About our website and data sovereignty

This website is a work in progress, and is the result of the tireless work of Stó:lō community Elders, knowledge holders, teachers, researchers, and the dedicated Stó:lō Shxwelí team. The goal for this site is to have a single place to share materials that have been created for Halq'eméylem in the past few decades, and provide an organized forum for displaying and sharing them. We also wanted to ensure it is easy to add, change, cross-link and maintain all the materials on here.

The support of FPCC grant funding allowed us to develop this self-hosted community-run platform with the help of a supportive outside tech team, which helped us create a site that we could take ownership of after the collaborative development process. Released with an open-source license, the organization of materials can be adapted by other communities, with the content of the site belonging to all Stó:lō peoples. To ensure ongoing safeguarding of our data, the content is backed up daily to Stó:lō Servers, with an additional backup to several off-site machines. We felt the importance of having complete ownership of all our precious stories, images, and voices of our Elders. The backups contain explicit instructions to allow any trained professional to reconstruct all content and its organization in case of data disaster (e.g. website crash).

This site is now working as a 'living archive', since we can display our legacy materials, newly created materials, and materials we are digitizing, all in one place.

For more information please get in touch with info@stoloshxweli.org or sonja.thoma@stoloshxweli.org