Photo: Clouds over the lands and waters of the Wayana territory in Suriname. Courtesy of Rudo Kemper / CMI.
October 1, 2026
How Indigenous Peoples in Suriname Co-Created a Digital Platform to Advance Guardianship of Their Territory
By Nancy Kelsey (Anishinaabe)
Photo: Boats in Wayana territory in Suriname. Courtesy of Rudo Kemper / CMI.
For the Wayana People, the biodiverse lands and waters of the Amazon rainforest have long been home before colonial borders demarcated them as Suriname.
Still, Suriname is the only country in South America that does not recognize the collective rights of Indigenous Peoples to their homelands.
“The question that was always asked of us: ‘You have such a big territory and if you get land rights, how are you going to manage that?’” recounted Andre Verhoogt, the Mulokot Foundation’s Managing Director. “The answer that the Indigenous would give and still give is: ‘We have been managing it for thousands of years.’”
Translating their ancestral guardianship in ways western governments or institutions could understand required new tools. This was the impetus for Guardian Connector: to co-create an open-source data integration and monitoring platform that positions Indigenous Peoples to collect, manage and own data about their territories on their own terms.
Nia Tero helped support this effort at an early stage through technical resources and funding, and brought Conservation Metrics, Incorporated (CMI) to the table.
‘Nothing About Us Without Us’
Guardian Connector was co-created by Mulokot, Nia Tero and CMI, who understood it was vital for the process to start not with technology but with conversations to assess what the Wayana wished to monitor. This collaborative development of Guardian Connector aligned with Mulokot’s foundational belief –– “nothing about us without us.”
Six years later, Guardian Connector has become important to how the Wayana document their land, culture and wellbeing. Rather than build a single rigid application, the technical team created a framework into which any Wayana community could add its own data. This includes monitoring encroaching extractive operations like mining, surveys on mental health, population data, river water quality and more.
Getting there required work toward intentional alignment as the Wayana and technical partners used different vocabularies to describe what to measure and how. A turning point came when international partners traveled to Wayana lands and met directly with the Wayana rights-holders. A Wayana woman and traditional leader offered plain, concrete examples – comparing concepts to a house, a forest, a canoe – that ultimately shaped the project's guidelines more effectively than any technical framing had.
“Sometimes when you're trying to create something and you’re worlds apart, there can be confusion,” said Jupta Itoewaki (Wayana), a co-founder of Mulokot and a Nia Tero Board member. “But when you walk in the community, you connect with the forest. You start to see that the logic that you had is a bit different in reality.”
Photo: Wayana territory, Suriname by Rudo Kemper / CMI
The Wayana use Guardian Connector to collect survey data on health, education, traditional knowledge of medicine and more around their territory. Genealogical tools capture family trees and oral storytelling. Camera traps and audio recorders –– 15 so far, with a goal of 35 –– track wildlife. A large biodiversity monitoring excursion, taking place in October, aims to document small species that the Wayana have long known. Under Mulokot's data protocol, any species newly described in scientific literature will also carry Wayana names, and the Wayana leading the fieldwork will be co-authors on resulting publications. Additionally, regular satellite-based alerts flag illegal mining.
All data collected feeds directly into advocacy campaigns and social media posts aimed at advancing the Wayana’s guardianship of their homelands and waters.
This pipeline of Indigenous Peoples’ self-determined data collection and information is exactly why Nia Tero supports partners like Mulokot and the Islands Knowledge Institute in the Solomon Islands, among others, in co-developing Guardian Connector.
“The Wayana are harnessing the power of innovative data technology to strengthen their guardianship of ancestral homelands and waters,” said Nia Tero Chief Program Officer Margarita Mora. “Indigenous Peoples are on the front lines of the climate crisis, so it is vital for funders to support Indigenous Peoples’ guardianship in the face of rapidly accelerating changes to the ecosystems they call home.”
"We’re inviting researchers. They’re our guests. And it’s not their data. It’s our data."
- Jupta Itoewaki
Wayana People, Suriname
Co-founder, Mulokot Foundation
Indigenous Peoples’ data sovereignty is central to how Guardian Connector works. Its mission is to provide a trusted data and information solution to Earth’s guardians. Its promise? Your data will always belong to you.
“Data has been collected for many years from Indigenous communities, but they have never been able to be used by Indigenous People,” Itoewaki said. “And many times [Indigenous People] don't even have access to that information anymore. So, this is where the data protocol comes in.”
Mulokot developed a data protocol with its research partners specifying that the Wayana retain ownership, access and control over everything collected –– including veto power over publications and a rejection of "discovery" framing. Several potential partners declined those terms while others accepted them, sometimes for the first time in their own research history.
“We’re inviting researchers. They’re our guests. And it’s not their data. It’s our data,” Itoewaki said.
The results also feed back into the territory itself. At times, this is through a Wayana-run podcast and short videos, such as a video by a Mulokot fieldworker explaining his work directly to other Wayana People.
Survey data has also driven concrete action. For example, health surveys revealed high rates of gender-based violence. The Wayana themselves describe this violence as not part of their culture, but tied to the trauma of losing their lands and ways of life, and to alcohol brought into the territory. This led Mulokot to organize discussion programs and secure funding to study the issue further. Because there is no police presence in the territory, the solutions came from the Wayana themselves, including trusted confidential persons in each community whom people can turn to, Itoewaki explained.
“The more data you collect, of course, you have to find solutions in the data,” Verhoogt noted.
Protecting this sensitive and important data is at the heart of Guardian Connector’s mission.
“To me, the core challenge Guardian Connector is designed to address is ensuring long-term community ownership and control of data, while preventing the kinds of data extractivism and data colonialism that have historically affected Indigenous Peoples. It’s also about increasing communities’ autonomy over the tools they use to manage and work with their own data,” said CMI’s Rudo Kemper, who has helped co-develop Guardian Connector in partnership with Indigenous Peoples.
He added that many off-the-shelf data collection tools are not built for Indigenous communities or steeped in Indigenous values or principles, meaning they often fall short in meeting their needs. Guardian Connector is co-created with Indigenous Peoples for this very reason.
Planning for the future
Asked what advice she'd give to other Indigenous groups considering a similar system, Itoewaki pointed to two things: build enough trust that adopting new tools doesn't feel destabilizing and avoid dependency on outside technical partners. Indigenous Peoples should train their own members to run the systems, she noted.
“In the long term, I think this can be a great tool,” Itoewaki said. “We are already seeing how great a tool this is.”
She added, “Helping to co-create or develop a tool that can be used by other Indigenous People is really great. They don't have to start from scratch. There’s already [Guardian Connector] and they can make it their own.”