Non-profit association — Oslo

Our purpose

UMA KIWE is a non-profit association preserving and sharing indigenous culture through digital archiving and technology — bridging oral tradition and the digital world. We collaborate with artists and culture-bearers — across music, oral tradition, painting, speech, and all kinds of workshops — who are indigenous themselves, or who work with indigenous peoples, as part of that bridge.

Our approach:

• Open source where possible
• Content is always owned by the creator — never the platform

  What that means: I own what I create — the code, the structure, the technical side — but the artist or group owns all their own material they upload, and can take a copy and store it themselves, online or offline, at any time.

  If the project ends, or the artist wants to end the collaboration, they can take down and remove all their material whenever they want, and store it wherever they choose — I'm happy to help with that too, online or offline.

• Environmental and cultural protection are connected

The architect behind it

The work is built and run by Louisa — Nasa by origin, indigenous from Cauca, Colombia, but raised in Europe, with a background spanning Colombia, Sweden and Norway and over 20 years of experience in IT and technology. The IT person behind UMA KIWE's work — building and running websites, backend tooling, digital archiving, and all related software and hardware.

As Nasa, this is not an outside view documenting another culture, but a voice from within — which underpins how UMA KIWE works.