The Unama’ki Emergency Alert System, a pioneering project designed to improve emergency response and communication within five First Nations communities in Cape Breton, offers a blueprint for how community-driven solutions can enhance safety for Indigenous women and communities across Canada.

“4,127 — that’s how many people are registered to receive alerts across our five Cape Breton Indigenous communities…. 183 — that’s how many alerts we’ve sent since its inception. 67 — that’s how many young people we have reunited with their families because of the alerts,” Jennifer Jesty told members of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women in Ottawa this past March.

The committee was discussing the proposed national Red Dress Alert System, aimed at addressing the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women across Canada.

Jesty, 48, a member of the Eskasoni First Nation band, is the emergency resilience manager at the Union of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq (UNSM). She is an advanced care paramedic and the first Indigenous woman to become a member of the Nova Scotia Firefighters Association.

The Unama’ki Emergency Alert System’s success stems from its community-focused approach, and has received broad support from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous users, demonstrating its potential as a model for national implementation. The alert system has expanded to Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland.

“We do have non-Indigenous people signing up for the system. They see that our success, our system, is successful, that we are delivering information in a timely fashion, and we were getting it out to them quickly,” she said. “People are information hungry. They want to know more information for their own personal safety. So, if our alert system attracts non-Indigenous users, that’s wonderful. I welcome them with open arms.” 

Jesty said it cost her less than $8,000 to set up. “The initial set-up was tedious but through Everbridge [the app developer] I now can have a system in any community set up and running within an hour. I’d love to go to each Indigenous community in Canada.”

Since September 2020, 4,000 people have registered to receive the alerts, which go out to users immediately. Subscribers can choose how they receive an alert — text message, email or landline. And they can opt to receive alerts for more than one community if they have loved ones living elsewhere, Jesty said. The subscriber-based model differs from Canada’s National Public Alerting System, otherwise known as Alert Ready. 

A text-only option was recently added to avoid waking people with a call to their landline if the alert doesn’t warrant that amount of urgency. A voice-to-text tool allows alert senders to dictate alerts in their own language. “We’re talking about critical incident language and you want to make sure there’s no barrier there when it comes to language,” she said.

From creating educational posters to tabling at the band office so people could sign up using a pen and paper, Jesty worked hard to inform communities of the Unama’ki system when it launched and even sent summer students door-to-door to elders’ houses to explain the system. She even wrote them a script to make sure the message was consistent.

To issue an alert, a chief or community leader must enter a username, password and message body and then hit send. There’s no specific ringtone associated with the alerts yet, but Jesty said she’s working on an educational video to teach subscribers how to change the settings of their phone so they hear a specific noise when an alert comes in.

In her ideal world, Jesty said her system would co-exist alongside other alert systems in Canada. The goal isn’t to replace one system with another, she pointed out, since her subscriber-based system wouldn’t necessarily work well for tourists visiting an area. But she said there’s room for it to expand into other First Nations across Canada.

Whether it’s First Nations or entire municipalities, the Unama’ki alert system’s subscription requirement allows for unique, community-specific alerts, she said. “This is so easy that we could set it up in every town, every community, every Indigenous community across this country within an hour … ,” she said.

Sources:

Cape Breton woman presents Indigenous emergency alert system in Ottawa Saltwire, March 19 2024

Consultations begin on Parliament Hill about Red Dress Alert system. APTN, March 19 2024

Indigenous-led alert system, ‘Made for us, by one of us’ Climate Disaster Project

Mi’kmaw alert system helps find people missing from Indigenous Cape Breton communities CBC, June 20 2022