Honouring the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation for a Just and Inclusive Future
RWI Synthetics observes September 30 as Canada’s National Day of Truth and Reconciliation. More than just a federal holiday established as a result of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Call to Action #80, it is a national day of mourning, remembrance, and most importantly, action. The day is also now recognized in the United States as the National Day of Remembrance for U.S. Indian Boarding Schools.
In Canada alone, over 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children were forcibly placed in residential schools, many of whom would not survive this experience. There are no words we can use to describe the terrible trauma experienced by the children in these colonial institutions of genocide, which deserve to be read in their own words and recollections.
Collectively, we all have a responsibility to continue to learn the truth about what happened, work to understand the harms that remain, and work towards a more just future.
For RWI Synthetics, a Certified Indigenous Company, we’ve enshrined essential principles into all aspects of our work and include the voices and experiences of all peoples who have been historically marginalized. We, in conjunction with the investment group and the RWI partner Raven Indigenous Capital, aim to encourage active allyship every day of the year. We are committed to ongoing, active learning and finding meaningful ways to amplify truth.
Principals & OCAP®
RWI has a new set of guiding principles that reflect our prioritization of inclusion, equity, and reconciliation. These will be included in all future statements of work.
These principles are the following:
Representative & Never-Identified Populations: ensuring that privacy and confidentiality are maintained to the fullest extent by synthesizing never-identified populations using multiple sources of publicly available data and information.
Intersectionality: ensuring that the data collected, synthesized, and generated through our work considers the experiences of intersectional identities and people and communities that are often excluded in traditional data sources.
Intergenerational Impact: knowing that our decisions today can and do have impacts for many generations to come, recognizing the systemic discrimination that has informed the societal norms of the present day, and offering futures that begin to address these barriers for future relatives.
In Balance: striving to minimize the environmental impact of our computing activities, while seeking to restore a sustainable balance between humans and the planet.
Interconnectedness: focusing on systems of systems, including the human, technological and natural systems that are interconnected, and understanding the place of humans in this broader system of seeing, understanding, and acting.
Fostering Community Cohesion: fostering community and belonging around truly impactful and beneficial, sustainable ideas for all, while promoting reconciliation and healing.
Abundance: operating from a place of confidence and trust that we are better together; our natural and social systems can provide enough for everyone, and enough space for everyone, when the stewardship of these systems prioritizes mutual respect and reciprocity.
Ways of Knowing & Passing on Knowledge: endeavouring to present data-backed insights in beautiful and comprehensible ways to inspire engagement and understanding among diverse clients and stakeholders.
Data Sovereignty: operating in ways that honour self-determination, self-governance, and collective rights to data sovereignty for First Nations and all peoples by adhering to the principles of OCAP®.
Data Rematriation: finding meaningful ways to return data sources and collection processes to the control and possession of Indigenous Peoples to support their self-determination and sovereignty.
Data Stewardship: practicing care in data access and control until it can appropriately be rematriated to its rightful owner; helping others create their own data stewardship processes that respect the principles of OCAP®.
Regarding the final three principles, RWI has also ensured that staff have received training in the First Nations Principles of OCAP®: ownership, control, access, and possession of data, as well as in gender-based analysis plus. Moreover, the company is committed to furthering the implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and operating in a manner that promotes free, prior, and informed consent.
The Values Behind our Technology
While this is a landmark occasion for these principles to be formalized, RWI Synthetics and the motivation behind both our technology and business practices have aligned with these values since our inception.
Reducing the computational requirements of our modelling platforms has always been a priority. Not only does it make our proprietary technology more efficient in what we can accomplish, but it also ensures that our energy and cooling requirements remain more ethical in contrast to comparable generative AI. Whereas a single query to an AI Chatbot might consume the equivalent of three full bottles of water, our Synthetic Earth requires less than a drop. RWI is committed to sandboxing the world digitally without harming it in real space.
“We visualize the Earth and its people — not because it is impressive — but because it's essential to show and understand the interactions of communities and regions, and the ripple effects at a global scale,” says RWI Indigenous Co-Founder and CTO Dean Bittner. “We have a profound promise to keep for all those yet to come to preserve and revitalize the web of life of our planet, and RWI helps converge human energy, through its technology and approach, to help keep this promise.”
Moreover, the nature of our Synthetic Populations ensures that populations historically disadvantaged by traditional data or survey methods are made visible.
Through converging multiple data sets and sources, we build our Synthetic Populations that embody the people we are creating virtually, but never identify them. We ensure accurate representation without ever compromising on privacy, intersectionality, or data sovereignty.
Additional Learning
As an Indigenous business, these values permeate all we do.
Beyond just recognizing and acting on these values on days of observance, we strive to ensure that we’re consistently working towards building better futures for all peoples. It is vital that recognizing, honouring, and supporting Indigenous Peoples as Rights Holders include principled decisions, actions, and measures.
For additional learning, we recommend visiting the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation and the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition to understand more about the history and ongoing healing from Residential and Boarding Schools.