In this presentation, I examine archives-based approaches to Indigenous and decolonial mapping. These efforts take place within a context of structural inequality, where Indigenous peoples largely are not the legal rights holders of their archival data (Luker, 2020), limiting their ability to uncover, assert truth and tell their own stories. In Canada, Indigenous communities must navigate laws governing ownership and intellectual property rights, which are rooted in colonial frameworks and dominate government and ecclesiastical record-keeping practices. Advocates for Indigenous Data Sovereignty stress the importance of Indigenous control over their own data, including administrative land records (Kukutai, Whitehead, & Kani, 2022). While data sovereignty is a concept shaped by the digital age, Indigenous peoples have long been data gatherers, with established protocols for protecting, transmitting, and using community knowledge, including spatial information (Lucchesi, 2020). Today’s Indigenous researchers are building on past technological innovations to enhance data recovery, analysis and storage. Collaborative efforts to recover and curate archival datasets are driving new approaches to cartography, not merely by mapping colonial records but by enriching metadata and strengthening connections between data and the communities they represent (Lucchesi, 2022; Sorensen et al., 2023). This repurposing of archives fosters the creation of alternative archival data and geospatial repositories that better serve Indigenous needs.