GoKawiilIn February 2024, a young man lay somewhere on the frozen shore of James Bay, Canada, surrounded by snow and darkness, succumbing to hypothermia. When he failed to get home on time, his frantic mother sent a Facebook message to Elizabeth Kataquapit, then chief of the indigenous community Fort Albany First Nation in northeastern Ontario. Kataquapit used Facebook to alert the community’s search-and-rescue squad, who jumped onto their snowmobiles and drove into the night. Before dawn, they returned with the dazed man, who told rescuers he’d given up until wolves nudged his hypothermic body. “The wolves told him to wake up,” Kataquapit says. “I really believe they saved his life.”
A fiber-optic network also played a key role.
Not long before the young man’s mishap, the indigenous-owned Western James Bay Telecom Network (WJBTN) had built its own fiber-to-the-home network in this remote Cree community, some 975 kilometers north of Toronto. Before the network, the rescue squad relied on a few handheld radios to pass information along. This time, a Facebook message to the full list of volunteers triggered the search.
An aerial view shows the remote community of Fort Albany in northern Ontario. Gavin John
Building Canada’s first fully Indigenous-owned-and-operated fiber-optic network was an uphill battle for Brian Nakogee, WJBTN’s finance officer, who had to secure capital from agencies less familiar with the challenges of remote northern life. For the people of Fort Albany First Nation, accessing many vital supplies and services means traveling about 500 km to the regional city of Timmins. By land, the trip is possible for only a few weeks each winter, when the swampy tundra freezes hard enough to construct a temporary road. “The southern way of doing things is very different than how we here in remote areas piece things together,” says Nakogee.
Telecommunications giants long saw little profit in serving the subarctic coast of James Bay. But even as satellite internet started to become available in remote communities, WJBTN staff saw the value in building and owning its own hard-wired internet service instead of relying on outside companies. Today, the nonprofit operates one of the fastest networks in Canada, while keeping both infrastructure ownership and revenue within the First Nations communities it serves.
WJBTN is part of a broader movement among Indigenous and remote communities seeking more control over their telecommunications infrastructure. In the United States, 30 tribes now operate fiber-to-the-home networks, many launched during COVID. Canada has since created a dedicated Indigenous broadband funding stream. And as more communities pursue the expertise and funding to build their own networks, WJBTN’s experience offers a blueprint for what locally owned connectivity can look like in some of the hardest places to serve.
How a Power Line Became a Broadband Backbone
While many towns in North America were connecting to optical fiber in the early 2000s, the subarctic communities were left out.
The residents of Fort Albany saw the earliest sign of improvement in 2008. That’s when their locally owned power company, Five Nations Energy Inc. (FNEI), strung fiber-optic cable on the utility poles that were delivering electricity from the dusty railway town of Moosonee, 135 km away across the peat bogs. On the shore of the Moose River, Moosonee is the last stop for Ontario’s telecommunications providers. Its only link to the province’s highways is a 5-hour train ride that shuttles passengers, freight, and vehicles through the Boreal forest.
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