Neither big data, nor data justice are particularly new. Data collection, in the form of land surveys and mapping, was key to successive projects of European imperialist and then capitalist extraction of natural resources. Geo-spatial instruments have been used since the fifteenth century to highlight potential sites of mineral, oil, and gas extraction, and inscribe European economic, cultural and political control across indigenous territories. Although indigenous groups consistently challenged maintained their territorial sovereignty, and resisted corporate and state surveillance practices, they were largely unable to withstand the combined onslaught of surveyors, armed personnel, missionaries and government bureaucrats. This article examines the use of counter-mapping by indigenous nations in Canada, one of the globe's hubs of extractivism, as part of the exercise of indigenous territorial sovereignty. After a brief review of the colonial period, I then compare the use of counter-mapping during two cycles of indigenous mobilization. During the 1970s, counter-mapping projects were part of a larger repertoire of negotiations with the state over land claims, and served to re-inscribe first nation's long-standing history of economic, social and cultural relations in their territories, and contribute to new collective imaginaries and identities. In the current cycle of contests over extractivism and indigenous sovereignty, the use, scope and geographic scale of counter-mapping has shifted; maps are used as part of larger trans-media campaigns of Indigenous sovereignty. During both cycles, counter-mapping as data justice required fusion within larger projects of redistributive, transformative and restorative justice.

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This article compares the historical role of North American grassroots groups in setting up telephone communications at the turn of the 20th century with contemporary campaigns of grassroots activists to establish broadband communications, in one US metropolitan region, the San Francisco Bay. The narrative analyses the local and national policy environment, the corporate commercial context and the activist constituencies. It focuses on mapping the frames used, the direction of their campaigns and the outcomes. Drawing from examples of citizens' activity in assessing community needs, policy-making and political mobilizing, including among historically marginalized communities, the author argues that digital inclusion, and democratic decision-making in broadband, is much more than a narrow technical question of providing access to new information and communication technologies, or of incorporating consumers in market-based development. The study concludes that democratizing the new communications platforms of the broadband Internet will involve the support of citizens' initiatives in building their own communications technologies and content; challenging the incumbent corporate players, and supporting a variety of municipally operated systems.

A new cycle of communications commons has become part of the contemporary repertoire of Indigenous first nations in North America. The mobilization of the Standing Rock Sioux is perhaps the bestknown example of a continent-wide cycle of resistance in which Indigenous communities have employed a combination of collectively governed land-based encampments and sophisticated trans-media assemblages to challenge the further enclosure of their territories by the state and fossil fuel industries and instead represent their political and media sovereignty, and prefigure a more reciprocal relationship with other humans and with nature. Although their practices of commoning resemble other radical commons projects, the contemporary Indigenous commons begs for a reassessment of the critical framework of the commons. In this article, I discuss the critical commons literature and compare it with the practices of commoning in the antiextractivist encampments of Standing Rock.

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