Two Ways to Look at Deep Tech: Indigenous and Western Views

Canada investing more in advanced technologies like AI, energy storage, and materials science. These deep tech innovations take years to develop and cost a great deal to scale.

So who decides what to build and why?

One way of thinking about comes from the wordlview of Western venture capital (VC), which focuses on profit, speed, and market size. Another perspective comes from Indigenous communities, who focus on community benefits, long term care for the land, and passing knowledge to future generations.

Below, we compare the Indigenus and Western views to explore how they do and don’t agree.

1. Shared Goals, Different Values

Both Indigenous leaders and Western investors want to support strong technologies. They often agree on what needs to be built, like clean energy systems, climate tools, or health tech, but they measure success differently.

As shared in What Makes Innovation Indigenous?, Indigenous innovation is about more than profit. It must support culture, language, relationships with land, and future generations. These values shape how technology is used and shared.

2. Different Ways of Governing Projects

Western investors often use business rules that focus on ownership, control, and return on investment. Indigenous communities use governance based on relationships, consent, and collective care. This matters when it comes to informed decision making.

In Data is Ceremony, we explain how data is more than information; it is sacred. Indigenous communities must have control over how it’s collected, stored, and shared. That’s very different from most Western VC investment models.

3. What Happens at the End of a Project?

Deep tech often comes with waste or other impacts, especially in battery energy storage, mining, and biotech. Most Canadian projects don’t have end-of-life plans, while Indigenous communities take a different approach.

In Circular Infrastructure, we show how Indigenous thinking includes the full life cycle of a project from beginning to end. That means planning for clean-up, reuse, and long-term safety before the project even starts.

4. Indigenous Leadership in Clean Energy

Some people talk about Indigenous communities as “stakeholders” in clean energy projects. But the truth is that many are already leading.

In The Next Energy Economy, we highlight projects like Oneida in Ontario, where Indigenous Nations are both beneficial owners and key decision makers in what’s built and how it is managed.

Conclusion: A Better Way to Build Tech

Canada wants to lead in deep tech, but building advanced technology also means building trust.

Western VC can help grow companies. Indigenous leadership will help build systems that last and that respect the land and future generations.

If Canada bring these two approaches together, we can create an innovation economy that is strong, fair, and ready for what comes next.

What Makes Innovation Indigenous?

We often hear about Indigenous involvement in clean energy, tech startups, and land-based research. But what makes something Indigenous innovation instead of just innovation by Indigenous people?

The answer is not just about who’s involved—but how the work is done, and why.

Indigenous innovation is shaped by relationships. It values land, language, kinship, ceremony, and long-term care. These values guide how new tools, systems, or businesses are created. They also shape how results are shared—and with whom.

1. Innovation Is Rooted in Place

Indigenous innovation begins with land—not with a lab. It starts by asking, What does this place need? What is already working here? Instead of scaling fast and wide, Indigenous innovators build slowly and with purpose, often with the goal of healing relationships between people and the environment.

This shows up in everything from community energy projects to water sensors based on traditional knowledge.

2. Community Benefit Comes First

In many Western tech models, success is measured by growth, profit, or exit. In Indigenous-led projects, success often means cultural survival, better food systems, or stronger language transmission. The community—not just the founders or funders—benefits directly from the innovation.

Ownership and decision-making are shared. Many projects involve Elders, youth, or Knowledge Keepers. Some are governed by community protocols rather than corporate boards.

3. Time Works Differently

Indigenous innovation isn’t rushed. Timelines often follow seasons, ceremonies, or healing processes, not quarterly returns. This can make it hard to fit into grant cycles or investor timelines—but that doesn’t make it less valuable.

Instead, it means that the innovation is designed to last, adapt, and serve multiple generations.

4. Knowledge is Relational

In Indigenous contexts, knowledge is not just something you collect or own—it’s something you’re responsible for. Innovation includes art, story, food, and land care. It’s not limited to science labs or digital platforms.

This kind of thinking can change how we design AI, environmental tools, or even climate policy. It encourages us to ask: Who is this for? Who is missing? What responsibilities come with this knowledge?

Conclusion: More Than Inclusion

Indigenous innovation is not just a version of Western tech with different faces at the table. It’s a different way of seeing the purpose of innovation itself.

When Indigenous communities lead, they bring forward systems of knowledge, law, and governance that go beyond extractive growth. These systems are already working—in clean energy, health, education, and digital technology. They don’t need to be retrofitted. They need to be respected, funded, and protected.

If we want innovation that lasts, we need to start by asking better questions—and listening to people who’ve been solving complex problems for thousands of years.

Data Is Ceremony

We hear a lot about data sovereignty in conversations about Indigenous rights and technology. But what does that really mean?

For many Indigenous Peoples, data is not just numbers or information. It is connected to land, language, ceremony, and community. Data is part of relationships and one that comes with responsibility.

When we say “data is ceremony,” we are saying that how data is collected, shared, and used matters just as much as what it says.

It must be treated with care, purpose, and respect.

1. Data Is Not Neutral

In Western knowdge systems, data is seen as neutral. But for some Indigenous communities, data reflects a painful history: being studied without consent, misrepresented, or left out entirely.

Because of this, some Indigenous leaders say that data must be handled the same way you would handle a sacred object: with clear rules, shared values, and deep respect.

This approach isn’t about rejecting science or technology. It’s about asking: Who collected this? Who benefits from it?, and Who decides what happens next?

2. The Right to Tell Your Own Story

Indigenous data sovereignty means that communities have the right to govern their own information. This includes health data, education records, language resources, environmental monitoring, and more.

Without this control, communities can’t fully protect their rights, plan for the future, or respond to crises. As the post What Makes Innovation Indigenous? explore, true innovation includes self-determination. That means Indigenous people telling their own stories, their way.

3. CARE, Not Just FAIR

Many governments and institutions follow the FAIR principles for data - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. Indigenous data leaders add another set of principles: CARE - Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics.

CARE means data should help communities thrive, not just serve academic or commercial interests. It also means protecting sensitive knowledge, respecting laws and customs, and ensuring decisions are made by the people who are most affected.

4. A Living Relationship

Data is ceremony because it’s part of a living relationship. Just like in ceremony, there are roles, teachings, and outcomes. This is esstential to building trust and honouring responsibility.

This is especially important in fields like artificial intelligence, climate research, or clean energy, where data often guides major decisions. If the process leaves Indigenous people out, or ignores their protocols, it creates harm.

Conclusion: Rethinking Innovation with Respect

When we treat data as ceremony, we shift from extraction to relationship. We stop asking What can we take from this data? and start asking How do we honour this knowledge?

This shift doesn’t slow innovation. It actually strengthens it when both eyes work together.

If we want better systems (for health, for climate, for technology) we need to build them on trust, respect, and shared responsibility. That starts by recognizing that data is not a tool to be used, but a resource to be protected.

Circular Infrastructure: The Other Half of a Sustainable Energy Economy

When Canadians think about how to solve for sustainable energy, we often focus on what to create: solar panels, wind farms, electric vehicles, batteries.

But the real test of sustainability isn’t what we create, it’s what we leave behind.

A sustainable energy economy needs more than clean technology. It needs circular infrastructure: systems designed to reuse, repair, recycle, or return what we take.

This matters not just for the planet, but for Indigenous communities, who often bear the costs of what some others call progress.

1. We’re Still Building in Straight Lines

Most of today’s clean energy projects follow a predictable and linear model: extract, build, use, and discard. Even technologies that reduce emissions, like batteries or wind turbines, have end-of-life risks if there’s no plan for reuse or safe disposal.

As we noted in The Next Energy Economy, many Indigenous Nations are leading clean energy projects, but few of those come with full support for managing the waste that future generations will have to deal with.

2. The Risk Gets Passed Down

From mining to decommissioning, too many ‘sustainable’ energy projects pass the risk to the land and people at the edges of the system. This often means Indigenous communities, especially those in rural or remote regions. They get left with old infrastructure, chemical runoff, and abandoned sites.

When Indigenous communities are not involved in infrastructure planning from the beginning, circularity becomes an afterthought, if it happens at all.

3. Circular Means More Than Recycling

Circular infrastructure means designing systems that reduce harm from the start, including:

• Using fewer harmful materials

• Planning for maintenance, repair, and reuse

• Creating jobs in dismantling and rebuilding (not just in construction)

• Embedding Indigenous consent, governance, and knowledge at every stage

As discussed in What Makes Innovation Indigenous?, the values of balance, responsibility, and forward-looking thought are built into Indigenous worldviews. Circularity isn’t new. it’s just not always recognized.

4. The Opportunity We’re Missing

Canada will invest many billions of dollars in clean energy and infrastructure in 2025 and beyond.

But without circular design, we risk repeating the same extractive patterns, and we’ll end up with a slighty cleaner version of the same broken economy.

Indigenous leadership offers a better way by innovating in a way that both serves and respects the communities it touches, past, present, and future.

Conclusion: A Loop, Not a Line

The future of sustainable energy infrastructure in Canada is circular, which means we need to reduce both emissions and harms.

For Canada to lead in sustainability, we need to support Indigenous-led infrastructure planning. Not just with grants, but with governance. Not just at the start, but through every stage of a project’s life.

The energy economy isn’t sustainable until it respects the whole circle.

The Next Energy Economy Is Already Here

When people talk about the future of energy they often discuss new technology: batteries, hydrogen, solar, and smart grids. So, what we will create instead of what we will leave behind.

But across Canada, a different kind of energy future is already taking shape, led by Indigenous communities. and knowledge.

These communities are designing, owning, and leading major projects and delivering results. They are showing how energy can be clean, fair, and rooted in long-term responsibility.

That is the next Canadian energy economy.

1. Indigenous Communities Are Leading Projects

Today, more than 200 Indigenous clean energy projects are active in Canada. These include solar, wind, hydro, and storage systems, many of them built in remote communities that were once dependent on diesel.

One of the most confluenced examples is the Oneida Energy Storage Project in Ontario. This grid-scale battery system is co-led by Six Nations of the Grand River and is one of the largest of its kind.

As we saw in What Makes Innovation Indigenous?, in order for these types of projects to succeed, it can’t just be about electricity. Control, capacity, and cultural survival must also be considered.

2. The Goals Are Different

In the Western energy system, success is usually measured in cost savings, emissions reductions, or investor returns. Indigenous energy leaders care about those thing but they also measure success by community benefit and intergenerational learning.

Many projects are tied to education, skills training, or food security. This values are what makes Indigenous-led energy projects a model for others: Turning infrastructure into a tool for self-determination and sustainability.

3. Barriers Still Exist

Even with strong leadership, Indigenous communities in Canada often face common barriers:

• Lack of long-term funding

• Complex permitting rules

• Limited access to grid infrastructure

• Few chances to lead beyond the pilot stage

Too often, Indigenous partners are brought in late or offered ownership only after the major decisions are made. As we discussed in Circular Infrastructure, true leadership includes full decision-making power for Indigenous communities, not just a late invite to the table.

4. It’s Time to Rethink the System

Canada’s energy future must be more than clean, it must be just. That means changing how projects are funded, approved, and managed. It also means reframing Indigenous land relationships, not as barriers, but as sources of innovation.

As we explored in Data is Ceremony, Indigenous governance is built on accountability, respect, and long term thinking. Those are all values that Canada’s new energy system needs at its core.

Conclusion: Learning from What’s Already Working

The next energy economy is already being built in Indigenous communities across Canada.

These projects are showing the rest of Canada how to generate energy in ways that are clean, fair, and culturally-grounded.

If governments and industry want to lead the energy transition, they should start by following the example of the people who are already doing the work, and have been for generations.