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6 min read 44

UofWinds 449, Week 44, 2026: The Map That Roared, Seven: How to Play a Game without Rules, IFTF Ten Year Forecast 2036


Good morning. Today is Hallowe'en and we have yet to decorate our house with our traditional string of Jack Skellington skull lights on the porch railing and a couple of badly carved pumpkins. In our house, we celebrate the day but it's a minor holiday.

The Fall weather has been glorious for the last couple of weeks, warm and dry, This has allowed the canopy of neighbourhood trees to show off their brilliant reds, oranges, and yellows for a longer stretch than I can remember. It will only take one strong rain to strip the trees of their brilliance and transform them into more cold and menacing shapes. But this year, that day will happen after Hallowe'en.

I recently learned that the Anishinaabe have six seasons, not four. November will start the beginning of winter, known as pitci pibon (November-December). Pibon is deep winter (January-February).

The Map That Roared


I learned about the six seasons of the Anishinabeg from Thomas Gagnon-van Leeuwen's As long as the sun shines: Indigenous digital libraries across North America, a project he made while he was an intern at Library Futures.

How can digital libraries work towards Indigenous cultural sovereignty? Can they preserve and share traditional knowledge in a way that respects local protocols?
Having lived in Canada’s Far North before attending library school, I decided to explore these questions as part of my internship with Library Futures in Fall 2025. The result of this exploration is the interactive story map, As long as the sun shines: Indigenous digital libraries across North America.
In North America, libraries and archives have traditionally participated in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Stolen artifacts are scattered across the world in colonial museums, and mainstream classification schemes relegate Indigenous peoples to the past.
But a new generation of digital libraries is emerging. They leverage the possibilities of the digital age to put power back where it belongs: in the Indigenous nations.

The story is not just well-told, but it is also very well- designed. For those who are interested in such things, the essay is laid out using the storymaps platform of ArcGIS. Thomas doesn't point out to the reader that he's using the very same kind of Geographical Information System software to tell the story of how Indigenous mapping has been instrumental in supporting and defending the land claims of the indigenous peoples of Canada. He just tells the story:

In 1982, Gene Joseph graduated from the University of British Columbia with a Master of Library Science degree. She was the first Indigenous person to do so.
Two years later, she returned to her home, the Wet'suwet'en village of Hagwilget, a fourteen-hour drive north of Vancouver. She had been hired to work on what proved to be a momentous court case for Indigenous people across Canada.
The Wet'suwet'en and Gitxsan First Nations had filed claim to 58,000 square kilometers of traditional territories.
And they needed someone to organize the evidence.
Joseph worked to collect, translate, and organize oral evidence from Elders, some of whom were ill or quite elderly. She also compiled thousands of historical documents from archives in Canada, England, and the United States.
"While I did not speak the language, I was constantly surrounded and worked with sound and video recordings, translators and linguists who were for the first time having to spell personal, place and spiritual names. We worked closely with the cartographer as he recorded these names onto the new maps of the territories, continually cross checking with the chiefs, elders and researchers. The map was named "The map that roared" by the court. Gene Joseph in Doyle et al., 2009.
The _Delgamuukw_ trial ran for 374 days over three years, ending in 1990. The decision was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled in 1997 that the provincial government could not extinguish Indigenous title and traced its contours.
The court also stated that oral history has just as much weight as other types of evidence. An Indigenous librarian, using digital technology, had helped shift what kind of material is valued in archives.

The day after Thomas published his story of story-mapping, one of my favourite podcasts released an episode called, Mr. TIFF: an oral history of a format.

Stephen Carlsen died in 2025. His family knew vaguely that he had worked on creating the file format TIFF, but it was his nephew, Nathan Carlsen, who kicked off a quest for the full story. This week, senior producer Hans Buetow talks with Nathan about his oral history project to document his uncle’s work, and we hear a fascinating conversation that Nathan had with Donovan Cameron, a First Nation GIS specialist who uses the TIFF in unexpected ways.

I'm hoping to spend some time this weekend writing a short piece that will attempt to weave these two works together along with a talk that I recently heard and a book that I read over twenty years ago. If it comes together in time, it will become a part of episode 08 of Field Trip.

Seven: How to Play a Game without Rules


I try to recommend books only sparingly in this newsletter. Largely I refrain because I recognize that books are a considerable investment of time. But also, I recognize that we so rarely read outside of our own tastes and preferences that we have to create book clubs in order to generate sufficient external pressure to move us to do so. But I'm going to risk it today because if you have been reading this newsletter for any amount of time, there has got to be some likelihood that we have reading tastes that overlap.

I recently read and thoroughly enjoyed Seven by Joanna Kavenna.

Who decides the rules of the games we play?
​In August 2007, or thereabouts, a young philosopher leaves Oslo, heading for Greece, on a mission to find Theodoros Apostolakis, the head of the Society of Lost Things. Fortunately, Apostolakis isn’t lost, but everything else is: ancient libraries, entire civilisations, priceless books and a beautiful box, once used to play the world-famous game of Seven. The hunt for this small thing, among the countless lost things, becomes an absurdist quest through time and space: from the earliest human societies to the advent of AI.
Told, shared and mythologised by our narrator, along with a wild cast of dreamers, philosophers, poets, rebels and optimists, Seven is an extraordinary, uplifting journey through an ever darkening world.

For a second opinion, The Guardian gave a positive but measured review of the book some months ago.

Of all the genres Kavenna has worked within – or, more accurately, vexed the boundaries of – Seven (Or, How to Play a Game Without Rules) is probably closest to an academic satire. We first encounter the novel’s thoroughly anonymised first-person narrator in Oslo in the summer of 2007, where he or she or they are employed as a research assistant to a renowned Icelandic philosopher named Alda Jónsdóttir. Jónsdóttir is described as “eminent, tall, strong and terrifying”, and likes to host dinner parties for her histrionic institutional peers. The hapless narrator’s job is to help facilitate her work in “box philosophy”: “the study of categories, the ways we organise reality into groups and sets […] the ways we end up thinking inside the box, even when we are trying to think outside the box”.

IFTF Ten Year Forecast 2036


I was recently asked to recommend future forecasting work and so I spent some time explaining why I personally follow the work of the Institute for the Future. I appreciate that this research group is evidence-based, that it frames its work as forecasting but not as prediction, and its work is presented so that it can be understood at the scale of an individual, as opposed to being a strategic tool for a corporation or an index fund.

Their Ten-Year Forecast for 2036 that has been recently published is very well designed for both insight and brevity, although it is not particularly clear that you must scroll down to learn more about each of the ten frames that they use.

The report addresses more than just Ai and it makes the bold suggestion that the end of financialization may be near. However, I do want to highlight how the report frames the presence of Ai in ten years (and its subsequent effects on human discernment) because unlike so many other projections, IFTF presents Ai as a choice of individuals and institutions between one of four different types of culture.

The Four Cultures

  • AI-Free/AI-Proof: AI is intentionally avoided and resisted. Human effort, expression, and presence are valued, protected, and guaranteed.
  • AI-Adjacent: People prioritize doing, enjoying, and excelling at what only humans can do, rediscovering human purpose and spirit, while allowing AI to operate in the background.
  • AI-Augmented: AI is a trusted partner. People collaborate with it to think, create, and communicate more effectively.
  • AI-Directed: AI takes an active guiding role and replaces humans in many key functions: making decisions, leading activities, and shaping major outcomes in people’s lives.

I'm going to take some time to sit with what I've read in this report, especially the forecast around the Muddle Powers, which is feels like a very Canadian situation.

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