agreement between First Nations and business is far greater - leading to more money, more jobs, and more opportunity in future for Indigenous people.

Over the next year, Knowledge Keeper is being built using resources from the Central Coast Salish cultural area. This encompasses more than three dozen First Nations - including my own, the Kwantlen First Nation - and it is a densely populated region, rich in economic development, and in potential Indigenous conflict. First Nations communities in this region are closely interconnected, progressive, and business oriented. A disproportionate number of Nations in this region are subject to the First Nations Land Management Act, a piece of federal legislation that returns independent control over land to First Nations. A side effect of this legislation is that nations are required to have a well developed lands administration bureaucracy, the exact type of body that Knowledge Keeper is best suited to assist. 

Lands administration is done by accessible public bodies called Lands Administration Committees, which provide us with a large number of people in each nation that we can connect with for the purposes of understanding their needs, their resources, and how our solution fits with them. We intend to contact them through regular paid interviews as we develop the product. 

From our advisory interviews, we hope to learn if our reports are correctly identifying which areas are of critical importance to nations in their territories. This feedback will allow us to make specific changes to reports, as well as to fine tune our sentiment analysis tool in our reports, so that we more accurately rank areas of importance based on oral history information.

Our partnerships with First Nations will also be formalized with contracts that go beyond revenue sharing, but also give First Nations sovereign control over their data, so that they can determine the amount of information from their oral history databases that is shared in reports. 

At the start of each contract, we will do interviews with newly onboarded nations to establish a baseline identifying how many consultation requests they receive, how much time is spent in consultations, how much money is spent on consultations, their concern about the areas identified in the requests, how many reports identify problems, how many have the opportunity to grow into mutual benefits agreements. 

We will then track these numbers on an annual basis to measure the success of Knowledge Keeper in reducing conflict for partner communities. It is our expectation that nation’s will see an immediate improvement on each measure, and this will compound each year Knowledge Keeper is being used.

Lastly, we reserve 10% of net income to pay First Nations for access to their data. With 1% earmarked to compensate them for use of open source data, and 9% for access to oral history data.

Our team lead is Robert Jago, a citizen of the Kwantlen First Nation. He has worked extensively with his nation, including as a former member of the Nation’s Lands Advisory Committee, a representative of the Nation to orient municipal governments within the nation’s traditional territories, and he has worked on producing consultation materials for his and other nations. Outside of his nation, Robert is a prominent Indigenous communicator and organizer in the Coast Salish region and across Canada. 

The Knowledge Keeper project has been selected and is supported by Indigenext - an Indigenous-focused incubator based in Vancouver, BC. Indigenext blends the established  processes of business acceleration with the Indigenous entrepreneurial skill-set, a unique relationship of land and community.

Knowledge Keeper is one of the only Indigenous organization in this sphere. The current model for creating consultations is essentially anthropological, and employs methods that haven’t changed since the 1800s. Outsiders come in, set the agenda, and gather information to take back and analyze. It is entirely an extractive process.

Knowledge Keeper’s worldview comes from the Coast Salish world, and the belief that stories are wealth, and wealth of that kind has owners. With that belief in mind - Knowledge Keeper partners with communities, leaves it to them to determine the scope of materials to proactively put forward, and as reports are produced, revenue from reports is shared with First Nations government.

As contracted partners, Knowledge Keeper is responsive to the wishes of First Nations government, and sets their experience with industrial consultations as our most important KPIs. 

Knowledge Keeper also stays in close contact with communities on a more regular basis, via our panels of informed community members, who give insight as to the content and orientation of the reports that we produce. 

Knowledge Keeper comes from Indigenous communities, and is fully apart of these communities, their needs, agendas, and sensitivities.

We are on the third iteration of this project and have undergone several rounds of testing and builds. We have been exploring the technology and the unique resource - Indigenous oral histories - to test the right application for it.

We work on an unrelated Indigenous consultation currently, and have tested several aspects of our technology with this project, with the goal of overcoming faults in the consultations that have been done so far. This consultation involves 8 First Nations.

Based on the experience we have had with these nations, we have approached one, Kwantlen First Nation, with our proposal for Knowledge Keeper, and presented it as a tool to prevent the consultation issues we are currently seeing. Kwantlen has signed on in principle and has agreed to grant access to its oral history database. 

With that agreement, and with the support of Indigenext, we are working on building the prototype to begin testing with Kwantlen's Council. 

Knowledge Keeper has a Global Scale. We are rooted in Canada, where the Duty to Consult is enshrined in law. However, we have a place in each market where land-based stakeholder interests must be respected in order to ensure the smooth process of resource development. 

Every protest on this Earth involves people telling industry to not build somewhere. Knowledge Keeper answers the follow up question from industry: “so where should we build?”

From Solve, we hope to benefit from advice that will help us test our assumptions about how this product will work with Industry, and how it can benefit Indigenous Nations in this and other ways. We are looking for insight on the application of AI and machine learning to the task of working with Indigenous oral histories and to learn how other Solvers are using AI for similar tasks.

We want to connect with Solvers from around the world to understand better how Knowledge Keeper can function in their markets, and also to learn how their countries addressed similar problems. 

We also believe that MIT exposure through Solve could aid us in opening doors with industry partners, and could help demonstrate value to our Indigenous partners.

Robert Jago is a citizen of the Kwantlen First Nation, former member of the Nation’s Lands Advisory Committee, he has worked on industrial consultation projects involving the nation, and is the official Spokesperson for the reformist Band Council block. Through work with his nation, he is also connected throughout other Salish nations due to his work in governance reform.

We are doing several unique things with Knowledge Keeper. 

First is to use existing consultation reports as a data source for future consultation reports. Current providers do not do this, but instead create bespoke reports for each situation. There are more than 100,000 such reports available and they represent billions of dollars of time and labour in their production. These are an invaluable and yet wasted resource. 

Next we are drawing data directly from First Nations communities, and in partnership with them. This data includes oral histories. 

Until recently it was not practical to process oral histories due to their structure. Many Indigenous communities have vast stores of recorded oral histories - sometimes going back more than a century. However histories are kept under lock and key as they contain personal information and confidential information along with land-based histories. Oral histories are also broken apart between different speakers, with each holding a small piece of the larger story. With new AI and machine learning tools we can remove personal information, remove confidential information, and combine pieces of a narrative across many different speakers - and we can do this automatically and at a very low cost in terms of processing time. 

Machine learning tools will also identify locations, and allow us to geotag them to create a land-based data set of Indigenous concerns, histories, and interests. By identifying a range of geotags via a web interface, Knowledge Keeper will be able to populate a report template on Indigenous concerns for that specific area, including a map of key sites that have been identified by each Nation in their previous consultation reports.

Few people are aware that these stores of oral histories exist, and fewer still understand how to process them and how to combine them with GIS information, and past consultations. Many Indigenous communities themselves face significant obstacles to accessing oral history information. 

Most importantly, we are flipping the script on Indigenous consultations. Until now, outside industry has been taking the lead, deciding where to build, and then meeting with First Nations to figure out how to mitigate the inevitable damage. With Knowledge Keeper, our communities are setting the terms for development. With our data, we’re saying where you can build before there’s a shovel in the ground. This is no longer about mitigating damage – we are using technology to extend our sovereignty and decision making out over our traditional territories. And this will be successful because it prevents conflict, saves money, and gets things built faster. 

With Knowledge Keeper, we go from being reactive, and we go from an outsider view, to a fulsome Indigenous-sourced impact assessment right from day one.

During our 2-year development phase Knowledge Keeper’s impact will centre around awareness of each First Nation’s position relative to other First Nations. We intend to develop a comprehensive map of conflict scores that will allow us to inform partner Nations of where they stand relative to their neighbours. This information will allow First Nations to understand how they appear to industry partners and to be able to take informed decisions on how to address any problems they discover with their standing. 

Following the development phase a fully implemented Knowledge Keeper will lead to:

1. Reduction in Conflict

Each Knowledge Keeper report will include information about past conflicts in a region. These include media stories, information shared from First Nations, and lawsuit information. These form one layer of the risk-based heat map that we have for each mapped location in our service area. This map is included in each Knowledge Keeper Report.

The colour on the heat map is based on a conflict score, determined by the level of conflict that is possible at that site. The conflict risk score will never change for the end user. 

However internally an age-weighting can be applied to the conflict score, that will allow for it to be lowered if the time between conflicts is increased. If the number of conflicts decreases over time, the conflict risk score for that region will decline. 

We expect to see the Conflict Risk score decline by at least 25% in each region we serve. Conflict is destructive to First Nations communities. It causes the justice system to criminalize our youth, it costs money, and reduces business opportunity - as many are scared away from working with that community due to perceived risk.

2. Reduction in Consultation Workload for Nations

Our hypothesis is that the high cost of consultations leads to a delay in conducting them, and prevents many smaller firms from conducting them at all. The result is that when consultations eventually come to First Nations, they are for projects which are far along in the development process, and where mitigation becomes their primary concern. This puts a huge burden on nations if the area in question is one of supreme importance to them. Consultations of this kind draw on all of a Nation’s resources, including financial resources to hire outside experts. 

Our benchmark interviews with Nations quantify all of these factors. Within 5 years we expect to see the time spent on consultations, and the money spent on consultations decline by 25% in each partner Nation. 

3. Increase in Mutual Benefits Agreements

Mutual Benefit Agreements between industry and First Nations can include job and contract opportunities, cash payments, and even equity. We intend to conduct surveys with end users of Knowledge Keeper Reports to determine if they entered into Mutual Benefits Agreements with First Nations, and to determine the scope of these agreements. Over a 5 year period, we expect to see the number of Mutual Benefit Agreements increase by 10% among companies using Knowledge Keeper.

The current core technologies we are intent on powering Knowledge Keeper's MVP are: 

1. LangChain: This is a framework that allows for the processing of large customized datasets. We use LangChain to chunk text for processing by the Open AI LLM and export relevant data to our DB.  On the back end of the process, we use LangChain to query the structured DB in order to populate our Knowledge Keeper Report templates and dashboard.

2. MonkeyLearn NLP Tool: This tool is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) platform, which is used to interpret and analyze the textual data from Indigenous oral and written histories, as well as previous consultation reports. The tool is capable of understanding, interpreting, and extracting useful information from large amounts of text data, effectively turning unstructured data into structured data that can be used for analysis. 

3. Mapbox API: This is an API (which competes with Google’s mapping API) that is used to visualize the geographic data in the system. It plots the locations recorded from the database onto a map, giving users a spatial understanding of the data.

4. Generative AI APIs: The system leverages generative AI APIs to produce easy-to-read summaries of oral histories and previous consultations for a specific region. We interact with Generative AI through the LangChain framework. These APIs are capable of creating original, human-like text from the structured data, giving users a clear and concise summary of the information.

5. We have a secondary module of fine-tuned data that addresses the cultural bias in AI and allows us to relay summarized oral histories and Indigenous narratives in an authentic voice. We called this module “Elder”, and it is created using the manner of speech from modern-day Indigenous elders from our partner nations. 

The tech stack outside of that is built around Python, and will allow for the quick processing of PDF files, and scanned typed files, for their entry into our database. It will also allow for the production of basic consultation reports from the materials stored in our database.

Outside of the technology there is a large human element before and after each report is produced. Before, there are the relationships that allow us to access transcribed and recorded oral histories going back to the 19th century. After, there are the review panels that ensure our data has been analyzed and interpreted correctly and then there is a reviewer and writer who is experienced in producing consultation reports, who ensures that the finished product meets industry standards before being sent to the end user.

Knowledge Keeper is an Indigenous-led initiative and we intend to partner with Indigenous communities - this includes in hiring. We intend to ensure the posting for positions is shared through Indigenous channels as well as through mainstream channels. We also propose applying for BC provincial approval to designate certain positions as Indigenous only.

Outside of the Indigenous spectrum, wherever we are located, Knowledge Keeper will have HR policies that represent existing best practices in British Columbia which include accommodations for disability, for religious needs, and for family responsibilities.  We believe that BC is a high water mark for DEI and inclusion across all workplaces in North America.  

Our concept of diversity goes beyond the office and into the AI tools that we use. Racial bias in technology is a well known phenomenon. From hand dryers to facial recognition, techno-racism is a real and present problem.

Knowledge Keeper employs generative AI, and to use generative AI safely, it’s necessary to understand the role that techno-racism plays. In our early testing we found that the end product produced by GPT3 reflected a European worldview and manner of speaking. Even when it represented itself as Indigenous, the presentation was an outsider’s view of Indigenous people.

We intend to mediate all of our presentations of oral histories through a fine-tuned application of Generative AI we call our “Elder” module. Elder is a dynamic model that is based on input from each nation’s elders, and it allows for reproduced and summarized oral histories to be presented in their authentic voice. 

Ultimately, accountability for DEI rests with the CEO, who will be responsible for an annual review of DEI performance, and will use this to ensure that any problem areas are quickly identified and addressed.

Knowledge Keeper operates on a subscription basis. Our clients are mining, forestry, and property developers who are pursuing projects that are subject to the Duty to Consult Indigenous Peoples. This Duty technically rests with the Crown, however, in order to ensure that projects can be launched with no disruption, developers themselves often engage in their own consultations before engaging with the Crown on them.

At the lower end of the market, developers often do not have the resources to conduct robust consultations early on in their projects, if at all. This has disastrous consequences for First Nations and developers.

To solve this problem, it is important to position Knowledge Keeper impact assessment reports significantly below the cost of existing solutions - solutions which begin at $30,000 per report. Doing this opens reports up to smaller developers, and earlier on in project planning. A sufficiently low price allows them to produce multiple reports to test different locations for their projects.

However, Indigenous oral histories and the partnerships that produce them are extremely valuable and essentially an exclusive item, and pricing should reflect that. 

To respect these conflicting intentions, the end product will have different tiers of pricing, with different levels of report produced. 

At the basic subscription level, users will have access to a fixed number of basic reports, and will have the option to upgrade individual reports to premium versions which are more comprehensive, analyze more factors, and set the stage for the next steps of consultations directly with nations. 

All services are provided via the web application, which creates a space for the user to request reports for a specific location. Reports take several days to produce, and while they are machine generated, each report has a human reviewer and editor to guarantee quality. 

During the seed phase of our development, we will evaluate pricing, and we will explore other pricing models to find the right balance.

The organization is a for profit corporate entity which creates community benefit through a revenue sharing agreement with studied/impacted communities. We are a triple bottom line company. While we are open to the idea of selling equity based investing we are deeply aware of the colonial impact inherent in venture (and many ESG) exit strategies, and will insist on the community benefit as a component of any liquidity preference.

Seed/Prototype Development Phase: During this phase which will last 18 months-2 years, with approximately 300k required. The company expects to raise money through Government programs which fund technology and indigenous businesses, such as Innovate BC, AFI (Aboriginal Financial Institutions), SR&ED, and business focused NGO’s such as the MIT Solve program. We are also open to convertible note and community investment. We also plan to have 1-3 paid customers in Salish territory during this phase and to clearly scope our next phase.

Scale Phase: In this phase which we expect will require one or more institutional investors we expect to reach profitability and scale to 3 more regions, including one region in the US (ie Navajo, Six Nations, Northern Cree). In this phase we anticipate hiring a sales team (1 manager in each region) from existing non-indigenous owned consulting firms who we expect to compete/partner with. A separate team from each community will be responsible for the growth and community base.

Our team lead, Robert Jago, is a serial entrepreneur, who has founded and exited 2 companies in education regulatory compliance. In that role, he initiated and led the regulation of a sub-sector of education, which both introduced protections for students in WIL programs, and secured a market-leading position for his company, allowing it to capture a 10% market share. 

It is our intention to guide Knowledge Keeper in the same direction, to closely partner with First Nations so that we can take on a gatekeeping role as a preferred provider for consultation reports. Ultimately we would like to see partner First Nations requiring companies in their territories to first obtain a Knowledge Keeper report before proceeding with their development proposals. 

At the scale of consultations being done, a 1% market share in our target market would see us reach break even with fewer than 10 partner First Nations – provided they aren’t immediate neighbours. 

As a first step towards building these close partnerships, we have secured interest from the Kwantlen First Nation and we are in discussions with 2 other First Nations in the Coast Salish region. These nations are collectively responsible for hundreds of industry consultations each year. We were able to build these relationships at the ideation stage of our development. 

We are now at the beginning of our seed phase. 

We have been selected and secured a commitment from Indigenext, an Indigenous Business Incubator which has successfully supported some of the fastest growing indigenous organizations in Western Canada having launched successful projects such as Nawalakw.com, Deyen.ca and Native-Land.ca with a 90% success rate on adopted projects. Nawalakw, a Language and Cultural Revitalization project, experienced growth from 1 to 30 employees in 3 years, and is now the largest Indigenous controlled NGO in the region as well as the largest non-governmental seasonal employer of Indigenous youth in the province/state. Nawalakw raised $20 million through a tiered funding model supported by Indigenext. Deyen a learning platform reframing Canadian History though an Indigenous Women’s lens was sold out within 90 minutes of its Launch and Native Land has reimagined how we view and re-map the planet online through a decolonized lens, and has scaled globally.