About Onake Systems Inc.
A First Nations enterprise working where enterprise IT meets the technology that runs physical infrastructure.
As a First Nations enterprise, Onake Systems understands that critical infrastructure requires deep expertise in both the technology and the territory it serves. We specialize at the IT/OT boundary, integrating enterprise information systems with the operational technology that powers water systems, energy distribution, and telecom networks. Our work spans industrial automation and telecommunications, embedding Indigenous governance, privacy, and data stewardship into system design from day one. We deliver fully bilingual services across Canada on a strictly deliverables-based model, guaranteeing documented Indigenous content on every engagement.
Multidisciplinary Leadership
Our leadership brings specialized legal and regulatory depth across the three pillars that determine whether an infrastructure project survives real-world execution: telecommunications regulation and contracts, corporate and financial structuring, and Indigenous governance and procurement frameworks. This multidisciplinary grounding defines how we scope mandates and ensures we rigorously analyze vendor agreements to protect our clients’ long-term interests.
Domain Depth Where It Matters
Onake executes every mandate from a core IT/OT foundation. Our technical capability spans industrial control systems (ICS) and SCADA automation, multi-bearer telecommunications (terrestrial fibre, radio, and satellite), off-grid remote power, and the overarching system architecture that unifies them into a single accountable environment. We bring this senior expertise directly to every file, without delegating to junior personnel.
Operational Philosophy & Independence
Every Onake engagement delivers a tangible outcome: a funding-ready study, a production-ready system design, or a working system a community can operate and maintain. We hold no exclusive vendor agreements and specify on merit, and where a community already runs a particular platform we work within it, because compatibility with what exists usually matters more than what we would choose on a blank page. As a 100% Indigenous-owned enterprise, we operate fluently in both official languages while ensuring the economic and technical benefits of every project remain within the community.
Community Commitment & Indigenous Inclusion
Onake Systems Inc. operates directly from within the community, not as an external observer, but as a 100% Indigenous-owned and Indigenous-led enterprise. We are committed to meaningful Indigenous employment, capacity building, and ensuring that the economic and technical benefits of critical infrastructure investments remain rooted in the communities we serve.
What we bring
Every engagement draws on the firm’s full senior capability, with no junior staff learning the domain on your project.
Seeing infrastructure whole: from the systems on the ground to the agreements they stand or fall on.
A Message from Onake Systems
For too long, critical technology decisions in our communities have been made by external parties who never had to live with the operational outcomes. Systems selected from afar, contracts signed hastily to meet arbitrary funding deadlines, and infrastructure that performed on paper but failed the people who relied on it.
Onake Systems was founded to change that. We manage every engagement directly, from first assessment through to a working system, and we bring more than twenty years of systems integration behind it. We evaluate vendor agreements against technical specifications so that contractual promises match operational reality, and we deliver architectures local teams can run and maintain themselves.
100% Indigenous-owned and rooted directly in the community, our reputation is tied to every deliverable that leaves our practice. We ensure the economic and technical benefits of our work remain local, delivering standards-compliant work we proudly stand behind before our leadership and council.
That is our founding commitment.
Onake Systems
The Name
Onake Systems takes its name from oná:ke, the Kanien’kéha word for bark and the canoe crafted from it. Bark was suited by nature to purpose: lightweight, water-resistant, flexible, and robust enough to navigate demanding waters. We apply those same principles to critical systems, designing infrastructure built to endure severe operational environments and extreme isolation.
The Mark
Our mark places a circuit inside the hull of a canoe. Traces rise from the hull and end in open terminals, and roots descend below it, because technology that arrives in a community should take hold there rather than pass through. The ring holds it together as a network. The vessel has always carried what matters; the circuit is what it carries now.