Indigenous AI Gathering 2026 - Day 1 - Noetic Oracle Community

S41: Hi everyone. Hi everyone. I’m looking for all Pathfinders, students, and teachers, and facilitators, and staff from ILA to come to the front to take a photo, a group photo. We need to do it right away, so if all the Pathfinders can please come to the front, that would be great. Thank you so much. OSEAM. (3 minute[s] pause)

S21: Morning everyone. If you could start taking your seats, that would be great. We’ll start in about three minutes. Morning everyone. If you could start taking your seats, we’ll be starting in about three minutes. (…)

S48: I have one of these. Okay. That would be great. Yeah. First part? I am. You are? I am. Yes. (38 seconds pause)

S21: I’d like to get started. To get started in a good way, I’d like to call up the elder to start us with a prayer and a welcome to the territory. If I could call Elder Deborah.

S45: And you are. (16 seconds pause) Thank you. Thank you. (45 seconds pause) I began the opening in my language, um, well, I’m, I’m not very technical, so AI is, like, even way far from me. So I brought my little posters here, you can see. I didn’t have time to put, give them my, my key, but anyway, that’s fine. But what I just recited was, um, in, in my language, it’s the ohondegariwadekwa, and it means the words that come before all else. And there was two instructions that were given to us by the Creator, and that was to always give, uh, give thanks and show gratitude for everything that we have that sustains us, and to honour what we have that sustains us. So every day, and this, this, uh, poster of, of the, of, um, creation was done by one of our parents in our early childhood centre, and is used as a provocation for all the activities and, uh, that we do with the children. And, and, and the other one with the circle, and, and the other one with the circle, that’s how we honour, and that’s our cycle of ceremonies. Like we just had over the weekend, like we just had over the weekend, last weekend, we had our closing of the gardens. So let’s hope that they’re growing, and we’re going to have a good harvest. Um, so I just wanted to, um, uh, to just say a few words. Um, this is my third time here, and, um, it’s always so exciting. Um, I don’t know really what I feel about AI, but I, I, I think I have an idea what I think about it. So, but we know that history has made it difficult for us to continue living as our ancestors did. And so today, we write, we rely on the knowledge keepers who have the responsibility to pass on that teachings, much of which is done through storytelling and ceremonial practices, some of which are not to be shared with the outside. (..) In my language, rona de riandaro, that’s the word for elder. (.) And it doesn’t mean older person, it just means one who knows the ways. And because of our history, a lot of us have lost that, and we have had to relearn that. And we rely on those who have, have, um, saved that for us. And so we, we continue to, to, um, to take it in, adapt it, adopt it, and make it our own. Um, my, my, uh, traditional name is Sagagohe, and it was given to me by my grandmother. (.) And it means going back, and who would have known? Because I wasn’t brought up with my language and my culture. I was brought up in the church. (.) And I, when I was going to school, I’d ask my, my, my, um, I asked my, well, my friends. They had names like picking leaves and flower, gathering flowers, and all kinds of pretty names. And I go home, and I, I, it’s my grandmother. (.) The name is going back. (.) And, and of course, it’s all, they don’t really say much, but they model it. So she looks at me, and she smiles. She doesn’t tell me anything else. Once I grow up, I realized the name was so important, because, um, there was fear in those days of, of practicing our, our ways. So she, she gave me that name, and it taught me that I would go back someday, and I did. And here I am today, sharing that with you. (.) So it’s very important to me. And so my, my elder mentor, who has passed now for two years, he’s passed into the spirit world. But she said, if you don’t feel comfortable, because you don’t know all the ways, she goes, well, don’t be, uh, embarrassed by it, because I don’t even know all the ways. I’m still learning the ways. So she said, your name is Saga Gohe, going back. So she says, how about you introduce yourself as Sahadi Gohe, Zinini Wa Eudora, going back to get the ways. So I can only share with you what I have learned up until now. My background is in child and family early learning and education. I began my training in the field of education, and then I switched to social work. (.) The training I received in the social work field became a tool that assisted me in realizing the effects of history on the well-being of our children and families, allowing me to reflect and develop ways that provided the support needed. (..) Today I remain on my journey, learning my language and practicing my traditional ways. So what I have to share with you is what I’ve been gifted so far. (….) I’ve come to realize that as I continue to relearn the ways of my ancestors in the world of today, that there are many different ways to understand Zinini Wa Eudora, our ways. (.) However, what many of our people are challenged with is how the effects of our history are reflected in our everyday lives. A challenge we face every day walking in two worlds. And so, when it comes to artificial intelligence, we can say that our ancestral intelligence in all its forms must be protected. Here we are again, continuing the challenge. artificial intelligence with ancestral intelligence. (.) When I began with Indigenous Pathfinders in AI, I became aware of this description. (.) Designed to inspire Indigenous talent to learn, develop, and lead the evolution of artificial intelligence, shaping a future marked by our contributions as Indigenous people. And it really resonated with me. (.) Last year, I related a question from Jacqueline Ottoman, who is the president of the First Nations University of Canada in Saskatchewan. She posed this question at a conference I attended. What are we doing to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into systems change? Making reference to a term called inescapable interconnectedness. My question then becomes, as Indigenous peoples, is our connection to AI inescapable? (..) Of particular note today is the data center debate. Hmm. I’ve just begun to try to understand this. all especially in relation to its water use, electric demand, rate payer risk, noise, air permits, setbacks, permanent jobs, tax incentives, public accountability, not to mention, quote, big tech now targeting native land for massive data centers, unquote. (..) And so it remains that we must continue to go back in order to go forward, bringing our traditional teachings forward, finding their place in the today. (.) Perhaps even more so now if we are going to continue to have an influence on our relation or have influence on or a relationship with AI. With that, I look forward to sharing and learning in the next two days. Niawa miigwetch. Thank you. Merci. (13 seconds pause)

S21: Thank you, Elder. Thank you, Elder Debra, for that warm welcome. (..) So my name is Mick Elliott. My family name is Qayton. I am a proud alumni of the Pathfinder program here at Mila, and part of the reason why we’re here today. (.) I am also very humbled to be here on the unceded ancestral land of the Garawange. (.) And often we talk about a land acknowledgement to talk about and read a script. (.) And that actually comes to bother me because I find that just speaking words off a page doesn’t represent what the purpose of a land acknowledgement is. (.) For me, it’s about what we do on the land, that shared history, acknowledging it, and what we actually need to do looking forward. What is our responsibility? (.) Why are we gathered here today? So I put forward to you as we’re walking through in this conference today, what are you going to take from this conference? (..) What are the three things that you’re going to learn from this conference? And action. (..) So as we’re walking through this conference and you’re learning and you’re picking things up, (.) think of three things and take them away and action them. That’s going to be your task. Because we have to do more than just say words, move to action. (..) Because this path in AI and this technological revolution is changing and shifting everything that we do. (..) And putting the weight on the shoulders of indigenous peoples in this room isn’t right or fair. (..) And we need everyone’s help to lift this and walk this journey with us. (.) communities bear the weight of many socioeconomic challenges and loading it up just on indigenous peoples yet again isn’t right. (.) So let’s walk together on this journey. (.) So a little more about me as I’m also doing my PhD in business. (..) And thank you. (.) I’m almost there. I’m so, so excited. So I’m about a year away, knock on wood. (..) And that’s a pretty exciting journey. There’s not very many of us doing that. But it’s an exciting journey there. And I see how important this conversation is. (.) So I’d also like to acknowledge the sponsors and the funders of this conference, this gathering. Mila, of course, and Abundance Intelligence. (.) TELUS. Information and Communications Technology Council. (.) BDC. (.) CBC. Radio Canada. (.) Heritage Lab. Magnet. Connected Minds. Native Montreal. (.) Thank you very much for supporting us and letting us be here today and gathering. (..) Thank you. (….) Some important housekeeping items. Bathrooms are just over here to the left. Should there be an alarm or any kind of safety issues? Of course, the exit that you came into off to the right. We have doors at the back here. Please be safe. Be mindful. (.) And that’s some of the safety concerns and stuff. But as we move forward now, I’d like to invite our drummers up and open us in song. We have Koina Mela. (19 seconds pause)

S07: Koina Mela. Koina Mela. Koina Mela. (..) Koina Mela Mela. Koina Mela Mela. (..) The song I would like to share with you today talks about life. of how life gets so, so busy and so many things happens around us that we forget to look at the tiny little things that surround us. (.) How we, once we appreciate those little things, family, friends, a house. You know, it shows how life can be beautiful. (40 seconds pause)

S44: Thank you. (50 seconds pause)

S07: The song I really, really enjoy singing is in honor of all the children that did not come home from residential school. Uh, we recently found and have a big acknowledgement of what has happened, um, with our past. (.) Um, so, it’s a song that was made by, uh, Fawn Wood. And it’s called Remember Me. (2 minute[s] pause)

S44: There I will be. (…..) So I, feeling free. (…) Remember me. (..) Down to. (.) And, and, and, you and me. (.) Thank you so much for that.

S21: Oh my gosh. That was a beautiful way to start. (..) I’d now like to invite, uh, the CEO and president of Mela up to the stage. Um, Mela is really wonderful. I, I’ve gotten to know Mela a little bit better where there’s about 1,500 or more researchers here at any time. And 150, uh, industry relationships that happen here at Mela. And that’s an incredible feat that, uh, Valerie Pisano here leads and coordinates. What a task. So if you could come up and say some remarks, uh, Valerie. (………)

S08: It is, um, beyond words how big of a privilege it is to be standing here in front of you all for this gathering. To see a full room of friends, partners, colleagues. Um, this is a truly exceptional event. And, uh, a great source of pride for myself and for many of us. Um, I’ll start by thanking, of course, Elder Debbie for your wonderful words today, this morning, but for the past three years. It’s so wonderful that you come back every year like this. To the Honorable Evan Solomon, thank you for joining us again. For your trust, your friendship, your support on this initiative and many others also. to our partners at Abundant Intelligence and to Lindsay Chartrand, the soul and spirit of this initiative and many other things that we do. (……..) We, um, was part of a small group of people, of course, headed by, uh, Yasha Banjo, uh, exceptional AI scientist, but more importantly, an exceptional human being walking this earth. And when we founded Mila a decade ago, almost a decade ago, there was kind of a sense that this thing called artificial intelligence, and back then we would even argue on the words. It was kind of strange as if the language of it was going to be definitive. Um, we knew it was going to be something. We knew that when it became something with these kinds of capabilities and powers and invitations and opportunities, it would be important for us to be able to harvest that for ourselves here in Montreal, here in Quebec, as Canadians, and more globally for the values we stand for in the world. We also knew it would confront us quite significantly as, uh, as the humans walking earth right now as a society, as a collective. And we, we didn’t know exactly what that would invite us into or challenge, um, it would present, but we said, okay, we’ll build something that can be, uh, a home, a place where we host some of these conversations, we capture some of these opportunities. Yes, we’re passionate about the science of AI, but more importantly, we’re hyper-dedicated to making sure that this progress literally benefits all. That’s, those, those are the two words that close our mission statement. A lot of organizations have mission statements, and for us, truly, uh, and, uh, I allow myself to say this in front of you as witnesses because it really is how we go about our days here at Mila. Our mission is our North Star. It’s our soul, it’s our, it’s our spirit, it’s in every one of our conversations, our debates, our decisions. And so about four years ago, thanks to the leadership of a few people, but namely Anna and Benjamin, I think he’s standing on the side, um, came about this idea of, hey, we say we’re for all. There are a lot of peoples. And, you know, maybe we can’t cater to all the peoples of the world, but certainly here in Canada, we should be thinking about Indigenous talent, Indigenous communities, Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous challenges. How do we bring that into everything that we’re trying to do at Mila? And so it’s with great conviction. This was, took us all of, I think, 15 seconds to say, oh yeah, we should absolutely be figuring out how to do this, and how to do this with Indigenous elders and communities and leaders and Indigenous founded and leading, um, organizations. And so, a number of you are in the room, uh, today, you will have the privilege over the next few hours and tomorrow, to hear from, you know, startup founders, to hear from the students who’ve been in our program all summer, to hear from community leaders. It really is, um, it really is beautiful that all of us are taking time out of the busyness of our days, as we were reminding in the drumming and singing, to just sit here and be with the potential of this technology and the choices that we need to make collectively. So, um, thank you on behalf of Yoshua, our founder, Hugo Larachal, our scientific director, who will be here later and tomorrow. All of our colleagues, just welcome, welcome, welcome to Mila. And I wish you all a wonderful gathering. Thank you. (………)

S21: Thank you. Thank you, Valerie. (.) Uh, now I’m just hands happy that we have Minister Elvin Seliman here. Uh, the Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation. Um, he’s, uh, the Canadian government has this vision and has appointed the very first, uh, Minister of AI. And I’m very, very happy and pleased to invite you up for some remarks. But we also have some gifts, both, uh, the past and the present Pathfinders. (.) So I’ve just spent two consecutive, uh, weekends, four-day weekends, on the land in Sundance. (.) And I have a braid of Sweetgrass for you. And I don’t know if people know what Sweetgrass is. I know we have some visitors from afar. But there’s three strands. And often they represent past, present, and future. (..)

S42: Oof.

S21: So, as I said in the opening remarks, um, there’s a lot of weight on Indigenous peoples. And there’s a lot of, a lot of us that are left behind. (..) And, um, I see this technological revolution coming. And there’s a lot of Indigenous people that are being left behind. And as we have these conversations, I feel the weight of our people. And I see the opportunities before us that AI could open many doors. It can bring education. It can, it can bridge many gaps. And the policy you’ve introduced is, is wonderful. (.) But I also worry that we are going to be left behind. So when I offer this to you, it comes with a great weight and a responsibility. But also in, in warmth and, and a sharing of, we will walk this with you. And I will walk this with you. And so, I would like to offer you this from the Sundance, from us to you, that we will walk this path with you. And I ask that, ask for your help. And thank you. (13 seconds pause)

S41: And minister, on behalf of all the Pathfinder students, I’d like to offer you this, uh, smudge bowl, cleansing bowl, with some medicine of sage that I’ve been taught by our elders and a little shell from the West Coast. So, um, thank you so much. And thank you, Mick, for your amazing words, OCM. (16 seconds pause)

S21: We’re just going to do a quick photo up on the stage, Minister. So I’m going to call up Deborah Regin-Rose. Can you join us on stage too and we’ll do a photo? (..) Yes, yes. And while we’re assembling, I liked some of these words, many of the words, of course. (.) I was out on the land and in my own home nation, and we were talking about the animacy of knowledge and how knowledge is a relative. And I think about this a lot and often in, in the scape of knowledge, knowledge reveals itself. (.) And, uh, right now as we were just ruminating about knowledge and the baby brother or baby sister data, kind of its reduced form, it’s like the elders were talking about how in cycles there’s often a big reveal and how knowledge reveals itself in its animate form. (.) And we were thinking, is artificial intelligence kind of one of the phase of, of how knowledge is currently revealing itself? And it was really kind of an interesting philosophical debate of what AI as a system is. (2 minute[s] pause) Okay, now we have the glamorous director of, I’m sorry, I can’t help myself. I love Lindsay Chartrand, but she’s the director of indigenous initiatives here at Mila, and I think she is just wonderful. She’s doing wonderful work here at Mila. I’d like to welcome her up for some remarks. (……..)

S37: Don’t she? Good morning, everyone. (.) Wow. How do I follow all of this? Um, I’ll start by introducing myself. (.) I’m Lindsay Chartrand. Um, as someone hopefully affectionately said yesterday, I’m part of the Chartrand Mafia. I’m, uh, those who are familiar with the prairies, I think, will understand. I’m born and raised in the grasslands of southern Saskatchewan in Treaty 4. Uh, my father’s family is Red River Métis, and I’m a citizen of the Manitoba Métis Federation. (.) For the Métis folks in the room, cousins, uh, my last names are Chartrand, Lissert, Grant, Brelin, among a number of other ones. Um, I’m a mom of three boys, and, uh, also in my day job, I’m the director of indigenous initiatives here at Mila. (.) I want to start by thanking Elder Debbie, uh, of course, for opening this space so beautifully and grounding us in a good way. (.) Uh, I appreciate you coming every year. This is such a special moment. I want to thank Minister Evan Solomon for joining us this morning. (.) Gwenna, who’s left, but I think she started the day by opening everyone’s hearts. Um, so, truly very special. (..) So, um, before we hear from this year’s Pathfinders program, who no doubt are very, very nervous and eager to get up on stage and show us what they’ve learned, um, I want to take a moment to not only speak to them, but to everyone who is a part of this growing indigenous AI ecosystem. (.) This summer, we had 22 individuals from communities and organizations across the country join us for seven weeks here in Montreal. Together, they explored both the technical and human dimensions of AI. (.) They learned about emerging technologies, wrestled with difficult questions around governance, data, and ethics, and developed projects for the benefit of communities created for having good social impact and demonstrating indigenous thought leadership in this rapidly evolving field. (..) Over the past three years, Pathfinders has become more than a training program. It has become an important part, I would say, even the heart of this emerging ecosystem. A place where relationships are built, ideas are tested, and future leadership is beginning to shape what indigenous AI could and should look like. And every year, the program has been a bit different. (.) In our first cohort, there was really a sense of hesitancy. People were curious, but understandably cautious. (.) In year two, participants arrived knowing that they belonged in these conversations, even if they were still figuring out what exactly the role was they were supposed to be playing. This year, the cohort came in ready. from day one, hands were shooting up and people were asking, what are we going to do about data centers on our land? They were asking about indigenous data sovereignty, language technologies, environmental impacts, governance, intellectual property, and how our nations can shape and not simply respond to the future of AI. (.) To me, this signals a remarkable shift. (.) And it also raises an important question. How do we meet this moment? This year, my own team has grown. Thank you, Margaret. Thank you, Jake. And thank you, Leticia, who’s somewhere in the room. (..) This is something I’m incredibly grateful for. But it has also meant that, unlike previous years, I haven’t been as deeply embedded in the day-to-day experience of the cohort. (.) While this growth has been necessary as both the Pathfinders program and our broader indigenous initiatives grow here at MILA, I’ll admit it has also left me feeling a little bittersweet. This summer, I wasn’t able to immerse myself in the community that we build each year. And I missed that. Those relationships and shared moments have always been one of the most special and meaningful parts of this work for me. (.) I think that this has made me reflect on a challenge that we’re all facing right now. As this work grows, how do we continue to meet increasingly diverse and evolving needs, particularly in a sector that prioritizes speed, growth, and profit, while maintaining the tailored, relationship-based, and community-focused experience that has always made what we do meaningful? I don’t think that’s just a Pathfinders question. I think that’s a question for the entire indigenous AI ecosystem. You can see this growth today at the gathering. There are familiar faces, yes, and there are also many new ones. There are also many people who asked to be in this room that we had to say, we’re not sure we have a seat for you. That’s exciting. (.) Some of the conversations over the next two days are going to return to fundamentals, while others are going to be breaking entirely new ground. The ecosystem is expanding in expertise, in ambition, and in possibility. (.) So the question becomes, how do we grow, how do we share, and how do we do it without compromising our values? (…) How do we build capacity and welcome new voices while remaining grounded in community, in relationships, and in the values that brought us together and here in the first place? I don’t have all the answers, but I hope over the next two days we can explore them together. And I think that the people that you’re about to hear from are an important part of that story. (..) So, with that, it is my pleasure to introduce to you the 2026 Indigenous Pathfinders and AI cohort and the projects that they’ve spent seven weeks developing. Just give them a round of applause. (10 seconds pause) We’re going to get started now with the Pathfinders pitches. We’re a bit behind schedule, but hey, we’re having fun. So, I’m going to ask our first presentation to come up, the language and culture team for Viz Recall, Kai Curry, and Sierra Bentons. (39 seconds pause)

S38: Hello, hello. Hello.

S24: For Viz Recall, I’m Kai Curry.

S38: I’m Sierra Bentons. (….)

S24: I’m learning my Indigenous language as a second language. (..) I’ve heard a lot of talk about how our polysynthetic languages are so dense that in one word we can convey ideas that take sentences in English. So, I thought I would start with unpacking one. (..) And I started with a word that I hear a lot in my community. (.) Tim Hulauch. (..) But when I look it up in the dictionary, English translation is super straightforward. (..) In essence, it just says world. (…..) I don’t find any indications of some complex and coded meaning in any of my language resources. So, where can I go from here? (.) Do I need to ask a fluent speaker, word by word, what does this really mean? (…) Our fluent speakers tell us that our traditionally oral languages are so descriptive that you can picture them. (…) They describe our environment around us and specify our relationship to it. (.) They instruct us to picture the scenes in our mind while we learn new vocabulary and phrases, (..) rather than memorizing translations or focusing on the written form. (..) But we need to have the word parts and their meanings documented to picture them. (.) And that’s where VizRecall comes in. (…..)

S38: VizRecall will work alongside fluent speakers and educators to enable a visual pedagogy for Indigenous languages. We’ll help learners build vocabulary by first breaking down the word parts and visualizing them separately to underline the encoded meanings. And second, instead of needing to memorize English translations, we’ll teach learners to recall the meaning using visual media. (..) So, to enable this form of teaching, VizRecall has developed a data structure that integrates visual context to community language databases. It’s called VizDB, and it has three components. (.) Visual dictionary, a visual media library, and a curated art style. So, let’s unpack this by walking through an example of how to make a data entry. (.) So, first, we need to identify the various word parts that contribute to its meaning. And in this case, we have four. (.) Then, we craft visual descriptions that evoke imagery and specify how each word part contributes to the fuller, contextualized meaning. (.) So, from here, we see that the meaning goes far beyond the English translation world, and instead, it contributes, introduces a world view. It expands to all living things, the Earth and sun’s orbits, the Earth’s certain soil, all while signaling the present. (.) And then, based on the visual descriptions, we curate visual media. And for this, we just need images in a simplified form. So, communities can either manually craft them, reuse media from VizRecall’s shared visual library, or they can speed up the process by feeding the English descriptions to an image generation model. (.) Then, as an optional third step, communities can define a target aesthetic and automatically apply it to their learning materials. So, for example, it could just be a color scheme, or they could choose to work with community artists to create a custom style grounded in their traditions. So, take Southern Machif, for example, where the style could be geared towards Métis beadwork. (..) Now, let’s move on to the database. So, after making an entry to VizDB, it’s sent to a community oversight committee for approval before publishing. (.) And for each data point, the community determines the access level. So, they could either choose sacred for the data to never leave the server, (.) restrict it to secured community websites, or they could choose to make it public. (.) So, the idea is that communities get to decide who sees what, while still making language content as accessible as possible for learners.

S24: Okay, cool. So, now you have your visual language data in VizDB. (.) How does it actually reach the learners and educators? (…..) Whether a community language house or an indigenous-led AI organization, we provide tools to interface VizDB with downstream applications. (..) Users can semantically search for language visuals, simply provide your target vocabulary, and specify if the media or descriptions should be returned. (…) We also handle requests for applying styles to images and word part segmentation. (..) When productionizing, users can either integrate directly with their own platform, such as an online dictionary, or maybe a read-along storytelling app, or they can partner directly with VizRecall to build on our preset app structures. (…….) Take, for example, LandRecall, an app intersecting visual learning pedagogy and land-based learning for ensirchen learners. Starting with Break It Down, students learn word part meanings based on their image pairs. (.) In the second game, students are learning whole words and phrases by choosing between images that reflect different meanings. In either case, never recalling from English translations while tailoring teaching to the context of their land. (….) The vision is simple. We are using ML to assist in language learning by mirroring the learning style we’ve had since time immemorial. (.) Visualization. (.) And it all starts with collecting the right data and making it accessible to educators to deliver it. By teaching the fluent speakers of tomorrow to deconstruct their vocabulary, we’re enabling them to learn the philosophies behind constructing them too. (…) In this future, second language speakers could be better prepared to help build new vocabulary and not need to borrow from other languages. (.) They’ll be able to name the new technologies, changing natural environments, and social norms of tomorrow. Aiming toward a future of living languages, not just preserved ones. (..) Lim-lim.

S37: The team is the education and capacity building team. I’d like to call to the stage Daryl Fraser, Jasmine Spence, Ali Lang and Corrine Hunt. (……..)

S25: Hello. (11 seconds pause)

S35: Morning, everybody. I’m Corrine Hunt. Gayla Kisla, Tansi. Hello, we’re Team Potage. (18 seconds pause) Indigenous students need Indigenous educators. They bring lived experience and community knowledge. (.) Our platform addresses short supply of Indigenous teachers by easing overload and streamline curriculum development. (…) Meet Kukum Anna, a Cree knowledge and language keeper who’s taught K-12 students across the North. (.) When her school introduced AI tools into her classroom, she ran into a problem. (.) The tools didn’t know her students, her community, or her culture. (..) Generic AI tools flattened cultural nuances, erasing the rich histories and diversities found in the human experience. So we built Potage for her and her future generations. It’s a community-governed platform that supports local knowledge and sovereign infrastructures. (.) Communities maintain absolute control over their data and their culture protocols. (…)

S12: Let’s zoom out. Anna’s problem just doesn’t stop at her classroom door. Take a look at these headlines. AI infrastructure is arriving on Indigenous lands. First step to make a decision on any of these pressing issues is being properly informed. And exposure to AI tools is an important part of that. AI education is sovereignty. (.) Why now? First, our communities are asking urgently. Second, one month ago in this very room, Canada launched its national AI strategy, AI for all. Portage delivers on the strategies, commitments to Indigenous peoples, protecting cultural expression, revitalizing languages, and ensuring self-determination over how AI is built and used within educational systems. Now, let’s get into the moose meat and bannock of what Portage is. (….)

S17: We’ll now demo the product using synthetic data and a fictional First Nation, which is based on our team’s intimate knowledge of our own communities. (..) Here’s how the product is structured at a high level. The community’s data governance policy controls everything else, and the community knowledge base enriches the quality of AI responses. (..) Together, these underpin four key features enjoyed by our app users, the teachers, and the students. (.) These are the AI teaching assistant, intelligent tutoring, lesson creation, and adaptive course creation for online modules. (…) When prompted for teaching assistants, a typical AI tool gives generic, often incorrect responses that lack cultural context. With Portage, the same question returns rich, nuanced answers, grounded in real data, stories, and lived experience, thanks to the community knowledge base. (.) When prompted for teaching assistants, a typical AI tool gives generic, often… Oh, sorry. Let’s look at how the data governance policy controls the AI’s behavior. (.) It can do things like share restricted information, a huge governance risk. With Portage, the community retains full agency over what constitutes an appropriate response. On screen, we’re contrasting same prompt, but now you’re looking at the gated response. (.) How do we support communities in building their knowledge base? We offer AI-assisted wiki compilation. (..) What you’re looking at on screen is a fictional community’s wiki. So the community decides who can submit content, who approves it. Here’s an example of a data submission moving through the required approvals. And how do we support communities in defining their own data governance policy? We start them off by walking through a ready-made governance framework based on standards like OCAP and OCAS, so they’re not starting from scratch, and can adapt it to their own principles. We also offer AI-assisted policy-building tools to help define oversight roles and answer key questions, all backed by hands-on consulting support to ensure success. The secret that sets us apart from all the tools that promise sexy innovation? (.) Boring AI. (.) Yes, our solution constrains the probabilistic behavior of the tools that Kokum and her students are so eager to use, wrapping them in integrated governance layers and sophisticated security protocols. (….)

S36: Nerds, this slide is for you. With Portage, only humans can make governance decisions, and only humans can approve community content. AI helps compile the rules and knowledge and writes answers that are auditable, safe, and trustworthy for teachers and students. Our system design is rigorous, but the details are outside of the scope of this conversation. We invite you to visit our landing page, which will be linked on the final slide, or to pick up a printed info package afterwards from any of us. (..) As you can see, Education Tools is a very crowded space. But no one offers anything close to our Indigenous community-directed stack design. Finally, a product that Kokum can trust. (.) This is made possible by our team’s decades of collective experience engaging and delivering for Indigenous stakeholders. (…) If we were to win today, we are dreaming big. With Canada’s national AI strategy rolling out, this feels like a very pivotal moment for Indigenous people, but more broadly Canadians in the world, to imagine the future of AI. We would start by partnering with communities to begin their data governance onboarding, and with governments at every level, self-governing, local, national, and international, who are already deeply advancing AI literacy. We want Indigenous people there early as an active voice shaping this conversation. I will leave up these QR codes for a moment for you to scan through to our LinkedIn and our website. Hi, hi, thank you for having us. Please come find any of us after to talk. Gaila Kisla. (13 seconds pause)

S37: Fantastic job. (.) Up next, we have our Governance and Data Sovereignty Group. I’ll call Anthony and Ganadahi to the stage, please. (15 seconds pause)

S23: Indigenous people are 5% of this country, yet represent one in three people in a recent national homelessness count. (.) This gap is not about a lack of will, it’s about a lack of available information. We need that data inside our nations, where it belongs. (….) Data Sob AI, the first sovereign-centered governance tool. Ask your records, secure your data, and begin nation building. (.) But to realize that future, we must first solve a hidden administrative crisis.

S51: Imagine waking up every single day, working as hard as you can, but knowing your children will still go to bed without clean drinking water. Not because you didn’t try. Not because our leaders are short of effort. Because the community lacks the administrative tools and staff. (..) Record-static decisions await. Governance capacity decides the quality of life. Administrative overload creates delays in decision-making, and those delays take time away from strategic planning. (…) So why not ChatGPT? (.) We tested ChatGPT, and it makes things up. Even Stanford University claims that the top models are wrong 22% to 94% of the time. (.) Nobansiris puts a nation’s files in someone else’s cloud. (…) Two designs. Theirs. Your question leaves the territory, it is processed by someone else’s server, and it feeds someone else’s model. That is the illusion of control. (.) Ours. Your question, your records, your machine, a closed circle. (.) Their mission is engagement. The vendors is profit. Ours is nation-building. (…) Now follow one question through this map. Everything that is in the dashed line stays in the community. (.) A worker asks a question, it searches the sovereign vault. (…) The nation’s own records. It syncs community’s constitutions, laws, and policies. (.) The community rules decide who may see what. (..) Then the truth check. No source, no answer. It flags a person instead. Every correction a person approves stays in the system. Offices get smarter. The results, a document the nation can use. (……) We use a smaller language model adapted to communities using community-approved information. (.) Because it is smaller and purpose-built, it can run locally. Language models require a lot of compute, and it can be expensive. (.) We learn, we keep ours lean, efficient, and built for the right purpose. (…) It connects to the community-controlled sovereign vault, so it does not need a massive amount of training data. (..) We also plan to make our models open-weight and release the models as open source, giving communities greater transparency and control. (…)

S23: We built our interface to be user-friendly. When the user inputs their prompt, data solve evaluates. (..) A certificate badge is shown when there is an alignment with the nation’s constitution. If a user asks for sensitive information, our model abstains. It does not try to make things up. Instead, it suggests how to properly engage and earn community consent. (…) Ask it how to use cultural knowledge. It refuses. (.) That information is sacred and held by the knowledge keepers. (.) Drop in a city’s plan and compare it against the nation’s policies. (.) With one click, create a briefing note on how that plan impacts your community. (….) So what’s next? Partnerships. It means tailoring the model to the nation’s needs. Then we pilot. Evaluating and fine-tuning for better accuracy. (….) Big AI builds in black boxes. We build in relationships. (..) We will offer setup, training, and support. The cost? The price of an office laptop. (.) This is an asset the nation owns, not a service it rents. (….) There are over 600 First Nations communities. Over a million people. We start with governance because trust grows through relationships. This June, Canada announced its AI strategy with sovereignty at its center. (.) Chiefs and Assembly have already said it. Data sovereignty is an inherent right. (..) For everyone else, this is a market. For us, it’s home. (…) The two-row, the dish with one spoon, data governance older than Canada. We are not adopting their future. We are continuing ours. (..)

S51: Let’s stop asking leaders to start from a blank page and give them the tools to build their own future. Sovereign AI for the first sovereigns. On your own device. On your own land. On your own terms. Thank you. (12 seconds pause)

S37: Let’s have the, oops, sorry, just social justice and society group come up. Troy, Chase, Cole, and Devon. (32 seconds pause)

S19: Gets easier, right? (..) Yes. Ask any care practitioner what’s actually breaking them. And it isn’t the work. It’s the paperwork. FieldNote is a case management platform that gives workers back time for client care by speeding up documentation. (.) It turns rough session notes into structured case files and turns those case files into the next right action. (..) Here’s the shape of it. A single case note takes 20 to 40 minutes to write. Many frontline workers are carrying three times the recommended caseload. (..) It turns, oh wait. Half the work day is lost documentation instead of the people in front of them. (.) And the cost isn’t shared evenly. For example, indigenous children make up 54%, or sorry, make up 8% of indigenous kids, but 54% of those in foster care. And when the system meant to help them is drowning in admin, the families this system has already failed are failed the hardest.

S15: So we were deliberate about who this is built for. FieldNote is built for community care, family service agencies, friendship centers, and small therapeutic practices. Not enterprise level hospital systems with a two year procurement cycle. We build for where the paperwork hurts the hardest, and for workers everyone else’s software skips. (..) FieldNote is an assistant just for that. It understands shorthand, fragmented, written, or typed notes, and turns that into a complete file. Every field in place. FieldNote catches what’s missing by understanding where the need is greatest and where the risks are. As well, it knows what happens next. It reads today’s notes and turns that into complete files and surfaces what has to happen this week, closing the loop. Therefore, telling the calendar what is needed next and where the need is greatest. (.) No other platform closes that loop. 20 to 40 minutes a note turns into under 10. See six clients a day, and that’s nearly two hours back every single day. (…)

S03: The product. (….) Signing into FieldNote, the practitioner can see today’s schedule, intakes, suggestions, and follow-ups. Dynamic AI scheduling and monitoring help reduce the administrative burden practitioners face. Open a client file, and the AI overview brings together client history, outstanding actions, unresolved follow-ups, and recommendations. (.) That’s what makes FieldNote more than just a calendar. Instead of searching across notes, calendars, and reminders, practitioners can see what matters, track what comes next, and act before something gets missed. (….) Here, the practitioner can draft or dictate their conversation. The generation process uses a code-guided private language model and requires four structured outputs. Case note, source information, missing flags, and next actions. (.) The model organizes wording, expands approved abbreviations, maintains scheduling, and updates source control panels. Control and traceability are front and center. Nothing is final, exported, or scheduled until the worker reviews and approves it. (….)

S19: With data this sensitive, sovereignty is in the foundation. Notes are stored locally, siloed per client. We’re aligned with OCAP and CARE, with government patient data laws from day one. Founded in Canada, kept accessible for 10 years to meet retention rules. We’re not only promising a bulletproof system, we’re promising an honest one. (.)

S53: But don’t get us wrong. We think this platform is great, but we value a human-centered approach. Therefore, all communities can opt out of AI features should they choose. The right to hold community data is earned, not assumed. That’s why we co-design our hosting options, pilot to build trust before we scale, and ensure the platform flexes to fit each clinic’s unique intake process. (…) Building that trust paves the road ahead. We start by automating note synthesis, expand into regional referral networks, and in the end, scale to provide national case guidance all on one unified platform. And ultimately, it comes back to that one number, two hours. That is the time given back to frontline care, every single day, for every worker. (.) This is Field Note, a case management system built to return time to community care. Privacy first, hosted right here, in Canada, and in communities. Thank you. (15 seconds pause)

S37: So we’ve got environment and climate next. So, Jacob, Ruth, Anna, and Mishra. (18 seconds pause)

S25: Good morning, everyone. We are Landlands, a community-owned cumulative effects platform which helps Indigenous nations see clearly how decades of industrial development has changed the land they steward. (…) In the name of innovation and progress, often framed as closing infrastructure gaps and promoting economic independence, Indigenous nations across Canada are handed strict deadlines to decide what gets built on or near their land. (..) So, decisions get made fast, often only looking at one project’s effect on the land. (.) However, Indigenous communities and their territories do not experience these effects singly. They experience the compounding weight of decades of development. (..) And over time, these impacts can erode constitutionally protected rights to hunt, fish, and trap across their territory. This process has repeated for decades because no fast, affordable, community-owned tool has ever existed to measure a project as part of an already strained ecosystem. (..) In 2021, Blueberry River First Nations challenged this process and made history when the Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled that decades of industrial development, not any one single project, had infringed a treaty right. (.) The key evidence for this case came from cumulative effects mapping. But, it took six years to prove. So, we asked ourselves, what if this evidence could be proved in minutes instead of years? Let us show you. (…….)

S11: We recognize that First Nations, land stewards, and legal teams working on these sorts of cases need fast, reliable, and verifiable access to data. That’s what we provide. (.) The data required to answer this question is already 100% public, which means we could start building this for our nation tomorrow, without having to wait for new studies and new access. The issue, however, is that it’s scattered across separate government and organizational websites in all sorts of different formats and file types. That makes it messy, hard to piece together, and slow to reach. (.) Time spent hunting for it is not time spent on the work that actually matters. (..) To solve this, we use a custom data pipeline and AI summarization to create a one-stop shop for cumulative effect mapping. We provide a map for quick looks, as well as links directly to the source to accelerate legal and analysis work. (….) For data sources, just to name a few, we use provincial industry regulators, Environment Canada data, satellite data, and human impact research, all on top of the usual map layers that you’re used to. (.) With the platform up and running, it constantly checks for new data to come in, and it can automatically send an email to First Nation offices and land stewards when it detects a new industrial disturbance. (..) For demonstration, here’s an email a First Nation office received about a new industrial disturbance in their chosen area of interest. (.) We can click on the link provided in the email to go to and view the new disturbance. We can easily see that the new disturbance is a new oil well that has recently been licensed, but not yet drilled. Our LLM agent generates a quick summary of the feature, and below we can see the links directly to the source data. (.) Within seconds, the app allows you to pinpoint disturbances, get information based on verifiable sources, and see potential ways forward. (.) The map also allows you to quickly visualize the extent of industrial disturbance over time, with time sliders allowing you to go backward and forward over time. (.) So that’s the tool in motion. An alert will land, a nation will click through, and in seconds they’re looking at a disturbance with the source data one link away. But the tool itself isn’t the point. What matters is who’s holding it, and that’s why this changes things. (.)

S29: So, we didn’t set out to build another mapping tool. Right now, when a nation needs its evidence, it hires a consultant to rebuild the Crown’s own record, and then pays again the next time. So we put the land departments back in the middle. (……) We let the AI do the slow work, reading the packages, polling the footprints, and servicing changes across thousands of public records, which actually changes what a land office is actually doing. So, it’s not proving what already happened anymore, it’s deciding what happens next. (..) We’ve always been stewards of this land, and that work didn’t start when a referral landed in somebody’s inbox. And it shouldn’t get spent proving something that has already happened on the land. (….)

S31: So, our next milestone is the one that we haven’t built yet.

S29: And that’s why we’re here today. Right now, the alert only covers everything that goes to the front door. But we are researching new open-sourced radar satellites that see straight through the canopy below, into the soil. (.) And we are… We know that the data is public, and that problem, though, is the signal from the radar satellites comebacks full of noise. So, it takes a model to read that noise and train it on the actual community’s landscape. real-time intelligence in the nation’s hands. Our responsibility never stopped at a reserve boundary or a provincial line, and those lines were drawn around us. We’ve been caring for the land for generations, and before anyone thought to draw a line on it, we’ve always been stewards of the land. (..) So, Landlands doesn’t decide what happens to the land, it gives people who’ve cared for it the longest the evidence to decide for themselves. So, we’re Landlands, and we thank you for having us today. (14 seconds pause)

S37: Our final Pathfinders group, the health and wellness group, I’d like to invite Joseph, Leslie, Morgan, and Deborah to the stage. (41 seconds pause)

S52: Imagine living with some unbearable pain from something entirely preventable. Now imagine waiting months for treatment, simply because your community doesn’t have access to the specialized care you need. For far too many Indigenous families across Canada, this is the reality. (…)

S41: This is Howard. (..) Howard was 12 years old, living in Nunavut, when a simple, untreated cavity became a severe tooth decay. (.) A dentist determined he urgently needed a tooth removed, but treatment didn’t come. (..) During that time, Howard stopped eating. He cried day and night as his mother watched him lose 15 pounds. (..) We’ll let his own words tell the story. (…….) No child should ever believe death is easier than tooth pain. (.) Yet Howard wasn’t alone. That same year, nearly a thousand children in Nunavut were waiting for dental surgery. (..) Today, hundreds still are. (…)

S09: 85% of Inuit children aged 3 to 5 experience tooth decay. Yet only 38% of children between the ages of 6 to 11 receive an annual dental health checkup, contributing to an astonishing 97% of adolescents living with tooth decay. (.) Distance, limited access to care, and the legacy of historical trauma within healthcare systems continue to delay treatment until small problems become emergencies. (.) And yet, the problem doesn’t stop there. Much of Canada’s national oral health data, including these statistics, is nearly two decades old with little to no follow-up data. We’re not only facing a gap in access to care, but in understanding today’s needs. So what happens when nothing changes? (.)

S22: Pain becomes trauma. Problems become permanent. Delay becomes crisis. (.) Howard’s story illustrates how preventable oral health problems can become serious when left unrecognized. As oral disease progresses, it has been linked to systemic conditions including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and even dementia. (.) So the real question isn’t how we treat oral disease, it’s how we prevent it. (.)

S52: That’s why we built SayCheese, the first AI-powered oral health platform designed to facilitate prevention for Indigenous people through education and to generate community-owned health data. (.) It provides an approachable first step towards understanding oral health risks while encouraging earlier intervention. (..) To facilitate the process, we designed a simple three-part solution. First, a quick photo. Second, a questionnaire built with dentists. (.) And a personalized AI oral health assessment. (.)

S22: SayCheese was designed to make oral health support simple, accessible, and trustworthy. Users can create an account or continue as a guest before completing a short questionnaire. (.) They then upload a photo combining their responses with computer vision to create a more thoughtful AI assessment. Users received a personalized summary with urgent, moderate, or low-risk findings and an explanation of each result to build trust and transparency. They can then ask our AI assistant questions at any time. They then receive recommendations, next steps, and trusted resources tailored to their needs. (.) Everything is accessible from the home screen. Users with an account can securely track the oral health over time while guests can still view a summary of their latest assessment. Finally, we’ve included a guiding breathing tool because we understand that oral health can be stressful. Every feature was designed to make prevention easier, more personalized, and more accessible. (..) A meaningful solution requires thoughtful implementation. (.) Our roadmap builds responsibly. Validate the AI, pilot with communities, refine, and only then can we expand. (..)

S09: Building technology is easy. Building trust is the challenge. Through informed consent, every user chooses how their information is used. guided by OCAP and the care principles, communities maintain ownership and governance of their data. (..) Anonymous community insights reveal barriers to care and help communities drive meaningful change. The data doesn’t just describe communities. It empowers them. (..)

S52: This model wants to grow. This model wants to grow. Connecting dental, traveling dental providers to the communities that need it the most. And extending to other underserved communities across North America. (.) Our future is a future where geography no longer determines oral health outcomes. (….) Success isn’t measured by the number of downloaded apps. It’s measured by healthier children, empowered communities, and a healthcare built on prevention, partnership, and health equity. (…) We began with Howard. (.) His story reminds us that the greatest burden wasn’t a cavity. It was the absence of prevention. (.) Together, we have an opportunity to change the next story. Thank you. (13 seconds pause)

S21: Wow. (.) Okay. That was a Pathfinder last year. I was crying yesterday in some of these. So, I was really moved. I’ll simply say I think they leveled up from last year. (.) But, we’re going to take a break now. So, break time, come back at 11.05, please. Sharp. We have some time to make up. So, enjoy your break. Once again, bathrooms are over here. Enjoy your break. Thank you. (11 minute[s] pause) Take your seats, everyone. You got one minute. (1 minute[s] pause) This break. (.) Some coffee. (..) Got the bathroom break in. (…) Just kind of, got to be excited. Come on. We got the digital futures coming up here. I do have a little bit of an update. Because this session, we had one of the guests. (.) Has had some unfortunate travel interruptions. They could get everyone to just take their seats. We need to get rolling. (..) Hello. (……..) //S49: I know.// Come on. (..) Everyone take your seats, please. We’re just going to get started here again. (..) So, one of our panelists couldn’t make it. The fires that… (……) There we go. (.) Come on back and have your seats. Let’s get rolling. (25 seconds pause) Please take your seats. Would you like to get going, please? (……)

S50: Thank you. (..)

S21: Thank you, Minister. (11 seconds pause) Come on up. (20 seconds pause) All right. We’re just going to get going then. So, we have up and coming right now. The Digital Futures Engaging Indigenous Youth and AI. (.) Unfortunately, one of the panelists, Danielle Boyer, can’t make it yet. is on their way. (.) Unfortunately, the travel was interrupted by fires. (.) It’s okay. Safe. But, you know, it’s on their way. And we’ll be part of a… We’ll present their project later tomorrow. So, we just have three up here, but they’re going to be so amazing anyways. And we’re going to fill the time, but we’re going to shorten the panel a little bit. Our moderator is Lisa Matthias, right? And she has the Vice President of Canada’s Information and Communications Technology Council. has 20 years building partnerships across industry, academia, and government in tech and innovation. I’d like to give a warm welcome to her, and she’s going to introduce the rest of the panel. Thank you very much. (……)

S32: Does this work okay? Can you hear me?

S33: Okay, great. (.)

S32: Well, as we begin, I would like to give a warm thanks to Indigenous youth, elders, knowledge keepers, educators, community members, and partners joining us today. So, thank you so much for being here. It’s such a pleasure to have everybody in the room today for these really important discussions, and it’s been so moving so far. So, I really, really am happy to be here. Thank you for contributing your voices to this important conversation. It’s a privilege to learn from you, and I hope today’s conversation reflects the importance of engaging Indigenous youth in shaping the future of AI. This is a great opportunity to explore a topic that has not received nearly enough attention in the AI conversation, which is engaging Indigenous youth in AI. Today’s discussion recognizes that youth spans a broad spectrum, from secondary school to young adults building careers, raising families, pursuing post-secondary education, or leading their own communities. Each group will experience AI differently, but all deserve the opportunity to participate in shaping its future. This conversation is about more than technology. It’s about ensuring that Indigenous youth have equitable access to the infrastructure, connectivity, and digital tools needed to participate in the AI economy. It’s about building AI literacy and education pathways that are accessible, relevant, and community-driven. It’s about ensuring that Indigenous language, culture, and knowledge systems are respected and preserved, not simply represented, as AI technologies evolve. And it’s about governance in terms of who owns data, who benefits from its use, and how Indigenous communities maintain agency and control over technologies that increasingly affect their lives. To unpack these questions, it’s my absolute pleasure to be able to introduce our outstanding panelists, Christine McLott and Joel Gamache.

S33: Thank you. I’ll let you both introduce yourselves. (….)

S26: Hey, good morning, everyone. My name is Christine Mallott. I am here today as a high school teacher. I’m a curriculum developer, and I’m also associate publisher of Portage and Maine Press. And High Water Press is our Indigenous author imprint. I got into this conversation when I started my master’s degree in education. And I started it during COVID, being a teacher that had to move all my programming online for half a year. I started to ask myself, like, how are Indigenous youth engaging with technology? And what are some of the challenges and benefits of engaging with technology? So that started my research on navigating digital spaces in Indigenous education. Because I started in 2020, I was mainly focused on things like virtual reality, augmented reality, and digital immersive spaces. Of course, it wasn’t until a few years later that ChatGPT launched, and I really started to think about the potential of artificial intelligence. And how that’s going to shape and potentially disrupt education. So that’s kind of what brings me here today. I’m excited to talk about my research. I’ve also had a lot of opportunity to work on projects, helping to train AI models in Indigenous value systems, to create lesson plans, teaching youth about artificial intelligence and technologies, and really trying to understand and to add to the conversation about working with these technologies in a critical but also hopeful way. (..)

S32: Beautiful. Thank you so much, Christine. And Joel, we’d love to hear about you.

S16: Yeah, thank you. (….) So my name is Joel Gamache. I direct ACTUA’s Indigenous youth in STEM programming. (.) ACTUA is an organization that focuses on uplifting youth in STEM, and creating up and breaking down the barriers for youth accessing STEM. the work that I do is really targeted on pathways for Indigenous youth. (.) Formally, I’m an educator. (.) I’ve passed high school administrator. I’ve done some work in school board. And so, yeah, I’m very passionate about the voices for our young people, and particularly creating space for them, for those of us who are Indigenous in those places and spaces, because it’s not always welcoming at times. And so, really, when I do this work now nationally, that’s the lens that I bring. (.) I’m a relatively new father. I have a one-year-old son. And so, when I’m looking at these pathways and these opportunities, I really have him and my nieces and nephews at top of mind for, okay, what are the next steps for them? What are we needing to think about? What advice do they have for us? And so, that’s the lens that I’m bringing to this space. I’m really excited to share that. And really, there’s a lot that we can learn from our young people. (.) And so, we’ve been hearing a little bit about this from some of the programs that we’ve been doing at ACTUA. And so, yeah, I’m looking forward to sharing that.

S32: Thank you so much. Congratulations on the birth of your son. And it’s really wonderful to look at this perspective as a parent as well. So, thank you for bringing that lens. And what you’re both doing is so important. And so, thank you for your wonderful work. So, we’ll get started with the questions. I wanted to start by asking you, when you think about Indigenous youth and AI, what excites you the most and what scares you the most? So, I’ll start with you, Christine.

S26: Sure. I mean, I think what excites me is the endless possibilities. When I think of possibilities of Indigenous youth engaging with AI, I think about having them have tools that can help solve problems in their communities. I think about them, you know, using these tools in creative ways, like new ways to learn languages, new ways to tell stories, new ways to engage with others and learn about culture. But what, I guess, scares me a little bit or what, you know, I’m hesitant about is really thinking about, like, sovereignty, issues of privacy. Of course, well-being is a huge topic, not just in social media, but with artificial intelligence and chatbots now integrated into, you know, a lot of platforms that youth use. And so, those are some of the big questions, I think, that we still have, that we have to figure out. But I like to kind of take a balanced approach between some of those hesitancies and also the excitement. (.)

S32: Beautiful. Thank you so much. Joel.

S16: Hey, yeah, thank you. Really, I’m excited and reassured at one thing is that our young people are already bringing up topics of concern that we’re discussing. And so, when we talk about things like environmental impact, stewardship, language ownership, how are we learning and recreating pathways for the next generations. And so, they’re already thinking from that community-oriented mindset. And so, that excites me because we know that they have these concerns and it’ll be their generation who solved that because that’s what they’re interested in. I think, look at the parallels that we’ve seen within the recycling movement. these were all grassroot-oriented that were really originating from our young people saying, look, we have a concern about this. (.) So, that excites me that we should be asking our young people more, what are you worried about? You know, my niece, she’s eight, and I asked her this not long ago. And she had that, she thought about it for a minute. She said, you know, I’m really worried about what type of food will I eat when I’m a grandma? (.) Where does it come from? She’s thinking about this. Wow. You know? And so, thinking about those worries, that excites me. Because I think we can really tap into that passion. (..) And what am I worried about? Many things. things. But, you know, if I was to really deduce it down, one thing that really stood out to me most, we actually had done a bit of a research project looking at asking educators and our young people, including Indigenous youth. And really, it was that 90% of our high school aged youth are saying that they’ve reporting engaging with AI content and AI in general, these tools. But really, 65% of them are learning about how to engage in those processes through social media platforms. And so, they’re learning about these platforms, these pathways, not from educators. leaders. And so, I worry about those pathways as to how are we articulating the importance of data sovereignty, of language, of the revitalization of cultural norms, these pieces, if we’re not able to control or monitor those educating platforms. And so, I’m really excited by some of the pitches that were done here because it offers some opportunities for that. And those are originating by our young minds, right? These are our future innovators. So, yeah, a bit about my concerns. I mean, I have others. I can talk more about those, too. Really thinking about the uneven distribution of risks. And so, that, I think, is how I could summarize some of my concerns. thinking about tech access, AI readiness, for example, deducing that further down to digital literacy. Thinking about accessibility, because we know it’s not even across, you know, economic status. If we’re looking at the complexities of the dynamics within demographics. Thinking about age, you know, access from age. I think about cultural bias. It’s also being a really big concern for me. And then, further there, looking at data governance and just governance in general. So, yeah, I think if I was to kind of deduce down into categories of concern, you know, if I’m really looking at that systemic thinking, those would be my main ones.

S32: That’s really insightful. Thank you, Joel. That kind of is a good segue into my next question. And I’m wondering, what does meaningful AI literacy look like for Indigenous youth? So, beyond learning how to use AI tools, what knowledge, skills, or ways of thinking are most important? And how do we ensure we’re building youth autonomy rather than dependency on AI tools? So, critical thinking, those types of things. So, I’ll start again with you, Christine, if you don’t mind. Sure. (.)

S26: Yeah, I mean, I think what you were saying about access and opportunity is a huge one. We know, you know, even through my research, I was interviewing educators up north and they said, when it’s cloudy, like, we don’t have internet access. And so, thinking about, you know, the gap in opportunities to engage with the technologies. And then, my kind of concern is also thinking about those educators. A lot of the educators that I interviewed did not know what AI was. They obviously knew it existed, but they didn’t know how it worked. They weren’t comfortable teaching about it in the classroom because they had limited knowledge. And so, if we think about how do we educate our youth, like, it has to, we have to start with the teachers themselves, right? Parents and the general public needs to know about these topics so that they can, they can pass down that information. I think a big misconception that people have is that young people, like, are just, like, natural with this technology, right? They pick it up right away and they know how to use it. But they’re using it at a very, like, surface level, right? They’re using it as consumers. They’re not really thinking about some of those big topics. And so, yeah, I would say, I mean, it starts with educators and adults knowing about this. We can’t assume that young people are going to know how to do this on their own. One thing from my own teaching practice is even thinking about typing. You know, we stopped teaching typing lessons in elementary school because we’re like, oh, youth, you know, they type all the time. They know how to use this. It’s intuitive. But if you’ve ever watched a young person type on a laptop, they’re, you know, using two fingers. So I think we really have to get back to those fundamentals. (.) You know, not just typing, but really learning, you know, basic, like, math and English, right? As a high school teacher now, a lot of my writing assignments are done in the classroom. No technology is used. I don’t assign an essay for homework anymore because they’re going to be tempted to use those technologies. And so I think it really just gets back to the basics, the foundations. (.) youth even, you know, I watch them use AI. I do try to, you know, have AI opportunities in my classroom and teaching youth how to use it in responsible ways. And, you know, what can, how can it enhance your writing and those kind of things. And even the prompts that they ask aren’t quite exactly what, you know, they’re hoping to get out of it. And so, yeah, just really teaching them foundations is super important. Um, but also equipping educators and the people responsible for teaching youth about these topics with, with that knowledge and understanding. Um, and again, you know, that critical lens is super important as well.

S32: That makes a lot of sense. How about you, Joel?

S16: Yeah, geez, thank you. I really appreciate that. The, I, I think of a, what you were saying made me think of a stat that I, that I had looked up, uh, recently, uh, from Stats Canada, looking at, um, how many indigenous educators exist across public schools in the country. Um, and it’s less than 2% of educators are indigenous. And so, that’s, you know, across the country. That’s outstanding. And so, yeah, we’re, you know, leaning on our educators and we really need to rely on them through that. But if we’re wanting to also bring in that indigenous lens to, towards this, this education, that’s a key indicator is that we can’t rely on these, uh, education pathways because the indigenous perspective is not built within it. So, really thinking about, okay, how do we, how do we do that? But if we’re really looking at AI literacy, um, within, within this question, you know, I’m looking and thinking at, for our young people, we don’t want them to approach this. And it’s exactly what you’re saying here, from, like, an unquestioning adoption. Because often they’re going through these motions and engaging with these tools, um, in the same way that, that maybe I did when I was going through school. And, you know, we’d go to typing class and learn to type because they said, you know, these computers are going to be super helpful for your future. And we did that and we went through, but informing our young people to structure and question these tools and how they’re formed, identifying bias, identifying bias in data sets, knowing which data sets will be most efficient to answer the questions as, uh, in alignment with what you were saying within the prompting. How can we prompt and re-prompt to get down to the question that we’re trying to ask with this tool that can deduce information for us and with us? And we are now the guides to that. To say, okay, we’re going to ask this prompt, actually no AI data set, I don’t want you to, to go down this path. I want to re-prompt that because I want you to focus on this because this is important to me. and using it in that way is really the opportunity for a storyteller. You know, we hear these, I think of these ancestral stories that were, that were taught to me almost that are like prophecy nature. Um, and so every time we ask and tell that story, we learn something different because of the way we’ve prompted it and the way that that question comes to mind. And so it’s important that that story stays the same and doesn’t shift and that it doesn’t imagine that something else had happened. You know, these are the opportunities that we have within AI is that, yeah, okay, we can use that as a tool, but really within the critical thinking aspect. And so I think that’s the most important area for our young people is to have that critical mind. We see that within some of the, the, the hazards that come with, with AI is the, what I’ll call, uh, cognitive offloading. They’re, they’re not, um, footnote chasing anymore. They’re not, uh, confirming that these are sources that are verifiable. Uh, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re almost over-trusting at times. Many of them are not. And they’re questioning it and they actually choose to say, no, I won’t use that. I choose not to. But burying our head in the sand isn’t helpful either. Being informed about these decisions, about where we can put our efforts and time, is what we want our young people thinking about. Because if we’re not positioning ourselves as a contributor to it, then we really become part of, of that, um, of that bias within it. Because now we’re, we’re almost, uh, reaffirming that, yes, this is the way we want to utilize this tool. And so, yeah, I agree with building on that there. Thank you.

S32: Yeah. Great point. Um, this is my favorite question. I can’t take credit for it. Uh, it’s the Shartram Mafia that fed it to me. Um, but I, I just love this question. So, um, we often talk about what we need to teach youth. But if we flip the script, what can indigenous youth teach AI developers, elders and tech leaders about designing the future of this technology? So I’ll start with you, Joel, this time.

S16: Jeez, thank you. Our young people, they can really teach us a lot of things. But what I really admire them for is that our young people are often choosing to step away from opportunity because it disaligns with their values. And so that commitment to it, particularly when it comes to harm or perpetuating stereotype or perpetuating racism, our young people choose to disengage with that. And they can teach us a lot about that. And I think about within my upbringing, I had the understanding that we had to endure a lot of these harms to get to a place where we could find success. But our young people know that differently. They know, no, we don’t have to. And that can look like to a lot of people just, um, a blanket disregard or it can look like laziness or it can look like, um, disengagement that they’re choosing not to engage. You know, it looks like ignorance or arrogance, but that is not what our young people have. It’s really they’re looking at it from a value-based assessment. They’re getting a little bit deeper. And so using that as an opportunity to ask them, you know, what are you value about these next steps? How can we use this as a tool to reinforce that within, uh, within your approach or within where you see yourself in the future? Um, but there’s also an opportunity for us in there is that helping them see where, helping them see themselves in those future opportunities as well. Tech is a good example of that. There was a recent study, um, through ICTC done in Alberta about, uh, Indigenous recognition, Indigenous representation in the tech sector. It’s a really good, really interesting study looking at how Indigenous young people are not seeing themselves. They’re self-selecting out of these fields because they don’t see themselves represented in there. And so looking at, you know, I think we can learn a lot about, about the values that our young people have, uh, within that space.

S32: That was really powerful. And thank you for the plug as well. Happy to share the article with anybody that would like to read the research. Uh, Christine, I’d love to hear from you on this question.

S26: Yeah, I mean, instead of, um, Indigenous youth, you know, teaching AI developers, I would love to see Indigenous youth becoming AI developers. Um, so really thinking about, again, like, what, what problems do you face in your communities and how can AI, you know, be a tool? Um, and I think the Pathfinders presentations did, like, an amazing job at that. Um, you know, seeing Indigenous young people, um, grapple with some of these big issues that we’re facing in society today. And creating tools that can help solve those problems, um, doesn’t take away the human aspect of it. But also, you know, just using these tools in responsible ways. And so I’m excited to see what they have for the future. It’s hard for me to imagine because, like, I’m no longer an Indigenous youth. Um, so you’d have to ask an Indigenous youth themselves probably. But, um, I’m really excited for the future. I think there’s a lot of, um, positives that can come out of this.

S32: That was a great point, and, uh, I was blown away by those, uh, Pathfinders projects. So, good example. Um, my next question is, um, related to data. So, AI relies on data, but Indigenous communities have long advocated for data sovereignty and the protection of Indigenous knowledge, as we’ve heard this morning. Um, how can we embrace AI and support AI literacy among youth while ensuring communities retain ownership, control, and agency over their knowledge and data? So, Joel, would you like to start on that one?

S16: Yeah, sure. (..) It sounds a bit dualistic, the question, right? Like, how can we do one without the other? Um, and so, I think there’s, there’s a lot of hesitancy within, within the approach. But I think taking that, that patient and really intentional, uh, approaches is important. But, you know, I think that if we’re really looking at, to me, it really deduces down to governance. And so, and really structuring within that work and helping our young people to know that there are alternatives. Um, and to, into organizing data, into organizing our thoughts, into articulating how they’re gone. So, looking at, you know, it doesn’t all need to go into one single large language model that we can really structure and engage in this way, but how it’s governed and we have the opportunity for choice within that. Um, and communities can choose to engage with that content or not. And that is respectful and important. And there are some things that don’t get entered into that space. And there’s, it’s no different than there are some things that we do, uh, within certain engagements, within ceremony and things that we don’t do. And it’s because there’s a reason for it. And so, just because we can doesn’t mean we should. And so, that’s where I start to think about within, within that approach. (.) Yeah.

S32: Very insightful. Thank you, Joel. Christine, what are your thoughts on this? Yeah. (.)

S26: I think, um, it’s important for communities to have ownership and say over the data that the models get trained on. Um, you know, community ownership, not only over the content and the data, but also like the infrastructure and the government systems is really important. Um, these are all things that were brought up in the Pathfinders presentations. Um, you know, I, I was hired by, um, a nonprofit organization, Connected North, that works with, um, indigenous youth. And they, you know, they wanted to me to train these AI models, um, on indigenous value systems. So, what would, uh, tutor and, uh, like chat GPT-like tutor sound like if it were trained on a community’s, um, value systems? And so, they hired me. I’m, like, indigenous. I’m Anishinaabe. Um, Swan Lake First Nation is, is the community that I belong to. Um, but I didn’t feel comfortable, you know, doing this for all nations across the country. I’m, like, maybe my own, I don’t even speak for my own nation. Um, so, we really had to grapple with some of those questions. Like, who, who is the person to do this, right? And, of course, it’s the communities themselves. Um, they should define, you know, what knowledge they want to share. And what knowledge they, that shouldn’t be, uh, used in training, right? And I think a lot of communities are, are really good at this, right? Our most sacred stories, um, are not written down. They are shared orally even still. And so, I think just really keeping those, keeping the sacred, um, out of AI is probably really important. And so, yeah, community ownership is, is really the way. Um, funding is, is another issue, right? Oftentimes, um, communities or organizations receive short-term funding to create and, and do, like, a pilot project. Um, but to create, you know, a truly, like, sovereign AI system, um, would probably create a lot of, or take a lot of funding, um, and long-term funding would be the, the thing that’s needed.

S32: I love those answers. Thank you so much, Christine. Um, so my last question is, if we were sitting here five years from now and had truly succeeded in engaging Indigenous youth in AI, what would success look like? So, what’s one action, whether we’re youth educators, governments, industry, or community leaders, that can, that we can take to help make that vision a reality? So, it’s a two-part question. So, I’ll start with you, Christine, for this last question.

S26: Yeah, I, I love this question because, again, I’m, I’m so hopeful. I’m so excited. Um, just for my interviews that I did in my research, like, there are so many opportunities, uh, for this technology to assist and, and help our communities. Um, and so, you know, I see education transforming, um, really exciting educational opportunities, engaging, um, disengaged youth, um, engaging youth, you know, with various abilities. And so, I’m, I’m really excited for the future. Um, I think we would know that it’s a success if, um, Indigenous youth were engaging with these technologies in a responsible and critical way. Um, even, you know, right now, um, I, you know, as a teacher, like, watching some of my youth, um, go to a website, and they’re automatically, like, accepting all the cookies. And I’m like, wait, like, why are you doing this? Take 30 seconds and just deselect everything. Um, so even something as simple as that is just really getting them to, you know, pay attention, be critical, um, don’t give all their data out, you know, for, for free or, or at all. Um, and, and I think we would know if it’s a success if our Indigenous youth, um, aren’t negatively affected in terms of well-being. Um, of course, you know, with even social media and, like, the upcoming social media ban, um, we know that social media is detrimental to developing brains. And so how can we create AI systems that are responsible and maybe even promote well-being? Like, what would that look like? And how can Indigenous youth be a part of those conversations? Um, that’s the thing that I think will be really important, um, next, coming up.

S32: Such great points. Thank you, Christine. Joel, we’ll end with you.

S16: Hey, sure. (..) The, uh, can you remind me of the two parts to your question?

S32: Yeah, of course. Um.

S16: I’m focusing on the advice, and we’ll start there.

S32: Yeah, so, um, the first part is good, too. Um, so if we were sitting here five years from now and had truly succeeded in engaging Indigenous youth in AI, what would success look like to you?

S16: Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah, thank you. (.) To me, I don’t think five years is far enough of a vision.

S45: Okay.

S16: I think, I think success is a series of points of success, not an end point. It’s, it’s something that we can continue to strive to. And so, having more representation from our young people’s voices that see through, that are continuing to engage in that pathway over time. So, our young people will be the future elders informing these structures and seeing true to what advice they had received from their elders now. And so, we need to continue to, to have that. So, I’m thinking generations. Uh, and that is a series of points along the way. That can’t just be, um, okay, we’ve got there, we’re done. Um, and so, that, that’s a piece that I’m, that I’m thinking about when, okay, what would it really look like is that we would have ongoing engagement that’s not panindigenized. That’s really looking at unique, very particular hyper community focus that has the option for opting in or opting out at their choice. That is true governance. That’s, that’s true sovereignty. Within that saying, we get to decide at every step along the way what this is used for, what it’s not used for, what we enter, what we don’t. And that, that is not up to someone else to decide for us. And so, that, engaging with that choice and that, that’s not just, okay, we’re, we’ve met our success, we’re done. It’s, you know, that’s something that’s done, uh, always and along the way. Um, and so, my advice maybe is, um, thinking about, uh, almost like decision-making criteria. (.) Um, and I had a few other things, kind of, uh, pieces of advice that I was thinking of, but my dad made me think of this one. And it almost comes down to, to a government structure. And I learned this, uh, cause I grew up on a farm. Um, and I learned this operating heavy equipment as a young child. You know, now I think like, why was I doing that? Dad, I was nine. Um, but that’s the way it was. Uh, anyways, he, he explained that as we’re moving through, and all this rain was making me think of it, um, as we’re moving through territory that’s potentially hazardous, rather than knowing, okay, I have to get there, I gotta get over there, collect information and gather data to help you decide if you should keep going, not what gathering data am I deciding to turn around. So you’re not gathering data to say, oh, it’s too dangerous, I’m gonna turn around now. It’s no, I have making my decisions along the way. And I’ve used this to govern a lot of my decision making, particularly within hazardous terrain. I do a lot of, uh, outdoor engagement, land based engagement with our young people. Do that in hazardous terrain, mountainous terrain, along treacherous waters. And that’s the decision making process. It’s almost a risk averse decision making process. Governs our decision, but rather than making decisions that could lead towards confirmation bias of saying, no, I, I, I need to keep going. I’m looking for answers to decide why I should keep going. No, I’m looking for reasons to turn around. And so as we’re building these tools, how we passed already decisions that are leading to hazards that we could have mitigated if we approached it in that methodical way. Um, and so a, a bit of a differencing in decision making. And, you know, that, that notion of hurry up and break things, that really puts that at odds. But I think there’s a lot of benefit that can come to it. And we’re at that crossroads now where we really need to take that relational intentionality. Um, and that, that decision making, uh, I, I would say that that’s a piece of advice. So I can talk more about how that’s really helped me in my life to someone wants to come and sit for tea. Um, but, uh, yeah, that’s maybe my piece of advice, you know, just because we can doesn’t mean we should. And let’s gather the information that helps us decide where we need to slow down.

S32: I’ll definitely take you up on your offer. I learned so much from both of you. Thank you so much for this really insightful conversation. And thank you.

S21: Now I’d like to welcome up one of our keynotes, Dr. Sosey. Crystal Sosey is, uh, Denny. Uh, Denny. Genes, geneticist, and bioethicist. (..) Bioethicist. (.) Bioethicist. Ha, ha, ha, ha. (.) She’ll get it for me. Uh, she’s an assistant professor at Arizona State University, co-founder of the NATO Biodata Consortium, and the first indigenous-led biobank in the United States. Wow! Woo-hoo! (.) And she’s gonna help me with that word, bioethicist. (..) Okay. Welcome. (..)

S31: Uh, yeah, thank you so much for the introduction. Akiahat. Thank you so much for having me here. Uh, my, uh, co-founder and colleague, Joseph Irshad, is also in the audience over here. It is my honor to be here in front of you, and I’m going to talk really quickly because my talk has been truncated by, because I’m between you and lunch, let’s be honest. Uh, so I’m going to try to get this, uh, 12 minutes shorter, which is about 33% reduction time. So, uh, I will go in to say that my, of course, our peoples, we are the southern Athabascan individuals. Uh, long, uh, stories of oral migrations and narratives coming through Utah Promontory Point to the southwest, where we, as Diné people, Navajo people, are kind of the eyeballs, uh, compared to the other desert dwellers. But I also love this slide because, uh, my favorite aunt, I have many aunts, but I have a favorite aunt, who is my mom’s sister, actually married into the Sitsika peoples, and I have family, actually, in Albert, uh, Alberta and, uh, British Columbia. Uh, but my, both of my sides of the family are, are Diné from several generations back in, uh, both parts of the Western Agency in Arizona. I come to you as a geneticist, genomicist, very humbly to say that we have a large national scale, uh, project called the All of Us Program, that when it started, uh, to advance precision health for indigenous peoples, also had concerns related to engagement of indigenous peoples, how to do it, how to do it well. And it’s with a stomach not churning, uh, um, huge lift and burden that now leading this, these analyses, and it’s something that I do to try to bring our, this national scale endeavor that’s gonna move with us or without us, but to try to do it in a good way and try to think about data sovereignty in all these different situations. Uh, but one of the things that I, I love doing is bridging genomic research, bioethics, and also in my training as an informatician in genetic epidemiology into these new emerging spaces of artificial intelligence and machine learning and building data systems that work for our peoples as opposed to the other way around. And it is with great honor that I come back to Arizona State University where I did my undergraduate, my first master’s training as the first indigenous geneticist, which is huge when you consider that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So, if you know of an infamous lawsuit of the Havasupai nation suing the Arizona Board of Regents, ASU is one of those institutions, which is a fact that I dropped, like a mic drop when I did my job talk at ASU. that if you want to return benefit and change the course of trajectory of how research is done with indigenous peoples, you need to hire indigenous researchers at your institutions. Uh, this is the part I’m going to switch, skip over because basically it’s stating that I really at a young age patented the technology for targeting to, uh, a tumor targeted device to image, uh, with ultrasound and deliver drugs to early sites of cancer growth. Um, but then when I went to top rank institutions, I had this really huge question of, can my people afford this? Uh, we talk about, uh, the, the, the, the, the, the pathway between, uh, how we go from bench to bedside, but we don’t ask enough, where does community sit in this model? And where does translation fit for these promised therapeutics that utilize our data if our people cannot access or afford the therapeutics that brought about this innovation to begin with? And this is the exact same question that I bring forth with you as we think about AI and data, and we think about innovation in all of our various spaces, but also related to our sensitive data, related to our DNA and our health data that should be held so private and secure because it links us all as community members and is such a rich resource for innovation and quote-unquote discovery of non-Indigenous peoples onto our stories. So how do we then think about data solutions that we build that don’t just reify this same story of extraction? Because every single study, every single grant that’s in the space of precision health starts with this common trope, that in order to ameliorate health disparities, we just need more Indigenous peoples recruited. And I’m tired of this. I am tired of this because it ignores this innovation pathway and ignores the fact that our peoples do not have equitable access to preventative health to begin with. How can you promise us the next advances of genomics, medicine, precision health, if we don’t have access to basic healthcare? (.) And how can we advance beyond this narrative of you need to be participating in studies in order to improve your own people and actually switch it? Rather than a victim-blaming or coercive message, how do we then build systems that our people operate and govern and have decision-making authority and then situate other people to ask us for permission and access if we so want to grant it? This is important. Thank you. I want to be clear when I’m talking about AI in healthcare. What I’m really talking about is machine learning systems because this is how these systems learn off of our data. It’s what determines what the system sees, what it optimizes for, whose outcomes it measures, whose outcomes it does not measures, whose benefits, who is harmed. And when we think about this pathway from community health data to machine learning, to algorithms, to diagnoses and treatment access, our community’s data is already on this pathway. And the question is whether or not our community governs what it becomes. And this isn’t essential because when I convene a gathering of indigenous genomicists worldwide for the first time at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, which is an epicenter historically of much of colonialism in science and genomic medicine, and then to bring indigenous peoples to this space for the first time in history, I also invited a practitioner who had worked in tribal healthcare settings who stated very boldly that genomics medicine will never be a benefit to our people amid all of these real infrastructural barriers that are rooted in structural racism, including poor infrastructure, aging facilities, limited personnel, lack of access to clean water. water. I have another story about how in the state of Arizona, the states held hostage access to tribal water rights to open a new hospital. They held hostage the opening of a new hospital that would deliver healthcare just because the state wanted the tribes to sign over water rights to feed into larger urban cities away from our own city centers. And when we think about data centers and also thinking about what is required to cool them, water in a very scarce desert, and yet data centers are opening all the time in Arizona, the link is real, whether or not we think it, and it’s all rooted in power dynamics. This is something that was told to us as indigenous geneticists by pharmaceutical companies when we started the Native Biodata Consortium. where we came to them, or actually they came to us asking for access to data sets, asking how many people across what phenotypes, what conditions, and then Joe and I came prepared with a list of conditions that primarily impacted us. Primarily it’s childhood disorders, metabolic conditions that are highly prevalent in our peoples, and we asked companies, why don’t you use our own people’s data and our DNA to study conditions that impact us? They said, indigenous peoples constitute 3% of the majority population. It’s not profit generative for drug companies to utilize our data to study the conditions that impact us. So if you think about what it means to democratize data, or what it means to expand health equity, think whether or not these are actually being used in genuine manners, or whether or not it’s used in buzzword terms to gain access to our data to fund their bottom line. This is the same calculus that’s being embedded in AI systems, what it gets trained on, what it gets optimized for, and whose outcomes get measured, and this is important. Going to the talk, data has descendants. This is also tied with the fact that data has afterlives. Whenever we sign a consent form, whenever we broker these research partnerships in the beginning, what we’re not thinking about once that data gets deposited is all the secondary uses related towards other studies, incorporation into artificial intelligence, machine learning, training models, etc. But unfortunately, the engagement often stops at consent, but the data use does not. And if communities are only involved at the point of recruitment, that is translation. It’s not translation, it’s extraction. And when we think about the data life cycle, we often think only about consent, collection, dissemination, it turns into a paper, and then that’s it. But when we actually should be thinking about is consent across the entire life cycle. Otherwise, if we’re only thinking about engagement at one component, we’re engaging with the term in a limited perfunctory manner that is actually engagement washing. Here is an example. This is a situation in which a sitting bull, who is a very historic member, it’s meaningful to many communities. Basically, the researchers that were involved in sequencing a hair of a lineal descendant from sitting bull, only got the consent from one individual, did not seek consent of the related descendant communities, even though they were told for over a decade that they needed to. The first time that they tried to publish, it got rejected. And then the second time, it finally landed in science advances. And this is their ethics statement, as exactly worded in their publication, that it stated that permission or consent was not sought from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, which would be the modern day tribe, a sitting bull. However, the tribal chair and the tribal historic preservation officer of the tribe were informed of the study and its results in August 2020 via email. They have not replied. So one email, the height of the pandemic. (.) The tribe had more important things to worry about, like the health of its people and its workers. They sent the tribal research chair members home. This surpassed an ethics requirement of engagement to seek publication in a high impact journal? Horrific. So, when we think about this though, when we think about these journeys, when we think about this story, these narratives of DNA on a particular locus as it relates to health, it’s so ignoring all of these structural barriers related to health. It’s related these lack of data infrastructural decisions. It’s ignoring resource access. This is a problem of power. It’s not a problem related to health. Now, here again, I come to you humbly as a person from the States, acknowledging that the same questions that I’m seeing into the South, you all are also grappling with here in Canada. And last year, the Assembly of First Nations all came to an agreement that there needs to be engagement in precision health initiatives that collect genomics data from people. And the fact that engagement had not been done or sought from the very beginning is actually a travesty. This is actually a thought reified in a publication by Dr. Jessica Kolopnik, who’s a member of Cree Pegues First Nations, who actually stated that without Indigenous expertise, leadership, and governance, data will fail to address Indigenous priorities, produce less relevant research outcomes, and even worse health outcomes. So when I think about community engagement, we think about this as a spectrum. We should always acknowledge that tribes have the ability and the authority and the power to say no. But also, engagement is not just coming to our communities at one point and then taking all the data, holding it within the universities and institutions. We also need to think about the right side. We need to think about what it means for a tribe to have complete ownership and authority over these research questions and the outcomes and ultimately the data. And think about where community can be embedded from this pathway from bench to bedside. So I come to you with some actual translatable avenues that we as Indigenous scientists have sought when we started the Native Biodata Consortium, which is a nonprofit that is also a tribal research organization. It started with just the simple fact of how do we rematriate samples from legacy studies back to the community. And then the community members asked how can we ensure that this data is actually used for research questions that we’re interested in, not just other individuals. And then from this grew a laboratory, from this grew a CLIA-certified pathway to actually facilitate testing of SARS-CoV-2 at the height of the pandemic so that we could have a pilot surveillance program by actually situating the close proximity of our laboratory to the people that were actually impacted by this condition. Samples did not have to be sent across the border or the state border. It didn’t have to be, it could just be tested within the tribal nation that data held, tested, and results returned within 24 hours. And we’ve been able to expand and utilize this resource to think about expanding research in rheumatoid arthritis and other types of conditions that primarily impact the tribal members. And we really thought about in situating a high throughput sequencer here the first time, again, first time ever that we know of that a sequencer of this capacity and scale has been situated in a rural tribal nation. And so far we’ve been the last. But in terms of how we have then thought about the data itself, a data server that’s small and flexible and built from the ground up can be very nimble. It can be co-designed with thinking about how to operationalize data and digital sovereignty from the beginning, utilizing machine learning approaches. like thinking about blockchains, situating tribal members as authority nodes, approving, rejecting, and auditing all data transactions, and then therefore gating secondary data usage only from consented partners and trusted partners. Not just thinking about broad consent, now thinking about adaptive consent, now thinking about dynamic consent. how do we build electronic data portals where participants can see who is having access to the data and having aggregate summaries of what their data is being used for delivered back to community members and allowing them to change the types of studies that they want to have their data be used in. And of course then federated approaches that enable algorithmic modeling on community-held data stored on independent nodes without that data ever leaving tribal jurisdiction. So those are some papers that we have published in and high impact journals on these concepts. But really, honestly, the questions, the better questions, start from tribal members themselves because who better than us who have seen in real time the impacts of colonial changes on our lifestyles, on our ways of living, on to our health outcomes to drive these research questions. But also, of course, in true indigenous fashion, we’re thinking seven generations forward and asking how can this data be used to co-localize jobs on a rural tribal nation rather than having this talent being exported? How can we situate that talent back into our communities and regenerate a data economy that is embedded in science approaches and research approaches? And thinking about community benefit in the long-term economically and not just thinking within the narrow constructs of a paper that is defined by us. We have been able to restart another repository for housing federally procured data. And we were able to, with $10 million, create a different tribal data repository that actually situates federated approaches. With this, we’ve been able to expand in partnership with Maddie Sanders, who is Muscogee. She is the official artist for the Oklahoma City Thunder. So if you’re into basketball, which I am not, you know what that means. But she is a great graphics artist. And she helped us situate, like, these four videos that are about how to build a tribal data repository, how data systems work, how to think about broad, informed, and dynamic consent, and also how to build trust models with tribal nations. And short, for six-minute videos that are available on YouTube and a Creative Commons license, this is done strategically so that tribal instructors can just embed this into their curricula and not have to make this content themselves. And it’s way better to do these six high-impact videos than it is to do an hour-and-a-half webinar, which was the original plan of some of my colleagues. I’m glad that we did a different route. And I’m proud to say that’s narrated by my own PhD student, Karina Hernandez Hernandez, who is Mexican-Indigenous. But the part that should interest lawyers in the room is, and also tribal leaders, is that we’re thinking about building template policy language on data sharing, data ownership, memorandum agreements, how to build a tribally-led data architecture, how to build these research approval pathways. These SOPs are available on the TDR.org website for anyone to use, so that no one has to build this legal infrastructure from scratch. And we engaged with as many tribal lawyers as we had access to. And there needs to be more lawyers, I will say. But those that work for us. So if you’re looking for a career pathway, that is something to consider. But I want to say that it’s not just important to build the box, it’s important to have conversations about the box. It’s important to think about how the data infrastructures and repositories that we’re building. Also think about engagement, education, and policy. And lastly, I want to say what this room can do differently. Claim our authority. We already are the experts. We don’t need to be invited into these systems. We already build and can build the ones to replace the colonial-built ones. Look around what’s already been built. We can think about the blueprint exists. There have been many awesome solutions that have been presented before us. All we need to do is think about resourcing and scale. We need to direct change, demand governance at all levels, not just participation. Stewardship, not just sovereignty. Design, not just consultation. We do not need to be legible in anyone else’s AI systems, but we need to build systems that are legible to us. Yeah, thank you so much. Here are our partners before. (………) And shameful plug. My laboratory, which is now the largest indigenous laboratory in an R1 institution in the U.S. Southwest region. (12 seconds pause)

S21: Bioethicist. I would like to blame it on my creed tongue, but I can’t even do that. Thank you so much. (..) So, it’s lunchtime and a few things to state first. At the back, we have something being set up. So there’s going to be a montage that’s being created and capturing some art of what’s going on over these two days. That’s supported by Heritage Lab. Also, over the lunch, if you want to bead a lanyard. If you go down the hall on the left-hand side of the room here. Set up is Native Montreal. Another one of the sponsors. You can go and do some crafts. Bead a lanyard. So therapeutic. So amazing. By all means, step away. You can do that through the two days as well. Highly recommend. (.) I’m going to call Debra up. Debra Baker, one of the pathfinders. She’s going to sing and bless the food and meal today. (..) Debra? Okay. I’m happy to. (..)

S41: My ancestral name is, my English name is Debra Baker. I’m in the Squamish nation. I live in the village of Capilano. I’m so happy to see some familiar faces and to meet some new faces. (..) I’m going to share a song, which is actually from one of my relatives, from the Kwakwakiwak people in Northern Vancouver Island and villages. And some of my relatives are up here on the stage as well. Corrine is also from the Kwakwakiwak, Namgis, and Fort Rupert area.

S40: And I’ve asked my fearless leader, Lindsay, to come and join us.

S41: And I’m actually going to put her on the spot and give her the drum. (…….) And I’m going to need your guys’ help. So, I’m a ta’a. In our language, ta’a is grandmother. I’m the grandmother to the pathfinders. No, just kidding. (..) I also wanted to mention that this song, I went on tribal journeys. Is anybody familiar with tribal journeys on the West Coast? Yes. Hey, Marissa, come join us. She’s one of my rattlers too. Come on, come on. And a drummer. Marissa from TELUS. Let’s give her a round of applause. There we are. (…) Where’s my other fearless leader, Norm Leach? We went to Paris, France together. We didn’t get married. He married somebody else. (.) So, on that note, each and every one of you, you make a difference in the lives of so many people. Keep doing what you’re doing. Stay safe. Stay awesome. And, Margaret, come on. (….) With all that’s going on in the world today, we need allies like you. We need connections, networking. It’s such a great opportunity. (.) Mila Institute for AI. Let’s give it a big round of applause. (…..) Let’s also thank our Pathfinders, everyone that’s made this possible today. For each and every one of you to be here. Those of you that are online, please come and visit our fearless leaders here and make a difference because we need you. At the end of the day, we all need you. So, on that note, I need your help, as I mentioned. If you could please stand, for those of you who can stand. Debbie, please come up and join us. (.) And, I want you to put your two hands in front of you. (.) And, I want you to rub them together. (.) Can you feel that? Can you feel it? What’s that called? Now, do this. Create a ball. What is that? (.) A what? Oh, energy ball. Now, take that ball and throw it across the room. Gently. Don’t hurt anybody. Now, take your two hands again. Rub them together. And, give yourselves a big hug. You deserve that. Some of you have flown and your arms are tired. So, you need to keep taking care of yourself. On that note, yeah, there we go. Mick flew here, too, from Calgary. Yeah. Okay. So, we’re going to clap together. (…) Oh, can you feel it? Can you hear it? (..) That’s what we’re talking about. Ancestral intelligence. Where’s the minister? We need him on the stage, too. (..) Oh, Lindsay. Lindsay’s doing awesome. (..) Morgan’s got the mohawk rattle that I made in Six Nations. (..) Okay, ready? Anybody else know this song? Come and join us. We’ll make room for you on the stage. (.) Ayo! (…)

S40: Ho, ho, ho, ayya. (………)

S41: Ho, ayya. This is the journey song. One of us is on a journey. Sometimes, like, life gets hard, but at the end of the day, you know that there’s always somebody in your corner, whether it’s your ta’a, your grandmother, your best friend, your brother, your sister, your cohort, your teachers. The list goes on, but there’s always somebody there to support you on your journey. (……..)

S40: Hey, ho, ayya. (……..) Hey. (………)

S41: One final word. I have to fly home tonight. We’ve lost many loved ones in our community over the last few weeks, and there’s a service tomorrow for my Uncle Spin. So, I really want to be there to pay respects to our family and Tsleil-Waututh Nation. Also, I want to thank the Creator for bringing us together for the food we’re about to eat to nourish our body, spirit, and minds. So, let’s eat. OCM.

S46: Thank you. (10 seconds pause)

S21: Just one more thing. If we could still have Will. (..) Glasses. Alice. (..) I need my glasses. (14 seconds pause) And Leslie Canavera. Canavera, please come to the front. We just need to talk to you. Thank you. Check. (46 minute[s] pause)

S48: Mic 4. Check, check. (…..) Mic 5. Check. Mic 5. (..) Mic 6. Mic 7. Awesome. (..) Let’s test the podium. (..) If it goes well, check. Hey. Hello, everyone.

S50: You could just start making your way back to your seats.

S21: We’re going to announce the winner of the Pathfinders. We could start making your way to your seat, please. That would be amazing. Thank you so much. I also have a pair of sunglasses that have been found in a lady’s washroom, if these are anyone’s. (.) I have them up front, but also please make your way to your seat so we can get started. We have the Pathfinder winner that we’d like to announce.

S50: What do you think?

S21: We’re going to change up the look this afternoon. (……) If anyone’s lost a pair of glasses, I’m happy to give them back. Otherwise, it might just be the look for the afternoon. (……..) You could take your seat, please. We’d like to get started. (58 seconds pause)

S50: We could get all the Pathfinders up to the front, please. (..)

S21: And the judges. (….) All the Pathfinders should be up here, as well as the judges, please. (…) Judges, Pathfinders. (23 seconds pause)

S50: I really want to start. (..)

S21: Alright, we’re going to get started here. So, I would like to, once again, introduce the glamorous director. (…) Oh, come on, Lindsay. I would like to introduce Lindsay, once again, who’s making this all possible. She likes to be pretty humble about this, but, you know, when Lindsay asks, we all show up. All she has to do is ask. And she is really, really wonderful. She makes all this possible. (.) And it is amazing what she makes happen. She’s a dear friend, and I really appreciate her. And it is what she’s done today, what she continues to do. She is a catalyst for change, for Indigenous AI. I really want us to all raise our hands and give her some applause. Lindsay. (….) And she is glamorous. Thank you. (.) I’ll hand it off to you. (…)

S37: Thank you, Mick. So, I’d like to, first of all, thank our judges for volunteering their time over lunch to deliberate over what, no doubt, was a very, very difficult decision to make. I hope it was fun. I hope there wasn’t too much tension in the room as you narrowed it down. If I can just ask, I’ll name them quickly, just so that we can thank them. And then I’ll ask the judge who’s going to help me announce the winners up to the stage. So, first, Anna Yan, my former director and good friend. Thank you for being one of our judges today. Leslie Canavera. Cohen Wu. I don’t see Cohen Wu anywhere. Oh, there you are. Oh, my gosh. My eyesight’s getting dodgy. Karim Jerby. Where’s Karim? Ah, there you are. Thank you very much. (..) And last but not least, I’d like to invite Peter Lucas-Jones, who’s flown a very long way. And I’ve then asked other favors of him in this process after a long journey. So, I would like you to help us announce the winning team. (.)

S42: Kia ora tātou e te whare. Hari anā haute haere mai ki Wainganui a koutou tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā koutou katoa. It’s been a really hard decision to make. Um, the judges, we deliberated, and everyone heard the wonderful presentations that were so purposeful. Um, but what we’ve made is a decision for, uh, who was number one. And number one receives, um, a cash prize each of $500 and the opportunity of a residency here at Mila to further develop their, uh, proposed solution. So, I’d like everyone to give a round of applause. (….) To Landlens! Haere mai! We only pick one, but with so much good talent in the room, we couldn’t help ourselves but pick two. (…) And the, uh, the second pick, uh, was very, very close. And I would like to, uh, just announce that there will be another residency that will be co-funded by Connected Minds. And so, please, give a round of applause for Say Cheese. Kia ora mai anō tātou. (22 seconds pause)

S50: Thank you. (………) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (.)

S37: Wonderful. Um, I was so excited when this news came out of the judges’ room. So, right on, everyone. We’ll get a picture here with the winning team. And then, uh, we’ll call up the rest of our, our Pathfinders, uh, from this summer who did just truly outstanding work. Uh, and, and so we’ll just pause for a moment.

S50: And a round of applause to our two winning teams. (…….)

S37: The ones that are… (12 seconds pause)

S24: Um, now we would like to call up the rest of the Pathfinders, uh, cohort. So, Sierra. (……..)

S17: Chase. (12 seconds pause)

S29: Anthony. (13 seconds pause)

S37: Lydia. (…..) You do that. (….) Julie. (……..) Cole. (….) Kareem. (15 seconds pause) Well, Deborah’s already on the stage. (……..) Devon. (….) Kai. (………) Ganatele. (….) Troy. (13 seconds pause) Jasmine. (…) Ali. (….)

S50: All right, guys.

S37: Here’s our 2026 Pathfinder cohort. A final round of applause. (.)

S24: Uh, Deborah would like to present the Pathfinders with a gift. (….)

S45: I just wanted to present you with, um, some sweet grass from my own garden. I plant my own sweet grass. Um, and the meaning of it for… It consists of 21 strands. They’re not braided. (.) They’re three sets of seven. They represent the mind, body, and spirit as, as well as the past, present, and the future. The first seven honor the seven generations behind us, acknowledging the ancestors and teachings. The second seven represents the grandfather’s sacred or traditional teachings. Love, respect, honesty, courage, wisdom, truth, and humility. (.) And the third seven, looking forward to the seven generations yet to come, reminding us of our legacy, your legacy, and the impact of your actions on the future. So, go with that and congratulations. (28 seconds pause) Thank you. (………) Good job, all right. We can all win. Thank you. (24 seconds pause)

S52: What is that? I knew that the name of the grapevine is the one.

S50: It was! (21 seconds pause) Oh, I’m trying to take the bar. (..) Oh yeah, I’m good. (..) We’ve got perfect. (………) We made John Vanjurs. Oh, come on. (16 seconds pause)

S21: Oh, dear. (………)

S50: Is this the best one? (.) Uh, I don’t know. (21 seconds pause)

S21: So congratulations Pathfinders 2026. We’re going to move on. It’s now on to the fireside chat. Kindling for the future. Lessons from the text journey. I would like to welcome to the stage Sarah Wolfe. Wonderful, wonderful Sarah Wolfe. (.) She’s a registered nurse and midwife. She’s also the external director at McMaster’s Wilson College. Senior fellow at Massey College. And she also does a lot of work in the indigenous data governance space. Welcome. And where’s her panel? We also have Michael, Running Wolf, and Keone. Take it away.

S30: Welcome. We’ve had zero prep for this. Just setting the context, setting the expectations early. (.) I think the biggest challenge I’m going to have is keeping these two in line. (…) So thank you for the introduction, Mick. I am Sarah Wolfe. I’m based in Toronto. But I’m an Anishinaabe from Brunswick House First Nation, which is in Treaty 9 territory, Anishinaabe-Ascii territory in northern Ontario. And it’s the area I grew up around. (..) I am interdisciplinary by background. And so I work across a number of different jobs and sectors, as you heard. But the three most important things to know about me, I think, for today. One is I’m a midwife at heart. So I have no idea what I’m doing moderating a panel on AI. Except creation story is where my story begins, is working in creation story as an indigenous midwife. And AI, in its own way, is a creation story in that we’re going to talk to these kids about. The second is that I’m a mom. I have two beautiful daughters. And the youngest, just a couple weeks ago, graduated from high school, which means I’m an almost empty nester. (..) And then the third thing is that I’m a hockey player. And then we’ll see, I know, thank you, thank you. We’ll see by the end of this panel whether you can guess whether I play defense or offense based on how well I manage these two. I mean, you both have some pretty, pretty fiery, cool backgrounds. You’re kind of what I’ve been thinking of as the OG in the indigenous AI and data sovereignty space. (…) I’m going to get my notes out here. (..) Keone, you’ve come from the other side of the world, literally here. You live in Eretera. You’re a native Hawaiian. So, from the other side of the world, you’ve come here to be with us today. You’re the CTO of Tehuka Media. (.) You spent years building an AI that speaks, listens to, and protects the Maori language. But you’re doing it in a way that it’s like making sure that it’s on a community’s terms and not on Silicon Valley’s terms, not on anyone else’s terms. And you’re famous for a line saying, data is the last frontier of colonization. I’m going to ask you to unpack that at some point in here. But you have a son who’s two, because that was the first thing I asked, is how’s the baby? (..) But before we get into all of the titles, the tech, like, what’s your actual story? How did you end up here on the stage? (.)

S04: Well, that’s a big question. I played hockey in Hawaii. It was on roller skates, though. Still loved it. (.) Well, I think there’s a hint in that quote, the last frontier. I did grow up watching Star Trek. It turned out I liked it. But the reason why I grew up watching Star Trek was because we lived in a house that my father built with his own hands. And we didn’t have electricity, and we had an antenna up on the hill that could only catch one channel. And that channel was beamed from an island that was 100 miles away. And that one channel just so happened to be the channel that played Star Trek, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager. So I watched that, and that really got me into, it was a part of what got me into tech, particularly, like, the tech that we don’t have, right? The warp drives and the beaming and those sorts of things. Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if I invented warp drive or whatever, which never happened, by the way. But that, in addition to my father and the stories I was told about my grandparents, is also what got me into tech. Because we were what Americans would call poor, in a Western sense, we were rich in values and culture, but we were poor in terms of monetary value, dad had to fix a lot of things. We drove around in a junkalanka, as we called it, a car that makes a lot of noise and is rusty, and you’d be embarrassed to get dropped off at school. So you either want to go really early to school or really late so your friends don’t see you show up in a piece of crap car. And dad had to fix that, and even I had to fix it sometimes. I had to climb underneath the car with a wrench and bang the fuel filter, because we couldn’t afford to get a new fuel filter. But if you banged the fuel filter, all the junk in it would kind of settle to the bottom, and then the gas could go through. And this is my experience of debugging real-life scenarios so you can get to where you’ve got to go. And all those…

S30: Surely they didn’t have MacGyver.

S04: Yeah, like, yeah, my dad was very much a MacGyver. So all of that influenced me to want to get into tech. But another interesting thing happened to me when I was around maybe 12 or 11. My sister and I, I don’t know what the context was, like, why we were having this conversation, But we said to each other, um, we need to go to school, we need to get educated so we can get good jobs and make a lot of money so we can build our parents a house. Because of the way in which we grew up, and we saw our friends, who were mostly, you know, not native Hawaiians, um, you know, they had nice things, and we didn’t have nice things, and that was always sort of the crux of our families, oh, we live in a shack. Of course, in hindsight, it was the best upbringing I think any indigenous person could ever have, you know, rather than growing up in an urban, you know, environment, in an apartment, all these other things. Um, but at that time, we decided we have to work hard, we have to get a western education, uh, so we can build our parents a house. And that kind of, I think, motivated us through the grind of high school and college, you know, to get a good foundation to be at the point where you can kind of do what you want now, or what you’re passionate about. And I think both my sister and I now do what we’re passionate about.

S30: That’s beautiful. (..) Um, Michael Running Wolf. So, you have written in your bio, you were, grew up on a, in a village on your mother’s res in Montana, and like many typical kind of res communities, you didn’t have reliable water or electricity. (.) But now you’re advising the UN and governments and Canada. I saw you smooching, like, with Evan Solomon out in the hall when you arrived, right? (.) Um, you worked inside big tech, Amazon, IBM. Um, but now you’re on the other side of it, leading, hear it out, First Languages AI Reality, Flair. (..) Pretty cool, right? I’m going to ask about it. Um, it’s built, it’s building speech technology for some of the more than 200 endangered indigenous languages across Turtle Island. And you’re working on your PhD here at McGill in Montreal. No? (..) That’s old news?

S34: It’s old news, yes. You have your PhD? No. I had to hire Colin.

S30: Okay, good to know. (.) You were doing a PhD, but you, um, okay, so that is not relevant anymore. But before, before Flair, before all of these other projects, you’ve got, like, a million things on the go. Like, what’s the story that tells about how you got here? (..)

S34: I think we go toe-to-toe on who was, who had the least amount of tech growing up, you know? (.) I, uh, just like the Hawaiians, I grew up in the little res village, whatever you call them, in reservations down south. Uh, on my mom’s res, um, Lakota, Cheyenne, and Blackfeet, and I’m also a little bit British princess, um, that was also in the bio, I think, maybe. Um, and, so, I grew up, we, 30-minute drive from anything, like, from gasoline, help, the police, you know, being able to get water, in fact. And, so, similar to how you grew up, we had to deal, you had to, you had to have the thinking process of no one’s coming to help you, and even if they do, it’s going to be too late. And, so, the aesthetic has also kind of been imprinted on me of whatever I do, I need to, whatever I’m doing needs to last, and whatever I’m doing needs to get us to survive us to the next, you know, next food place, the next thing. And, and this aggravates Caroline, because I hate the car having less than half a gas a tank, um, and because we need to be able to get somewhere, you know, what if you have to drive to Bernie, you know, or, you know, to Seattle, or Vancouver downtown. But, no, going back, I think, to summarize it all, I, like, I grew up poor, western, but I didn’t know that. I grew up in the village, surrounded by my family. I didn’t meet a non-relative until I was probably in grade school, and I didn’t really meet white people. or Caucasian westerners until college, um, and so basically until, like, 18, I, I lived in a little bubble of my culture, and, and my, my culture, you know, and these different cultures that I was raised in, Cheyenne and Lakota, I was spoken in my house. And, when I met my peers in college, I realized that was very rare, and I, I was very fortunate to have this in my background, and, and, and so I became very interested in how to use technology for cultural reclamation. And so, backing up, what’s the real reason why I’m in tech? Um, it’s because of my mother. Um, she was a laser lithographer engineer for Hewlett Packard in Aurora, Colorado, who met this crazy, skinny Lakota hippie who was part of AIM, American Indian Movement, which was, like, an armed resistance against colonization. and, and that was my dad, you know, and he told me the story of how, how I almost didn’t exist, you know, like, all his, his attempts, his three attempts to get a date with my mom. (..) Who was this straight-laced suit, um, working for Hewlett Packard, and here’s this crazy, long-haired, shaggy Lakota man who’s, you know, resisting the government. Um, and somehow, I’m the emergent of those two environments, and so, so, and I think to tell the R is that, yeah, fast forward, um, my mom taught me to read, taught me how to use math, how to use the slide, uh, slide rule, which is an approximative for integrals and calculus. and, you know, because of her, and then this sort of, this aesthetic of, from, you know, growing up, needing to be self, um, you know, be self-sovereign, self-sustaining, you know, like, not depend upon others, uh, has really pushed us to where flair is at, and so we do make a lot of technical decisions. Number one, a lot of it’s actually based upon, uh, Tahiku. So, they, in 2018, they created the very first indigenous automatic speech recognition system in an era where it took tens of millions of hours of audio to make ASR automatic speech recognition, speech-to-text to work for French, and English, and German, and this crazy Maori group, you know, with no more than three sticks together, somehow created AI. (.) While these giant corporations, I was working at Amazon Alexa at the time, and I was thinking, like, why can’t we make Alexa work for our languages? And it turns out it’s, it takes a lot to get Alexa to work. You know, tens of thousands of staff typewriting, typing up, and transcribing the whole English, um, audio database, and then these crazy guys came along and said, hey, we did it with three hour, 300 hours of audio. And if you want to see their cool tech, it’s over there, by the way. (.) You can learn more about it. And that’s where flair comes from. It’s really just meeting Tahiku and saying, this is cool. teach us how to do it, and we’ve been working on this ever since, and working with them as our mentors.

S30: Amazing, amazing. Okay, I’m going to take, um, a two-minute pause here. This is an audience participation kind of piece, and you guys can do this with each other.

S37: Um, you’re going to turn to someone beside you,

S30: and you’re going to name one piece of ancestral, uh, knowledge, or family knowledge, from any culture. It doesn’t matter what culture you’re coming from. but what you think is at risk of being lost in your own lifetime, and what would you need to keep it alive? I’m going to give you, uh, 45 seconds to talk to your neighbor, to, to think about, uh, one piece of ancestral or family knowledge from any culture that you think is at risk of being lost in your lifetime, and what would it take to keep it alive? (..) And then we’re going to come back. so I’m going to give you less than a minute. (47 seconds pause)

S34: This is in Siberia, before they close the borders. (……) Oh, yes.

S50: It’s like, and so, (…..)

S34: that’s the coming. (.) You’re going to absorb your culture, and you’re going to override everything. You’re going to give it a moment. Okay.

S30: I’m going to bring them back. Can we all snap into the microphone? It’s not working. All right. I’m going to bring us back to the panel, to the fireside chat. I hope you had an interesting conversation. (.) If you can hear me, clap once. (.) If you can hear me, clap twice. There we go. You can tell I manage big audiences for a while. (..) Do you guys want to share what you, what came up for you? (..) What’s one piece of ancestral knowledge, or family knowledge?

S04: Yeah, well, for me, what I observe is how, well, how indigenous people treat their elders. That is a universal, I think, thing we have in common, that you do not see happening in Western cultures. And I see in Hawaii, (.) American values infiltrating the native Hawaiian population. and I see Hawaiians disrespecting elders, and that is very concerning to me. (.)

S30: What about you, Michael? (.)

S34: I think my response to Keone is, we think a lot, by the way. It’s kind of, we should not be on the same panel. (..) I was, yes, of course, and I agree, it happens in Montana as well, but thinking about, I spent the summer in Siberia, and when I arrived there, Coke was relatively new. Yeah, the wall came down in the 90s. (.) And, but Coke was, Coca-Cola, the soda pop, I don’t know about the drug, probably. (.) But it was, and it was just like, this is so cool. People would, we go visit houses, (.) and these, these people, Keogos, Siberian, indigenous people, who 80% of them still speak their own language, would welcome us in, do the traditional things that you would expect. you know, welcome you in, introduce themselves, you know, eat, give you food, you know, I gained weight in Siberia. (.) And they’d present you a can of Coca-Cola. And they’d be like, and I was talking to some of my colleagues, who are Siberian, ethnic Siberian Russians, about how, (.) they’re like, isn’t it cool that we’re getting American stuff? And they said, no, it’s not cool. Because, this thing, it’s this thing that’s going to come and invade, and just take over your mind, and change how you are, and you’re going to love it. it’s going to be delicious, you know, saccharin, and, you know, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup. And, you’re not going to be aware of it, until it’s too late, of like, what you’ve lost, while you think you’re gaining something else, with this Western technology, and information. And Coke’s like an empire, the Coca-Cola company. (..)

S30: For me, what came up for me was, like, breakfast. And, I ate, I hope no one missed out on any blueberries, because I ate so many of them. So, blueberries is a big one. I grew up having to go berry picking, and, you know, eating off of the land a lot in the summers, and we, we would spend, like, several weekends just berry picking, and not a lot, not a lot to eat any either. Like, I had to fill up buckets, and to bring them back for preserves. (.) and I tried taking my kids out blueberry picking, but the bugs, you know, it’s hot. And, like, you know, we’re kind of, like, you know, just off of a road in town that is in Espanola. Like, but, you know, the berries, it’s more than just the picking of the berries, and being able to sustain ourselves with the food. It’s like, what are the berries teaching us, right? and we’re in the blueberry moon right now, or the blueberries are abundant right now. This is the time of them, and, you know, that star at the top of the blueberries, like, teaches us about, you know, reminding us of that connection to our ancestors, and our ancestral knowledges, and, you know, the idea of abundance. Have you, if you’ve been in a good blueberry patch, you know, like, it teaches you abundance. There’s so much. You can, like, be eating it all, and still filling up your bucket. (.) And so, there’s, like, so many teachings that come into the blueberries, that you kind of, share in that, and I worry that I didn’t do enough to make my kids go blueberry picking enough, and to understand that deep connection. So, that’s, for me, the kind of the blueberry piece. What does that have to do with AI? I don’t know, but I think it’s like, how are we preserving language? How is the, this technology? //S04: That has a lot to do with AI,//

S04: right?

S30: It has everything to do with AI, right?

S04: well, you tell me, you tell me. Well, I mean, the fact that we go to the supermarket now to get our blueberries, because of the system that’s built around it, I can’t. I don’t have the time, right? Or I live too far away from my ancestral land that I can go and pick blueberries. So, I get it from the store. And so, therefore, I lose those moments to tell those stories, to have those connections, to connect back with the earth. And with any technology, whether it’s the supermarket, or artificial intelligence that isn’t very intelligent, (..) you have the same risk. But ultimately, it’s up to us to decide how we build these tools and how we use them. We can choose to build supermarkets and require everyone to buy their food there. And we can choose to allow monopolies to own all the supermarkets and raise prices, right? (.) Or, you know, we can choose to build technology that isn’t going to replace our people, isn’t going to replace the important human interactions we have with one another, but we can still use the technology to help us achieve what we’re trying to do. So, when we built our pronunciation app, we didn’t want people to see words because our languages were oral, right? And then they were transcribed. But the problem when you see the words is that we first learn about these words in English. So, your mind immediately goes to English. So, we deliberately, even though people say, please give us the words, we want the words, we deliberately say, no, you need to close your eyes and listen because this is the old ways of learning the language. And we make that choice. Sure, we can monetize the ability to show the words and someone can pay to see the words and companies do this, but we choose not to because that’s not the right thing to do. So, when profit isn’t the end game, you can make important choices with technology about how do you ensure it best helps the community that you care most dearly about. Yeah, Noah?

S34: I think maybe going upon your metaphor of, like, the thing with the blueberries is an analogy, obviously, for our culture. And as much as you can, when you can, you engorge yourself. You’re like, you need to stuff your food in your mouth. But you also gather enough to share so that someone else can have the benefit of your culture and benefit. and when I was younger, before I met my wife, a little more unfocused, I was genuinely worried that we were losing a lot of culture and language and, you know, COVID really accelerated that a few years ago. But, (.) and then I came to realize in interacting, you know, with my wife and other really smart people in that we don’t, as an individual, need to be the only ones engorging ourselves and being the only ones filling up the buckets, we need to be, we can have a role. Because remember, traditional societies was a system. There was people with it that had roles. There were storytellers. There was hunters. Often, sometimes, they were mixed, right? It’s not pure. So you don’t have to do everything. Like, you don’t have to be the most important ceremonial man and the best storyteller, blah, blah, blah, right? You need some of these skill sets. and since I came to kind of realize that, I’ve focused. So in the beginning, I was like, how can we use technology for culture? Now, I’m focused on what’s the most important part in my view of culture? It’s the transmission of the very thought and language of how culture is communicated, which is our language. And, yes, everything else is important. We need, you know, we need technology helping us manage our livestock, you know, bison returning. I think AI can play a role there, but that’s not my role. I’m going to focus on the specific task so that I’m not drowning myself in the blueberries, so to speak. You know, like, there’s someone that can help. They can focus on that. We’ll have peers. We’ll create communities. That’s what Pathfinders is doing. We’re all going to do different, you know, techno terms, domains of expertise. But we’re all existing within the culture. And then going back to the problem of we don’t hunt anymore. we go to the grocery store. We don’t have fancy tools. AI is just a tool. It’s nice going to the grocery store and buying blueberries. Like, I used to go do Juneberries, which is related to blueberries. They’re tiny. They’re kind of sour. They have thorns. And you’re going to go out there for like two or three days at a time just to get a little bucket. But you have a bucket. You didn’t have to go hunt something and get their belly and scrape it out and make it dry it out and make a Parflet satchel. (.) I could just go to Walmart and buy a bucket. Or I could just go to Walmart and buy the blueberries. (.) And you can kind of think of that AI in the same way. We could have this relationship with the AI that’s unhealthy. You know, entirely, walking past the blueberry bucket and buying pizza. Or we could utilize the AI in a healthy way and see what it is. It’s just a tool. You know, and that’s all we, steel knives are a tool. The bullet is a tool. And AI is just another tool for our cultures to absorb and, you know, be flexible around. (..)

S30: Thank you for taking my blueberry story to the next level, guys. That was awesome. We kind of talked about, okay, so you both work in kind of language and we know that in the language is our culture. And as you started kind of working in technology and language and kind of building to preserve and to gather and collect and to find ways of transmitting this knowledge, it became very very apparent that data governance and data sovereignty was going to be critical in this. (.) How do you see data governance, indigenous data governance, indigenous data sovereignty shifting as we kind of are facing this AI reality, right? Like, you’ve been living in it for a long time. You’ve been seeing it come for some time now. But for many of us, this is just kind of slapping us in the face. We’re just catching up a little bit now. And so how is indigenous data sovereignty and data governance like really rapidly shifting in our communities? (..)

S34: I can go first but then you can dive deeper. I think it really comes down to the very traditional perspective that I was taught and I think all of us who are indigenous are taught. There are indigenous Germans, indigenous Gaelic, by the way. It’s just Western culture has lost it. The knowledge is a burden and when you know something, (.) it transforms you. It transforms you a little bit, transforms who you are. You know, there’s ceremonies and protocols in which to learn new knowledge. Like, there’s very dangerous plants. There’s very dangerous practices. And you don’t want to give these gifts of knowledge and skill to someone who’s not ready for it. And so, I don’t want to know Métis religion. I don’t want to know Maori culture more than I need to. And I can’t be the judge of that. (.) And that is sort of the basis of data sovereignty. Like, as indigenous people, we can’t be taking knowledge from a different culture without really understanding the ramifications. Because in a way, that’s kind of a curse in a bad way, knowledge. And so, (.) we at Flare, obviously, we take the position that the data is not ours. We have contracts in place, MOUs, and we also be very specific in, like, this is what’s going to happen with your data. And if you don’t want it to happen to your data, don’t give it to us. You know, and making sure everything’s all very consent-based. And the law, again, is just inspired fundamentally from a technical perspective by what Hiku’s doing. (…)

S04: Yeah, I just want to support what Michael said, that the whole idea of some knowledge needs to be guarded, even in our own communities, and not everyone should have access to it. And, you know, Wikipedia and, yeah, the internet sort of, I guess, flipped that on its head. I guess, I assume everyone here, you know, strong proponents of data sovereignty and understand it very well, and I’d be preaching to the choir, so I do want to talk more about the risks that I see now. (.) You know, that we, like, we need to beef up our security to ensure our data is not stolen. (..) You know, when you see what they’re doing now with sort of AI and finding security vulnerabilities. (….) and I always say it’s inevitable, it’s inevitable that OpenAI one day and Google and all these big tech companies, they’re going to speak all of our languages. I don’t want that to be true. The way the world’s going now, it’s most likely to be true. So then, so then I’m like, well, how then do we safeguard that or compete against it? Do we have to hope consumers are going to make ethical choices and say I’m not going to buy Māori from OpenAI? I’m going to buy it from a Māori company. Free markets don’t seem to work in that way, so I’m not sure that’s going to work. Do we need policies or legislations that prevent these sorts of things? Should only Canadians be able to profit off of indigenous Canadian languages or should only indigenous Canadians be able to profit off of indigenous Canadian languages? These are conversations that we’re probably all having all the time, but the rest of the world isn’t and doesn’t care. and so I, to me, I’m more kind of unfortunately in a defensive position now in terms of data sovereignty, making sure we’re doing enough to protect not just the data, but the economic opportunities for our own community. Back in Hawaii, my people are living in tents on the side of the road and Larry Ellison owns an island, Mark Zuckerberg is building a fortress, you know, they’re all doing their thing and my people are struggling and so that’s, that’s, you try, see that’s happening in America and it’s only growing and hopefully the bubble bursts, but I don’t know, that’s to be told, right? (..)

S30: But we’re not just going to continue on this thread a little bit because, you know, we know that these big tech companies, they want our languages and, you know, you, there’s a quote somewhere from you about how they want our languages now. Is it suddenly that they care or is it just good for their bottom line? right? So how do we, how do we determine, like, because you’re not, not working with some larger corporate partners and institutions, you’ve got some relationships with Cambridge and Oxford, with Mozilla, (.) is that true? (.)

S04: Yeah, yeah, I mean, we have, there’s academics that we sort of talk to and work with, yeah.

S30: So my question is, like, how do you tell the difference between, I mean, aside from the obvious ones, but, like, a partner that’s helpful and a partner that’s just an extractor and how do you, how do you determine those things? Oh, //S35: that’s a hard one. what is the tool they,// like, what’s the process you go through for those, because a lot of our (.) audience members might be also, like, within these, you know, very situations where people are coming to them because as partners who want to care, but how do you tell if they’re actually there to be a good partner or?

S04: Well, our strategy is we take a three-prong approach. (.) One, two, three. (..) There, the three of us have to do that manually. and it’s, it’s this, it’s the relationship building, it’s the conversations, it’s checking in with one another. Like, we’re the core team at the top who essentially have to protect our organization and the data that we look after and our staff and our communities. And so, like, we’re it and you just have to, you just kind of have to do it. You’re going to make mistakes. You need to be able to make sure those mistakes are calculated so you can recover, you know, and understand the risks with making decisions. (.) It’s, it’s really hard but, and I’m very opinionated about these things and my colleagues will disagree with me on things, which is good. We need to disagree, we need to argue, we need to fight. That shows that we actually care. (..) Me, personally, I mean, I’m moving our organization out of Amazon because I just can’t stand what they’re doing and I, there’s a bit of a personal vendetta there but I, but when you look at the numbers, it actually makes sense. like, Amazon is just milking it. They have jacked up prices and people are paying more for products because of what Amazon is doing. This is just Amazon buy stuff online. I don’t even know what AWS are doing but presumably they’re doing the same thing, they’re the same devil, right? And so, just, just knowing how these companies operate in the rest of society, not just in an indigenous sense, you need to think about that too. A lot of what we talk about here in terms of indigenous data sovereignty, I mean, it just transfers over into the destruction of democracy and what capitalism is doing. We have so much we can align with. We’re talking about indigenous tech stacks. There’s a huge open source movement trying to do the same thing. Like, we also need to work with them. We can’t work in silos. Those are the people who I would trust to work with. People who said, you know what, why should we pay for S3 when we can build our own alternative? And the EU is now funding a non-profit to build a sustainable alternative to S3. What an easy way. How easy it is to shift a URL and some credentials and all of a sudden all of your data is on your own territory or in a company that you care about more than Amazon. Like, these are the easy technical wins that we can do on our long-term journey of sovereignty for our people.

S30: Amazing. (…….) Now, Michael, with Blair, you were talking about how you’re open-sourcing the tools but not the data, (..) correct? (.)

S18: Yes.

S30: Like I said, no prep. (.) I mean, just using my good friend, Claude. (…..) There’s lots of tensions that we’re all navigating. You’re working kind of like in, you know, kind of the language space, the cultural space. (..) There’s lots of (..) things that we’re trying to protect, (.) but we’re also trying to move at the speed of trust. There’s also this urgency, right? It’s coming at us and we need to build capacity. We want to, like, make sure that we’re not being left behind. How do you work to manage those tensions between, (.) you know, kind of supporting our preservation (..) of our knowledge and the urgency that we have? These languages are going extinct, like, you know, (.) in this moment right now with making sure that our elders and our youth feel comfortable and feel safe with 200-plus languages. (…)

S34: I guess more abstractly, (.) kind of going back to the very first thing you said that we didn’t prepare. (..) We have to accept what we’re given and be prepared to love what we find, which is how I found my wife, (..) the young lady up front. (..) And, yes, it is a debilitating realization that majority, I’m going to bring you up here and bring you right down. (..) it’s, it’s, I was thinking, okay, so, it’s, it’s stark. So, officially, Canada and United States federal government say there’s about 200 languages in North America combined. And the UN says there’s about 300. I know for a fact that’s at least an undercount of two, maybe up to three. So, there’s about, like, maybe around 500, 600 languages (.) in United, North America and the majority of them are being unaccounted for. You know, like Cherokee, for instance. I recently learned that, if you think of Cherokee, those are, like, two major dialects that you know about. There’s actually 60, and 24 of them are still being spoken right now. And you think it from that perspective, there’s probably closer to a thousand languages being spoken by a very small minority and declining. And the official statistic says that we’re losing the language every two weeks here in North America. (.) And it’s probably far worse the loss is quite, you know, high and we don’t know about it. It’s happening in the dark. It’s happening without any awareness of what’s going on here. But the other end of the spectrum, so (.) what’s the good news? We have language families. We have sister languages. We are working with a linguist whose sole life purpose has been to reawaken languages that have gone to sleep. And it’s basically, you know, the TLDR, that you triangulate. You know, sister languages exist and you can kind of reconstruct, you know, from documentation and memory and maybe some little pieces of how things work. And so then it becomes a tractable problem. Like, I have optimism in that we’re moving at the pace that the spirits are allowing us because this is the path. (.) if we go faster, we cause harm. If we go slow, we won’t do enough. And I don’t know the speed other than I’m in it right now. (.) And I’m sorry, (.) this is something that my mom always told me. (.) So, anyways. (..) And, yes, it’s, we’re not alone. There’s other organizations. There’s Heritage Lab. There’s Tahiku. You know, there’s other organizations out in the world whose sole duty it is to make sure our languages are safe and going into the future and using technology and AI. And my hope, like, seeing all these Pathfinders up here, they’re going to say, that Michael, he did it wrong. I like him. He’s respectable. But I have a better strategy. Do it. I’ll clap. I’ll applaud. I’ll stand there and say, these guys are doing it better than we are. We have Cohen, who’s been part of Pathfinders. And it’s always, (.) it’s our duty as, you know, I’m getting old. I’m in the mid-40s, becoming middle-aged here. You know, all we’re trying to do is make sure that the real leaders, the young ones who are coming, have enough resources that they can continue to work. And we’re not going to finish it. There’s no strangle law. There’s no utopia. It’s going to be an ongoing struggle because we’re indigenous. Nothing’s easy for us because we have to fight up. We have to gain voices. You know, there’s always a fight on the horizon. And so going back to your original question, I don’t know the ultimate solution, but I know where I think I’m on the right path. (.)

S30: I love that. And thank you for kind of bringing your mom here with us. I think we can all relate to those teachings that we get from our generations before us. But you’re speaking to something also that I was actually, it’s a great segue to the next question I had, which is like the name of this talk was Kindling the Future. and we got to see a whole stage full of the future of kind of indigenous AI with the Pathfinders program. (..) This is really important, right? Like, this is what, the second or third year of this conference? The second year of the Pathfinders program? Is that right? (..) Anyways, my point is, like, there’s things that are happening and this is really amazing. It’s good to see that we can start building these capacities in our community. You pointed to three people. I hope there’s more than three people. And so I just, I’d love to hear, like, how are we building that capacity in our community? What’s happening that you’ve seen that’s getting you really excited about the next generation of indigenous AI leaders? Not necessarily what they’re doing, but, like, what are the kinds of ways that we’re building this and what else can we be doing to support more potential and opportunity and capacity in our communities? (…….)

S34: I think it’s education. I think we need to, we need a program like Pathfinders. there’s slightly less than 2,000 people who’s part of MILA. This MILA is the largest AI research group in the world, and there should almost be a hundred of us here. Serious PhD computer scientists doing fundamental AI research. Where are they? There’s probably maybe two or three, like, and they’re all in the room, like, Dane Malenfant, you know, (.) name, Colin. There’s very few of us, and that’s a problem. there’s a lot of reasons why we’re not in computer science, we’re not getting educated, you know, and we don’t have to list all that, and my message would be to, you know, the parents raising the next generation and kids who don’t think they can do it, or they think that this technology is fundamentally colonial, and it is. You know, I used to work for Amazon. He just railed against it, but we’re friends, and I expect that from him. He needs to be, you need friends who criticize you, (.) and make fun of you and tease you, but I think the critical thing here is that we as a people and our youth need to understand is that our goal isn’t to contort ourselves so that we break ourselves, but to demonstrate the flexibility of our culture and the behavior that we embody as representatives of our culture. (….)

S04: I recognize the importance of having to get our people into STEM. You know, I mean, the fight now is very much a technological one, and we need more of our people in this field. I’m not an educator, and I don’t, like, I can tell my story of how I got into it, but I think that story is unique, you know, like Michael’s story to everyone, and we all need our own stories as indigenous people to get us into this field, I think, to hold strong to our identities when we’re in this space so that we make sure we’re working in this space under our terms and not under the colonizers’ terms. Where at least we can help, you know, our organization is we can bring in (…) those students who actually, who have had the training, right, who maybe just finished a computer science degree, but they are indigenous. I mean, our team is (.) entirely Maori and Pacifica. We have, I think, one non-Mauri on our team whose, you know, whose husband is Maori Nguyen and who has a, you know, a child. and so we’re creating opportunities at that, you know, in that part of the whole life cycle for our people and that’s important too, right, because, and I, look, there are many indigenous people that work at these big tech companies. What I hear from people is, I need a job, I need to put food on my table, and when you’re in America, you don’t have many options. People work in Amazon fulfillment, sorry, Amazon again, but, you know, (.) they have to. //S34: They deserve it. I’m not there now. like, you know,// people, when people are in vulnerable positions, they can be easily taken advantage of, and I think most of Americans are in vulnerable positions, unfortunately. So, we try the best that we can to create opportunities at this point in time so that our people, indigenous people, can have a job that not only pays them well, not only is challenging, you know, in terms of the science and the tech or whatever, but it’s also something they can be passionate about and proud of, and that’s something I’m so proud that we can offer in, in our small little way, in our small far corner of the world, and we just need more of this, you know, to create this economy of, of our people thriving. (..)

S30: Um, so, the journey is hard. It’s hard at times for many of us, um, and it’s hard not just sometimes, it’s hard a lot of the times for many of our community members. What would it look like if it was easy? (…)

S04: Ooh, ooh. I’d have less gray hairs. I’d be spending more time with my son. (.) I’m serious, like, you know, I mean, I’d have more time to, to go, to work the land back home. The weeds are this tall. There’s so many wild boars everywhere. There are trees that you, you would cost $10,000 to get, you know, a professional to chop down. Like, as, as, as I’m in this fight here, you know, my, there’s so much other responsibilities, right, that we have back to our people in our communities, fires that we can’t tend to.

S34: Yeah. (..) I think there was just more of us. I think having more friends in the space, you know, having more, more peers in the space, and they’ll come. I, I’m not concerned about that. You know, Lindsay’s going to do a good job and inspire another, the next population, next pathway is going to have, like, 300 students, I’m sure. Um, or we’re going to have to breed computer scientists. I think there’s also the Keone strategy here. (…) I have computer science friends, and all of them are going to make their little kids computer scientists. experiences. Um, so we’re trying different strategies. (.)

S30: Um, I’m not sure how much time I have left, so I have zero minutes left.

S04: What story to tell? (.)

S30: Sorry to the next panelist. I have a couple more questions. Um, I guess one is, what advice would you have for the Path Founders who are just starting out on their career? And two, what’s your vision for the, for the future generations, for those faces yet to come?

S34: So do you want us to be serious or funny?

S30: Your choice, your choice. No, be serious. Like, what, like, in your humorous way, in your humorous way, Michael, like, what, what would you tell? Like, these Path Finders are just starting out in their AI journey. You’ve done this for a couple decades now? (.)

S49: Yes, I’m getting old.

S30: You’re good there. (..) What would you tell them? (….)

S04: Um, so I would say, yeah, go in, it’s funny because I (.) wanted to do this and I never did it, and I’m, I mean, it worked out that it didn’t, but what I would say is go and work for big tech if, you know, and that’s, that’s okay. learn, learn, learn, learn, learn the devil’s tricks and bring it home and use it against them. I mean, like, come on. No, I’ve said this to people. I’ve said, look, go and, go and do your, go and do your thing. Go make a lot of money. Get your equity because, because you’re young, you know, get yourself in a position where you say, I have got, as indigenous, as a minority, I have the privilege to say I can now work for my people because a lot of our people don’t have that privilege. So do what you need to do to get to a position where you say, yes, I can now work for my people for the rest of my life because that’s what I want to do. And that’ll be, that’s my only advice. (…) Ah! (..)

S34: You step on my jokes, so. (.) No, I think to the next generation and Pathfires in general, I would say you’re going to, unfortunately, encounter a lot of failure and, you know, the nature of who we are in this economy and the nature of the current economy, but we do exist. You’re not alone. You know, find us. In this room right now, I encourage you all to introduce yourself to Dr. Sosi, if he’s still here. Maybe she ran off already. And there’s other luminaries in the room of indigenous people who’ve also had the struggles before you and know how to get out of the hole and don’t be discouraged if you feel that you’re, you’re at failure. like, you can’t go forward anymore because that just means you’re not on the right path and maybe you need to be going a different direction. (..)

S30: This has been great. I mean, I’m sure we could sit here for another while. (..) We have two more minutes? //S14: Negative two minutes. (.)// For the audience, I have one more thing to leave you with, which is I want you to close your eyes, put your feet on the ground, feel (…) yourself connected to those future generations, those future ancestors. That seventh generation from now, I want you to think of a specific person. You’re never going to meet them. They’re seven generations into the future. It’s not abstract. It’s someone real. What’s one thing that’s happening in this room today and tomorrow, this week, that they’ll thank us for? (.) And one thing that they’ll ask us to stop? And as we go through the rest of the next two days, I want you to think about what’s one thing that that seventh generation, that person, that relative, that future ancestor is going to thank us for? One thing that they’re going to ask us to stop. Enjoy the rest of your conference, folks. Thank you. (13 seconds pause)

S21: Amazing. (……) Hello? (.) Amazing. (..) So, I also actually have something to add to that. Working with a lot of youth, I want to say to the youth that also remember that our ancestors are survivors and you’re survivors. And they’ve done a lot so that we can have a voice and don’t forget that you have a voice and to use that voice. So next up, we have from extraction to ownership, building indigenous AI markets, and I’d like to welcome our next moderator up, Ryan St. Germain. (…) He’s the founder and CEO of Indigenous Tech Circle, Canada’s largest indigenous-led network. Welcome. Welcome. (25 seconds pause)

S48: Everyone, Mike, each, just make sure you talk closely to the microphone, please. Awesome. (14 seconds pause)

S05: What do we do without you walking? (..)

S20: Are we on? (..) Is it happening? (..) Okay. (…)

S05: Can we make everyone do a stretch for quickly for, like, 30 seconds? Like, a stand-up stretch to the roof?

S20: Let’s do it. Let’s stretch the legs and bring us back into it. I mean, get up with us. (…….)

S50: Come on.

S38: Oh, I can, uh, move it in the back. Hold back, hold it. (.)

S50: One, two. (..)

S41: Awesome. What a great-looking panel. Thank you so much. (.) Here.

S50: All right. Have a great time. Okay. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. (..) That’s right. It’s okay. We need, um, in any case, we’re going to have to be 15 minutes delayed for the

S37: next panel because the minister, the other minister is late, so we’re not, you know,

S50: you’re telling me that we have 15 minutes slapper and bomb any stand-up.

S48: Please, everyone, if you could come back to your seat and remain silent. We’re having another panel. Thank you. (.)

S20: Hey, everybody. (..) We got to get a stretch and then we lost y’all. (.) Please come back. Come back to us. (..) We’ll give you guys a moment to get settled. (..) Join us. (10 seconds pause) //S20: Mm-hmm. (.)//

S05: You need to give a few minutes in between these things to let people settle in. (.) I really struggle with, like, just sitting still. //S50: No way.//

S50: You can’t tell.

S20: You can’t tell about it. Just, like, I’m like, I’m like, You look like the Monica. (..)

S33: The two of you are slowly going to jitter away from this panel.

S05: Yeah, I’m going to just pace around the room when I talk, you know?

S50: It’s like, okay. (….)

S20: Thank you. We’re watching it. All right, we’re going to get started here and hopefully everyone can come back in and join us. And I just wanted to start off with saying that I am so hopeful being (.) here. here, and last year, this conference and, Lindsay, the work that you and everyone here did inspired me. It gave me hope to see, you know, the solutions that everyone here was created were, like, geared towards (..) changing the world, solving real problems. (.) We don’t need more widgets in the world anymore. You know, we need to solve and point the technologies that we have to the things that are going to help create the impact that we want to see in the world. (.) And, um, I see this as beginnings. (.) And I always say this within Tech Circle, that I hope this is the beginning of relationships and that we go out from here and we all know one another after this. Uh, I’ve created a WhatsApp group. As anyone who knows me knows that I will create a community out of just about anything, but this is not our event. So, Lindsay is the admin of this as well too, and I’m happy to support that in any way. But so we can communicate with one another while we’re here. And the irony of using WhatsApp for that is not lost on me. (.) Uh, so, yeah, feel free to come up to me. I’ve got the QR code for it. We’ve got about 20 folks here already in it. And so if you want to interact and connect with anybody, uh, I also see this as the beginning of, um, possible organizations. And, uh, that’s why I’m really excited about this panel because I don’t think it’s about, like, venture or for profit or not for profit. It’s like, how do we create sustainable organizations that help you fulfill the goals that are, that, that you’re trying to achieve? And how do we take these ideas from here and actually turn them into something that’s going to be lasting and that will have the impact that you’re looking to have? Um, so, uh, the panel we have here is fantastic. Uh, we’ve got, so first of all, we’ve got Darian and Altea here who, um, have graciously agreed to do a quite, uh, like a shorter intro because I think everybody’s going to want to talk to them anyways. they have money and they’re amazing. More importantly than that, they’re incredible people that are super helpful and they will help you on your way. So, um, please, I encourage you to come up and chat with them afterwards. Uh, and, um, I’m not going to talk too much about me. I’m very proud to be Métis on my dad’s side. I’m mixed heritage. I’m a Duke of Bourne, a Scouse on my mom’s side. So if you know everybody from Liverpool, I had to translate for friends when they came over for dinner. They said, you know, she called them a bloody bugger and it sounds like they want to murder each other, but they’re actually quite in love. You know, so I, I would also joke that the colonizers, you know, were across from me at dinner and they’re lovely people. Um, so without further ado, uh, maybe Darian and then, and then Brian, we’re going to give a, he’s going to actually start with his founder’s story and to talk about like the path that he’s gone with his company. And so he will be taking a little bit more time. I’m going to try to speak as little as possible. So I’ll let you guys just roll with that and then I’ll find the next question. (..)

S05: Tanishi. Hello. My name’s Darian Hurst. I’m proud made to you with deep roots from Manitoba. Uh, my parents actually moved to Toronto about four months before I was born. So I don’t have the, uh, pleasure of saying I was born in Manitoba, but I have spent a lot of time there and I’m an investor with BDC Capital and their new indigenous entrepreneurs fund, which is an equity fund to support indigenous entrepreneurs and businesses across the country. And outside of work, I’m deeply optimistic. I really believe in our ability to work together and make the world a better place. And, uh, I’m also deeply creative, which really inspires a lot of what I do. I will keep it very short and pass it over to Altea. (.)

S18: Understatement of the year. He’s a huge optimist. Hello, friends, new friends. I’m a, uh, (.) Altea Wyshlaflwe’e, gisgaslpdegge, (.) toyasitnissum, winbequissum. My name’s Altea. I come from the Fireweed Clan of the Gitsan First Nation. Um, thank you so much for being here today. What I do day-to-day is I am a general partner at, uh, an impact-focused venture capital firm called Raven Indigenous Capital Partners. Um, yay. I agree. Um, so I make equity investments in indigenous-led, uh, startups. I run the firm’s U.S. practice, so I focus on investing in Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian-led businesses. And, uh, I am soon to be launching a new investment firm called Barron Bison, which will help indigenous entrepreneurs acquire non-indigenous businesses. Really excited to be here with you today. (….)

S13: Hello, and, uh, I’m very grateful to be here as well. Uh, thank you so much, and it’s, it’s so exciting, um, as was already said, to see this, the potential in the room. Um, so I’m, um, Brian, as I said, I’m from Shaplow Cree First Nation. It’s pretty well halfway between Toronto and Thunder Bay. It was, uh, along the CPR railway stop. It’s also where my ancestors moved from north, uh, where Moose Factory and Moose Knee are, uh, were part of Moose Cree. And on my dad’s side, both his parents, uh, his, his mom’s parents and his dad’s parents, uh, came south when the railway was being built and settled there along with a number of other families. And that formed Shaplow Cree First Nation. I grew up in Shaplow. There was no reserve there at the time, so I grew up as, and my mom’s Italian, my dad’s, uh, Cree, so I’m kind of, uh, white passing, I guess. I grew up in going to school with everyone else. I wasn’t the darker of the natives that were getting bussed in from reserves. I lived in town, but everybody knew we were, um, that we were native. native, and, and, uh, we had no hostility, no racism that I grew up with. So I, I’ve led a very, uh, privileged life, um, and my dad was employed and, and, um, wanted us to go to school. So went to school, went to, uh, engineering, and then into, I got an MBA, worked in industry for a number of years. And then in, uh, I guess 19, I’m asked to share my, um, my story in terms of how, you know, how we got the company going. Well, there was a company before this company, before Kama, and it was called, uh, Palos Bay. It was a managed, business management consulting application running from 1992 to 1997. So in the very early days to the internet, the internet really only popped on the scene in 1990. So, uh, it was, that was a shrink wrap software company. And the reason I mention this is out of that, we were looking at all the assets of an enterprise. and what about projects and job descriptions and people in the role of a job description or, well, let’s, let’s do their performance evaluation. What about the strategic plan that drives the, the organization? How do we tie things into that? So we built the system, uh, me and my oldest brother. And there was a knowledge base that we were building. We never got that part of the product launched, but that knowledge base became a place where we said we could efficiently store knowledge. And we’ve been talking about storing knowledge and culture and language and things like that all day, all morning. And we will tomorrow, I’m sure, as well. Uh, but we never built that. It was just this, uh, graph knowledge base. We didn’t even know of things called graphs at the time. Now they are a thing. Graph databases are a thing. And we shelved the company. So it, it, uh, got closed down. I went back into working for tech, worked for Oracle. I worked in telecom for 17 years, uh, became a salesperson basically, but a solution salesperson. So I’m an engineer, I’m a builder. Um, and that was a good fit. And then I had always said that if I ever am able to find a good patent and develop a good patent, then I will start my second technology company. So we came up with an idea that maybe we could put human values as a guidance system on top of this knowledge graph. And if we did that, that would be a pretty way, a pretty good way of the machine to understand what it means to say, I want to build a canoe or I want to drink a coffee. Well, what does that mean? If you want to build a canoe, you value geography, you value transportation, you value the moose that you might get if you could go across this lake to that land over there where there’s more moose. So the values, that’s what we, that was the kind of aha moment. We really see the world through our values. And what we want or don’t want is guided by what we value. Different people, different values, different companies, different communities. We are all guided by slightly different values, but they kind of be, they kind of are harmonious across humanity, really. So we thought, oh, that would be cool. And then we came up with this idea that, oh, if you did it this way, you can actually make this a natural language system. So then we said, oh, well, let’s file a patent. So that happened in 2012. (.) By 2015, 2016, the patents came through in US first and then in Canada. And I said, oh, I remember saying that if I ever got a good patent, I might want to start another tech company. So in 2017, I left my second telecom employer, Chinese company called ZTE. And they used to make cell phones and other things, but I was on the network side, so base stations. (.) And I said, okay, well, I guess I should go and build a prototype, find someone, because I no longer code anymore. I’ll find someone to, one of these people, like Pathfinders, get them to start working on a prototype. I’ll start working on a PowerPoint presentation and a demo, and we’ll go out and raise some funds. (.) We talked to seed, because you can’t talk to venture people at that stage, right? So that’s the very early stage of investing. And we ended up saying, okay, well, we’re going to go it alone. I did that with the first company as well. We call that friends and family investing. You talk to your friends. It’s mostly friends and associates. It’s not family. that your family will not invest in you. There’s an old saying, your friends don’t want you to succeed, and your family don’t want you to fail. So friends and family is a bad place to go for investment. But it happens. It can happen. And most of the investment actually came from business associates that I worked for and customers of mine while I was in 17 years of telecom. So that was the start, and now we’ve got, you know, some investors stayed at kind of their $25,000 investment. Some investors are up over a million dollars. And then we started, so I guess that was 2018. We went from a prototype, kept that developer. We still have that developer on. He was from Venezuela, working remotely. We brought him to Canada two or three years ago under a talent acquisition program for immigration. And we have three other hardcore developers, so four hardcore developers. I’m not a developer, but I’m a pretty good designer, so I’m the, (.) as well as CEO, I’m also the CTO. And in 2020, we got our first pilot customers, and now it’s 2026, and we’re still growing the company and still looking for investments. So it’s, I guess, from a founder story, be aware. So I was a 61-year-old person, 60-year-old person, starting my second tech company. Right? It takes time. It doesn’t have to take that much time, but it can take time. When you think of something, maybe you’ve got an idea. Maybe it’s a patent. Maybe it’s a business practice. A very, (.) maybe you can’t patent it, but it’s a very neat way of looking at an application, a community that you’re going to launch. You think at that time that someone else is going to think of this, and they’re going to build it before I will build it. Nobody wants to build the exact same thing that you want to build. It’s, you will always have something that is unique, and it doesn’t happen that within a year, generally speaking, okay, this can happen, but generally speaking, it doesn’t happen within a year your idea, you know, goes to waste because someone else got there first. Your idea is probably pretty unique. Is it valuable in the marketplace? Well, that’s for you to find out. And there’s a very interesting thing called product market fit that everybody should realize and learn about. Product market fit, a lot of people might think, I’m going to find my product, and we’re going to be able to go to the customer, and we’re going to fit it to the customer. No, no, no. Build your product, build it exactly the way you want it to be. Of course, consult people and potential customers. But then go and find the exact market to take that product to. That’s where it’s going to fit the best. That’s where you’re going to close the most sales, those pilot sales that you need. So I’ve got lots more time to talk about lots more, but that was our thing, is, you know, finding a unique way to build a different type of AI. So we’re not a large language model AI. We’re a graph database AI, a graph database conversational AI. It’s a deterministic AI, a symbolic AI. Remember that there’s not only one form of AI in the world. Well, there’s lots of forms of AI, but not just even probabilistic AI. There are other AIs that you should, and other technologies that you should also embrace when you’re looking at designing your product, your solution. Thank you.

S20: Brilliant. Thank you. I think what’s interesting there is like this myth of the overnight success. like sometimes you get lucky, right? But in my opinion, I don’t know what everyone else, but it is luck when that happens a lot of the time, right? Like there’s, the story is often a lot more varied and it takes time and sometimes you fail at a few things as you go or it’s not exactly right and you learn as you’re navigating it. And so that myth of the overnight success is, you know, and stages of an organization matter in terms of what type of funding you look for, you know, what kind of decisions you’re making and working it backwards from the outcome you’re trying to achieve before you do a lot of those things, right? Because once you start, the clock starts. So make sure you’re going in the right direction and we’ll come back to that in a minute. But first, Elder, is it Elder Debbie?

S19: Elder Debbie? Yes, your question, I just want to ask it

S20: of the group here. So let me make sure I’ve gotten it right. (..) Is, you know, is our relationship with AI inescapable and how does that apply to the work that you’re doing? (..) maybe that’ll be more, and feel free if you feel it’s been answered, but, you know, I think that one’s good for everyone to. (..)

S05: I would argue it’s one of those genies that’s out of the bottle that can’t be put back in. It’s a technological advancement that has really been uptaken by countries and businesses and citizens around the world. And I don’t really think we’re going to be able to separate ourselves from that. With that being said, I think it is up to us to figure out (.) what are the ethical ways in which we utilize AI? how do we put guardrails and safeties in place? But at the end of the day, I think it really is a tool and it’s up to us to yield it in the best way possible. I think one of the things that we’re looking at with our fund right now is when we receive data from companies that we’re working with is how do we protect this data in a way that it doesn’t get access by some LLM that we have and how do we make sure that that stays with these companies? And I don’t think we have a perfect answer for that yet, and we’re still working through that. And I suspect it’s something, you know, we’ve had conversations about as well too, but it has also allowed us to move much faster in our work as well too, which has its benefits, has cons as well too, but it’s, it has been very impactful and I think we shouldn’t necessarily look at it as something that is good or bad and just figure out how we want to utilize it. (.)

S20: It really is the challenge and the opportunity of our time. (….)

S18: Not too much else to add. yes, inescapable. Has it been done responsibly thus far? In my opinion, no. Can we shape a future where it is done responsibly? Yes. (…..)

S13: Yeah, I do believe that it’s inescapable, but I think that we’ve heard, you know, several people already say it’s a tool, right? Right now in my community, there’s, in fact, three communities come together where there’s three communities around Shappler where we’re building our sixth birchbark canoe. I was there when we did the first one and, you know, building a birchbark canoe is it’s kind of a tool, but it comes together from seven different varieties of trees and we have to figure out what is the right tool for the job. So our form of AI, I’m not here to sell our form of AI. I’m just saying that in terms of indigenous language, indigenous culture, we have a project right now. One’s going on with the University of Toronto. Another one’s going on within my own community. They have chosen, we have a hybrid AI. It can use our knowledge graph AI, which is exact. That’s the reason that it’s really good for indigenous communities. It speaks exactly the words of the elders. Whatever you put into it, that’s what’s going to come out as the answer. But we also have a hybrid version where we can use generative answers based on the community’s documents or whatever. Well, sometimes you might want to use the generative part. Sometimes you might want to use the knowledge graph part in terms of how do you build things, build it with governance. So I think it’s absolutely right. where it’s inescapable and it’s a good tool. So we have, as humans, we want to use good tools. So we should not fear that. And we should not get left behind as well. But we should figure out what’s the right tool for the job and how do we build it responsibly. (.)

S20: We should not get left behind. I think that’s an interesting thing as well too. I hate the word frontier, but when we think about it, that’s how it’s being looked at. and do we want to be in that or out of that because we’ve, you know, the new frontier (.) didn’t end so well for us last time. And so it’s my hope that we are ahead of the curve with the current technologies. (.) I’ll tell you, I think starting a company is confusing as hell, right? Like when you haven’t done it before, right? Like I’ve been doing this for like 25 years and, or maybe, I’m not going to age myself, maybe more. Um, and like the first go is like, what, like, what kind of entity do I create? Like, am I for profit? Am I not for profit? Am I charity? Am I this? Especially in this room, right? And, and, and rooms like this. And so for me, building an organization is deeply personal. Why we choose to do it is deeply personal. And so when you understand the outcome you’re trying to achieve, you’re able to select the types of funding and the pathways that are going to work for you. But it’s confusing. And also, it’s the right tool at the right time. If you don’t have any revenue, you’re probably not getting a grant, right? Like if you don’t have any funding, you know, you’ve, so there’s a chicken and an egg problem within funding as well too. And then, this is a huge question for you. Like, so what type of funding when? What type of organization for what? And I know, and, and, and keeping in mind, and I’ll tell you, I will tell you this as well too, there is no like one answer to all of this. And it, it is complicated and you start simple. Um, and, and so maybe just dive into that a little bit. (.) Make it easy on you.

S18: Yeah, you got 45 minutes? Um, okay. So, I was actually just talking to a friend about this. Um, and he didn’t know that this was on our question list, so this is fun. Um, I will start by saying, I think that there’s a misconception that if you are a mission aligned, impact aligned organization, that you need be a non-profit. Um, and to me, like evidenced by the types of businesses that we back at Raven, that is completely untrue. Um, and so I think if you zoom out, before you even start holding non-profit, for-profit in one hand, I think that you need to have a real reckoning with yourself to understand what business model is going to create sustainability and longevity for my business. So, for example, if you are building a product, we were talking about product market fit just now, if you’re building a product that you think will be revenue generating and you’ll be able to sustain your operations on that, go for a profit. If you think that for whatever reason the activities that you’re going to undertake are ones where you’ll need to access a substantial amount of grant funding, then perhaps non-profit is the way for you. And as is the case with pretty much any question, there’s also the, like, middle situation where you do a hybrid model. So, for example, um, for some of the investment work I’m doing, the investment vehicle itself is a for-profit entity, but we’re going to be undertaking tons of activities that have to do with indigenous capacity building, training, etc. And for that, we’ve set up a non-profit that we’re applying for a charitable status so that we can really be efficient with all of our activities. So, um, and another, as with everything, consult your legal counsel. Um, I was also joking to my friend, I was like, Disclaimer. While I act as, like, a pseudo-legal advisor with the, the, um, entrepreneurs I support, I’m not a lawyer, so go to your legal counsel. When to access funding. So, I’ll kind of, um, park this in a few different lanes. So, uh, as you folks know, I represent an indigenous-focused venture capital firm. And for, um, because we’re not always taught these terms, I didn’t know, um, what venture capital was before I entered the industry. The easiest way that I describe it for those that are new to this field is I do Bear’s Lair or Dragon’s Den not on TV and not with my own money. Um, so I deploy equity investments into indigenous-led startups. And the question becomes, you know, when is the right time to raise venture capital funding? And Brian hit on this just now as, as you were talking about friends and family raise. So, for us, for Raven, here are the must-haves. You must be a for-profit corporation. So, we don’t back, um, sole proprietors. Um, we don’t back non-profits. We also require an entrepreneur to be full-time on the business. We want to see that you are dedicating your time. This is your priority. This is your focus. What you didn’t hear me say is you need to have X amount in revenue. And that goes to the thesis of the fund. We’re primarily an early-stage fund. So, I think, as each of you or the entrepreneurs in the room, um, if you apply your own business here, I encourage you to look at all these capital providers and better understand their thesis. It’s like, you’re almost, like, qualifying them before you get in the room with them to say, oh, are they like Altea where they don’t mind investing in pre-revenue companies? Or are they more of a kind of late-stage flowing river capital um, that, that is, has specific financial metrics, thresholds, etc. So, the answer to the when to seek venture capital funding is it depends on the fund’s thesis. Uh, but I think it’s safe to say that those two key ingredients at the beginning that I mentioned at the beginning, i.e., you’re a for-profit corporation and you are dedicated full-time or a substantial majority of your time um, will be key. When to access debt capital. So, um, and we’ll just kind of talk about the charter banks. Usually, that is not accessible um, to pre-revenue companies. So, uh, in the early days, you’re gonna go to these friends and family supporters, um, you may be going to venture capital firms, and you’re accessing capital, risk, growth capital from people that believe in your mission and vision, and might even back you on a napkin idea. The charter banks are not the same. They need to be able to underwrite your past performance. And so, that tends to be kind of, for some companies, maybe it’s two, three years in. And for other companies, maybe it’s 17 years, and it really depends on, um, yeah, your operating model. And then the last category of, like, when to access funding, I’ll focus on non-dilutive funding. Uh, and in my experience, uh, post-organizational setup is, can be as early as you access non-dilutive funding. It really depends on the program. Um, there are other programs, like, I was talking about, uh, IRAP to a friend yesterday that requires a little bit more progress, or requires clarity that it’s going to be built in the Canadian ecosystem and not exported. Um, but, safe to say, at setup, you can start evaluating those granting opportunities. (.)

S20: Brilliant. Yeah. And I’m hearing, well, one, a little bit of an add-on as well, too, is, like, taking debt before you understand your cash flow and have a predictability in your revenue, it’s actually a horrible idea for you as well, too. So, you’d be, any bank that would give you that is kind of doing you a bit of a disservice. Um, I think there’s some flexibility, and we’ll give you, because definitely. And, um, and one of the key things that I heard there as well, too, is that, um, oftentimes you look for the wrong funding at the wrong time, and I see this all the time, where companies just keep butting their heads against a wall with an organization that’s never going to give them funding. So, really researching the organization, the type of funding that it is, and making sure it’s a fit will just save you a ton of grief. And then I know that BDC also has some really interesting options available. So, maybe, I don’t know if you want to touch on that or other comments.

S05: Yeah, I mean, we’re still in the progress of finalizing our thesis, and we should be, uh, finally in a position to deploy capital later this year. But, uh, just for a quick background on the fund, we recognized very early on when we announced this fund that we didn’t have a strong enough understanding of what indigenous entrepreneurs and communities needed from our capital, and as a crown corporation, and as an indigenous person working at a crown corporation, it was really important to me that we didn’t show up to community and say, hey, we know better than you what you need, so take it or leave it. That was not going to fly. So, we spent half a year, six months last year, speaking with communities and ecdevs and academics and a lot of indigenous people in Canada, also in the U.S. and in New Zealand and Australia, to get a sense of what is working globally, but also what do people need here. So, right now we’re landing somewhere, uh, with a split that’s going to do some venture-related stuff, like Raven does, we’ll do some ETA stuff to help support entrepreneurship through acquisition, which is what ETA means. It would just be you acquiring a non-indigenous business, which is actually, I think, going to be a very powerful way for us to have an equitable wealth transition, because there’s a lot of wealth not within, within indigenous communities right now, but there’s a lot of businesses that need to transition and sell off, and if we can transfer these to indigenous people, to black people, to women, we really get a more equitable distribution of wealth across this country, which I think is really powerful. And then we’re also going to do work with DevCorps as well, too, because I think there’s a really important nation-building component there. Um, I think one thing that also is important is understanding the implications of the capital that you’re going to be receiving as well, too, because, you know, I have conversations with entrepreneurs, and VC is very sexy, and it’s flashy, and they think it’s really cool, but they also don’t necessarily understand the implications of what it means to take venture capital from investors, and that it puts a lot of pressure on you. You’re on a hamster wheel, you’re moving very fast, you have to hit growth timelines really quickly. Now, I don’t think Raven necessarily follows the traditional venture model, so that’s not as applicable for you guys or us, but, you know, on the flip side, debt is a really good solution for a lot of companies, but I think, myself included, have some negative connotations of debt being a bad thing, and I think it’s just important to figure out what the implications of that capital will be on your business, and the expectations that are going to be placed on your business, to avoid predatory situations, and I am happy, and anyone here on this stage is happy to have conversations with you about what the right type of funding is, but I think it’s very important to understand the positive and negative consequences that come with the capital you’re going to take.

S20: That’s, yeah, and to speak to debt in terms of private equity, or in terms, well, maybe not private, in terms of acquisition as well, too, it can be a wonderful tool, and to extend on that as well, too, you know, your aunties, uncles, and cousins have businesses, and a lot of them will actually cease to exist if they’re not transitioned, and so start to have conversations there, right? Like, start to see, like, what is your, you know, like, what would it look like to acquire their business, right? Like, and so I think there’s also opportunities to further Indigenous-led businesses and make sure that they have wealth preservation, too, so that’s something I’ve been thinking a little bit about, a lot about lately, and so (.) two things, I mean, Altea laughed at me at this question, was teasing me about this question, and also I’ve become glaringly aware of how pasty my legs are, but that’s another story. (..) So, without further ado, I’ve forgotten what the question was. All right.

S18: As you look it up, I’m just going to share an example transaction for what Ryan was just mentioning. So, let’s say you are in the room, and you want to acquire one of these non-Indigenous businesses and Indigenize the Canadian small business economy. Huge opportunity, and this is what both Darian and Ryan were referencing. And on Ryan’s last point about the ability to leverage debt in that scenario, because that non-Indigenous business has been operating for the last 20 years, has predictable cash flow, that is a perfect candidate for being able to access debt. So, a lot of those deals that I’m seeing are, like, 50% funded by debt, 35% funded by, like, an equity or an ETA partner, and then the rest is seller financing. So, tremendous opportunity in an area where the banks are getting, are really increasing their activity.

S20: And you can structure those however you both agree to, right? And sometimes it’s not just money that people are concerned with. And so, having a partner like BDC or, like, Raven with, you know, the more acquisition focus that’s starting to happen, which I think is a beautiful thing, they are there to help guide you as well in that process. So, I really encourage you, if you’re interested in that, to check that out. And so, I have figured out what the question is. It starts with a bit of a statement. We, I see this all the time, and I’m sure you guys see this all the time. It’s, like, people get lost in the weeds of, like, I need to incorporate, and, like, what does all my legal look like? And, like, what is, you know, and, you know, like, what type of organization? And the moment you start doing all those things, the clock starts ticking. And the more of it you, and you don’t even know if you have anything, right? And so, I’m actually going to drop the part that we laughed about. Maybe I’ll try to tie it somewhere else. But, Darian, like, when you look at the (.) start, like, what’s the most important to happen first? What are the things you do before you incorporate, you know, whilst you’re trying to figure out partnerships and things like that? But, you know, like, how do you validate ideas, figure out what works and what doesn’t? And I know you’ve also got a great example with…

S05: You have to talk to people. And this is one of the things that is a bit frustrating when entrepreneurs come in the door and they’re like, I have this great idea and I want money. And it’s like, have you talked to your ideal target customer? And they’re like, no, I’ve not spoken to anyone. It’s like, how do you know that someone wants this? And to give a bit of an analogy, I read it in a book somewhere and someone said, if someone came up to you and told you that they wanted you to teach a monkey how to juggle while standing on a box, what would you do? And 99.9% of people would start by building the box and not by figuring out how to teach the monkey how to juggle. Because that’s the actual hard part of what you’re trying to do. So it’s really, like, I have a lot of empathy and sincerity for people when they’re starting their business of thinking about my legal structure and what should my strategy be? But, like, the tough part that you have to figure out is what is the problem that you’re solving and who is actually going to, if it’s in a profit situation, who’s going to pay for that? And I think this is where constraints become really important as a part of innovation.

S20: I’m going to jump in here as well, too, because the question I was going to add is, like, constraints are the mother of innovation. I just really wanted to say it. And with that in mind… (.)

S05: Constraints are a very important part of innovation. And I think, you know, if you look at these big companies like Google and Amazon, these trillion dollar businesses, they’re not spinning out a bunch of new innovations. And I think a large reason for that is they have too many resources on their hands and not enough constraints to solve problems. And when you have $50 and someone says, like, we need you to solve this one thing, great. I can think about that. But here are the few resources you have. You have to start getting creative about it. And, you know, particularly in venture businesses, one of the things that we’ll say is we want to see a product that is 10x better than existing products or 10 times cheaper. And you kind of need some level of constraint to figure out how to do something cheaper. I know Elon Musk is not a particularly popular human being at the moment, but the stuff that he did with SpaceX and figuring out how to make rocket launches significantly cheaper is a great example of that. And I think one more thing before I pass the mic on is I don’t think you want to get in over your head and like build out the future without knowing what you have to do now. And I use Facebook as an example where Facebook today started and they wanted to be a marketplace and a messenger and a chat bot and all these things they would fail because they didn’t have focus and focus is incredibly important at the start. And you have to start with one thing and build that flywheel over time or you’re never going to be successful. (.)

S20: Beautiful. You just reminded me of a story as well, too, that ties into that. And I’m going to really abbreviate it. Guy goes to a potential funder and he says, I need $500,000 for this great app. I’m going to create an events app where you go to the event. and if nobody comes, you know, and fills a seat, you can upgrade at the event. I just need $500,000 to get it going. He says, or, you know, you could partner with a venue, get a free text now number, have them put up on the jumbo screen. You know, would you like to upgrade your seat? Text this number. Say, hey, meet me in the Poyer. (..) Take a square app that you get for $10. Swipe their card and say, thank you very much. Here’s your seat. So when they went out for funding, they didn’t need the funding. They’re actually doing great, generating revenue at the events, and they just needed to productize what already worked. So how do you, like, as technologists, we want to build things. And so, like, how can you not build and validate? It has gotten so much easier to build that my cost benefit on that is changing a little bit and that it almost is worth just building something quickly. But how do you get it out there fast to learn, fast in an ethical way? (..)

S18: Beware of getting caught in a situation where you’re so in love with your solution that you lose sight of your problem. The other way to say this is you’ve got a golden hammer and no nail. (.) That, I think, is the peril that a lot of folks seeking product market fit fall into. (..)

S13: Can I add on to that? So we started building this knowledge graph AI conversation. It drives chatbots. Ask a question, get an answer. Ask a question, get something done for you. Fill, change your address in the HR system, whatever it is. So that’s what we built. And it predated chatgpt coming online in November 2022. (..) So, but, chatgpt blew up the world, right? It changed everything. And everything went to, oh, large language models. And, oh, it has to do this. And, oh, it has to do that. And we had to look at what we have and say, what do we do now? Here’s a, you know, we have what we have. It’s good. It’s reliable. It’s transparent. All the good things about trustworthy AI, responsible AI that you see and hear. It’s explainable AI. So that’s all good. But the world is now enamored with this very lovely machine called the large language model. And it’s very powerful. Do we just keep trying to sell our stuff and say, no, no, no, it’s better, it’s better, this stuff is okay, but it’s got some risks, it hallucinates, et cetera, et cetera. Or do we join them? Do we actually make something and pull it together? And that’s when we decide, let’s do this hybrid thing. Let’s actually bring generative into our solution. So look for the opportunity. Don’t give up, of course. But also don’t be so enamored with your own product that you say, no, no, no, we’re going to succeed. BlackBerry tried that, right? It didn’t work. (.) But look for how can we make ours even better and how can we use the downside of theirs, whatever that is, some other thing that’s out there that may have looked like it’s going to overtake you and try to change the game. How do we, you know, change the game from a soccer match, now we’re playing ice hockey, we’re better at ice hockey, so now we can win this game. (.)

S05: I just want to add for anyone who’s building in the room or who wants to build, I have a fundamental belief that it is impossible for you to fail as long as you’re willing to pivot, which is not falling in love with your idea, and just not quit over the long run. And that, like, I think those are, like, the two reasons why most people fail, is they just quit too soon, or they’re not willing to pivot their product and fall in love with the idea, which is something that, like, you’ve done a great job of with your own pivoting. So anyway, I just, don’t quit, be open-minded, and, like, I promise you, you will eventually be successful, it just may take you longer than you want. I see a question from Sean in the audience. (21 seconds pause)

S18: Do you want to repeat the question, just so everyone can hear?

S20: Yeah, with the cost of code, a line of code going to zero, where you used to see the value being in the code, where is the value now? Is that, I think I missed, did I miss, yeah? (12 seconds pause)

S53: You guys are expert in this.

S43: Thank you so much, thank you. You guys are expert in this, and if the line of code is zero, where is the value tomorrow? Because, like, they’re all thinking about building a startup that might get funded in six to 12 months, and I think the landscape is completely different in six to 12 months.

S20: I’m going to maybe jump in here and then transition it into the next question, but please add on as well, too. So, the next thing I was going to talk about is, and lead into a question for Brian, was, like, the journey of TechCircle when we started it. Like, it is now a thousand plus community of Indigenous Tech folks across the country. We’ve just created a new platform on jointechcircle.com, so please, like, there’s hundreds of us that have signed up in six weeks, and so, like, the more of us that are on there that are sharing our location and our skills with one another, the more we’re able to connect, because things happen locally, they happen within groups, but that was built. It’s never about the technology. I’ve been building marketplaces my entire career, and I’m happy to chat with anyone about that after. (..) It’s figuring out whether there’s a need and a demand, right? And people kept coming back with TechCircle, right? They kept, you know, and so it’s not as much the technology as, like, how do we create real connection? How do we create real, like, meaning for whatever it is we’re trying to solve? So, you know, I think SaaS is going to change drastically, and it’s what do we point it towards, right? So, M&A can become quite interesting in that as well, too, because maybe you’re not actually selling SaaS. Maybe you have a secret weapon when it comes to, you know, a process that you’ve implemented using technology that you go to roll up and acquire a bunch of businesses, or many other use cases. And so, like, being that it’s never about the technology and that sort of thing as well, too, Brian, maybe can you talk about, like, how you validated your ideas and things? Well, before I do that, is there anything anybody wants to add to that?

S13: Can I add to the question? So, so I think, uh, human creativity is the value, absolutely. It’s you guys sitting here and saying that if we did this, the four pitches or five pitches we saw this morning, if we did this and we recognize the need, so the, the ingenuity and creativity, uh, and, and your values, bring your values to your platform, bring your community’s values to the platform, uh, that you’re building, whatever that is, uh, so I don’t think that we are outsourcing creativity. It’s someone, we have a beautiful artist who just painted a picture before our eyes. It took them four hours or whatever, you know, ChatGPT could have put up a piece of garbage there in 30 seconds, but this means something, right? This is, uh, there is, there is a meaning behind this which resonates with this room, with these people in this room, and we’re not outsourcing that to AI anytime soon, so, and even code, I read a story just recently where this woman, uh, a guy did a, a exit interview from his best coder who left, and she said, a year ago, I was valued for my creativity. Now I’m valued to pour over the code that’s generated by an AI model to make sure that it’s okay, and if it fails, I get fired. So, I mean, this is, I, I’m not a fan of outsourcing everything to AI. Right tool, right place. Uh, we should not outsource our creativity. We should not outsource our humanity. (…)

S18: Yeah, um, oh, sorry. Um, Sean, to your question, uh, in that vibe coding, i.e. coding using natural language is now widespread. For me, as an investor, I value traction more than ever before, because you can stand up a product in a tenth of the time that you used to be able to, and so, in that it stood up, and you can bring it to market considerably faster, what proof points do you have that the market actually wants it, validates it, is going to use it, and recommend it to others? So, while Darian mentioned earlier that the traditional venture capital model is one that is, in my mind, immoral, i.e., 3x growth year over year, um, I think that now, with the tools that we have at our disposal, unfortunately, it has magnified that, that expectation. So, when I speak with non-impact-focused venture capital friends of mine, where they say, you know, before, and a company that started, I expected them to kind of 3x their top-line revenue in time for their next financing, those friends are now saying, honestly, if you haven’t 12x’d, you’re not getting funded. Um, so, I think, back to one of the earlier points, I think, in that we now have tools to, that will not displace us, but make us more efficient, how can you learn from the, those tools, the marketability of those tools, and pivot as needed?

S05: And just quickly on that, as a jumping off point to traction, I think it still comes down to, like, domain expertise and fundamental understanding of the problem. And, yeah, you can vibe code a new app over the weekend, but so can anyone else, and that’s not a differentiator in and of itself. And I think the people that we’re really seeing succeed right now are the people with a deep fundamental understanding of their domain and the problem they’re trying to solve, because that’s what creates value. Like, I know that, like, code is the thing that, like, enables that to happen, but, like, the value creation is still the problem you’re solving for someone. And as an investor, I see a lot of people who are, like, bringing vibe-coded stuff in, but not as many people have a deep understanding of the problem. And I, it still just comes down to the person that you’re trying to solve the problem for. (.)

S20: I feel like I could talk with you guys forever up here as well, too, but they’re going to, like, yank us at some point. Um, I think we’ve got a few more minutes. I’m going to do a little bit of house cleaning first, and then see if we have a couple more minutes. So, um, you know, a little shameless self-promotion, but not really. But so we, we, we group, I said to a bunch of friends, they said, there’s a very big difference between creating your own table and inviting folks in, opposed to asking for permission to join others. I’m going to put in a little bit of money, and will you join me? Other Indigenous folks that had the resources and had the flexibility. Do I see one, one of them here, and Alejandro, and somebody from last year, Kelly, I is in the crowd somewhere. And, um, and so, um, everybody said yes. We had, uh, you know, $80,000 that we, uh, uh, funded two companies with last year as a minimum, minimum investment of $50,000. And, um, we had 77 companies apply, uh, shortlisted down to five companies. And, um, collectively, uh, Indigenous investors selected the companies that, that were awarded. One that I want to highlight, because I think it’s germane to the work you’re doing, and I did just try to put my Saint Germain into, into a (.) work, um, is, uh, they were pre-revenue. They hadn’t actually built anything. We just really believed in what they were doing. They were, they were, um, like, cleaning up and organizing data that’s, like, super poor in the government sites and that sort of thing. So working with Gladue writers in order to verify people that had deep domain and knowledge of local communities and, um, and, and, and, and, and providing that data, uh, in an ethical way. And, um, they were awarded 30,000, so a smaller amount for, for them. And they also were able to attain IRAP funding through a connection that we made with them. So it’s like, how do we amplify that? Uh, when we announced at our annual Indigenous Tech Conference, uh, 40, I think we had $40,000 of, of new, uh, folks wanting to contribute next year, like, right away. And so this is our second year doing it. It closed on July 1st. And now, uh, it’s called the Indigenous Venture Challenge. And you can go to investivc.com forward slash Mila, because I extended it for y’all, because I was talking with Altea, and she says, you know, you can’t go up on stage and tell people that you did a contest that, like, expired on July 1st to a bunch of people. And, like, that kind of makes sense to me, you know? Like, so, um, you know, it is my hope that some of these ideas will mature, that will evolve, will change as we see. You know, some of them will exceed quickly. Some of them will exceed slowly. Um, and I really do believe that the world is not binary in terms of pass-fail. Like, startup is about innovation. It is about iterations. It’s about, like, figuring out what doesn’t work so you can find out what does work. And the Venture Challenge is meant to be kind, patient capital, because the term friends, family, and fools is a ridiculous statement to most Indigenous folks. And so, uh, we want to be that kind and patient capital that is there to support you in the earlier stages so you can figure out who you want to be when you grow up. And then you can choose from, like, a more, um, a place of more balance and more balance of power in terms of, like, do I want to take, you know, there’s, there’s nothing good or bad about funding. There’s the right tool for the job. And it’s like, do I, you know, does this belong as a venture-based company? Does it belong as a non-profit, a for-profit? Should I be getting grant funding for it? So, to wrap that up, please join us. You know, we have 55 companies apply so far. Last year there were 77. Um, there’s amazing Indigenous folks that are supporting within this as well, too, that bring more than just dollars and cents. And we would love to see you in the, uh, uh, in the challenge with us. So, uh, again, investivc.com, uh, forward slash challenge. And I think I got like one, we got, you know what, or any comments to close us off here? This has been wonderful for me. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. I love this group here. Um, I think we’re being kicked off. Can we give some final comments or do we got to get out of here?

S18: We guys, okay. Can I encourage you to do more self-promotion and tell everybody

S20: about what Tech Circle is? So, we got this thing. There’s a lot of us. Uh, we’re pretty cool. Uh, it used to be lonely to be Indigenous in tech. You know, whether you’re a founder, you’re somebody that’s working in big tech, and like, maybe you’re like the only person in, uh, you know, a company like, let’s say Google Canada, like maybe, you know, like there’s like one or two Indigenous folks in the entire company. So, um, through our network, it’s not so lonely to be Indigenous in tech. We host our first annual conference. We have another one in January 26th to 28th in Vancouver. Please come join us. Uh, and, um, and more importantly, connect with us at our virtual events online. You go to jointechcircle.com and please create an account. Also, like I’m building it in public. You know, we’ve got a monkey loose on the wheels with adult supervision. So, um, this room, especially, I want your input as we’re, as we’re building this out and, um, uh, really trying to build something together that’s going to like connect us and build. I believe strongly that interconnected communities have unforeseen consequences and opportunities. Like so many good things happen with our community and I’m horrible at putting it together. Nicole was going to keep, yeah, others are going to keep me in track of that. Uh, and, um, and so we don’t know what’s going to come from these connections, right? We don’t know what’s going to come from today, but I can tell you this through the, the conversations, the stories, and the outcomes I’ve heard through tech circle. And I’ve heard through Mila and events like, like this is that really good things happen when we get to know each other at different levels and the business and the opportunities just come through those relationships. So funny for a tech bro, but it is all about the relationships and we hope you join us. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you. Okay. So say, so hang tight.

S21: We only have about 10 minutes. We’re going to talk salmon. Salmon’s up next. And then we’re going to have a break. So stay calm, stay in your seats. And we’re going to invite, uh, Will and Jeremy up to talk about salmon vision, indigenous co-development and ownership of AI technology to support wild salmon stewardship. It is short. It’s just 10 minutes long. So, and then we’ll have a break. So stay in your seats and we will then have a break. (….)

S50: back. I’m sorry. Check, check. Hey everybody. Thanks for still being awake. Super interesting

S54: meeting. I have to say, you know, I spent a lot of time at like fisheries conferences and AI tech conferences and the vibes are much nicer in this room. So kudos to you all for the positivity, the supportive environment, uh, and just all the different folks that have come together. My name is Dr. Will Atlas. I work for wild salmon center. I’m the co-founder of the salmon

S02: vision collaborative. And my name is Jeremy Jorgensen. And I have been with, uh, a weird program out in Quay for 12 years. And, uh, we just want to start by shouting out

S54: all the different partners involved in this work, including the Kitisu Hei Hei, Simon Fraser University, Haida Nation, Pacific Salmon Foundation, uh, Git San Watershed Authority, Git Niao Fishery Authority, Git Gat, and New Hawk Nation, among others, a growing list of folks. So I wanted to give you sort of a brief overview of the talk that we’re going to be giving today. First, we want to touch on the context and need, you know, why are we even doing this work? I think the previous panel really highlighted. Like, we need to know that there’s a fit, that there’s demand for the work that we want to do. Um, and so we’re going to touch on that a little bit. We’ll talk about the journey of actually sort of building this AI tool set, how it came together, what inspired it, and how the work got done. And then Jer is going to give a case study from the Helsing Nations Quay River Weir Program, now grown into another weir as well on the Tankia River. And I’ll talk about sort of where we go from here, looking forward, talking about our plans to incorporate a business that is co-owned by indigenous partners. (..) So I don’t think I need to tell everyone in this room this, um, but certainly, you know, I always tell an audience, like, AI is not just meta, it is not just ChatGPT, it’s not anthropic, and it’s not xAI. AI is a tool. And I firmly believe that it will be transformative for our society in many of the similar ways that the internet was. It is a big change that’s coming. And we’re at a critical moment here where we can shape and define the future of this tool, or we can passively watch it happen to us. And I think I’m incredibly encouraged by the people that I see gathered here who are really taking this opportunity by the reins and saying we want to define how this tool is used so it benefits our communities, so it upholds human well-being and ecological thriving. (..) And wild salmon, like many ecosystems and species, are struggling in the face of ongoing climate change, rapid, unpredictable changes in the ocean food web, changes in the hydrology of the streams that they spawn in. What you see on the left is the warm blob, an ocean heat wave that affected the Pacific ecosystem between 2014 and 2019. And these are now recurring phenomena. And they have extremely detrimental consequences on ocean food webs and the survival of salmon during their marine life stage. On the right is a river called the Nikas River in Heltzik territory, and you see here a fish kill that resulted from low fall flows during a period of high salmon abundance in the river. And so, essentially salmon are getting less predictable. The way that we manage salmon is typically based on this sort of rear view mirror. We’re forecasting abundance based on what’s happened in the past. But we’re actually in a climate with no historical analog in their entire three million year evolutionary history. And so we need real-time information to support sustainable fisheries and community food access. (..) Oh, and I’ll also say we’ve seen a massive erosion of Canadian government funding for monitoring and stewardship of salmon. And so nations are really taking the bull by the horns and saying we own this, we’re doing this for ourselves. So how are salmon even monitored? I mean, we have hundreds of rivers up and down the BC coast with unique locally adapted populations. We can’t do it everywhere. But one of the most common tools actually draws on an ancient indigenous technology with at least 5,000 years of history on the BC coast. And that’s a channel spanning fence called the fish weir. You see this here is the Yelm Jim’s fish weir on the Puyallup River. This photo was taken around 1895. Increasingly, these weirs are equipped with video cameras that enable passive migration of salmon through so that we can record everything that swims through the weir without actually having to handle and stress the fish. Now the challenge for this, it’s a great technology, but it generates six months of continuous video. And so that’s a big burden for resource managers and technicians and field leads like Jeremy to have to go through and review that video. It’s a huge staff demand. And actually, when we first put video cameras in the Quay Weir, I’d like to tell this story because Jer volunteered to review the video. He spent a whole year in the lab watching the video and he said, if you ever make me do that again, I quit. And so that was really, that was the seed that started salmon vision was Jer threatening to quit because if we lost Jer, we’d be toast. Um, and so it’s also really challenging to complete this review in season when we need timely data that’s actionable by resource managers. So as I’ve sort of alluded to here, there was a really clear technology opportunity, you know, managers, first nations need accurate in season data to inform their fisheries. Data review is incredibly time consuming and staff intensive. It can cost, you know, a hundred thousand dollars in staff time to watch all of your video for a season. AI tools can expedite this process, freeing staff time to do much more important and consequential work, more meaningful work. And so the Pacific Salmon Foundation, Wild Salmon Center, who’s my employer, SFU Computing Sciences, and LUMAX Ecological Analytics came together and we said, let’s form a group that can tackle this challenge. And we reached out to First Nation partners who we’ve been working with for over a decade at this point and said, hey, are you interested in partnering in this? Do you want to work with us on this? And overwhelmingly, they said, let’s do it. And so we went out and we got a major grant from the BC Salmon Recovery and Innovation Fund. Actually, we got two. We’re about two and a half million dollars in sort of government investment into the tech development. We’ve built out a web app that automates data review makes your video visible within 24 hours. And it’s now being applied at over 30 sites across Alaska, BC, Washington, and Oregon. So how does it work? First, we set up a monitoring site or First Nation partner will share their video or sonar data with us. We then run a preliminary AI model across that data. We use those initial AI detections to form an annotation data set, which we refine and review. We then retrain the model and deploy it in the field and confirm and validate its results. And I want to say none of this would be possible without First Nation partners who run these projects on the ground. And so really one of the sort of core elements of our philosophy is that resources need to flow back to those communities to support the work on the ground, because without them, there’s no market for this work. And without, you know, their leadership, the information on how many salmon are returning to our rivers in BC wouldn’t be there. So I’m going to pass it over to Jared to talk a little bit about his experience working on the project.

S02: Jared? Yeah, I’ll just share a bit of the next few slides here. So this is a slide introduces the Hellsic Nation, whose traditional territory includes the Quay River, where we’ve been running our program since 2013. As you can see, they are a coastal community. So fishing is a huge part of the culture, history, and way of life. The photos show the Hellsic community of Bella Bella, a traditional big house with elders passing on cultural knowledge. And the bottom picture is a couple of our old crew members working on some early stages of the old cedar weir that we used to build. (…) Hellsic fisheries. These are just some different traditional Hellsic ways of trapping and catching fish. We have the cedar weir, which we actually ran in the Quay River for a few years. It’s a fence built across a river to block guide and fish traps. There’s stone traps, which I’ve seen a lot around the territory, where rock walls are built in tidal waters. And as the tide rises, the salmon come in. And when the tide drops, they become trapped within those rocks. And we also have some fishermen pulling in a seine net full of sockeye, I think. We actually do seines by the Quay River once a week, too, for harvesting sockeye ourselves. And here is an old stone seine weight that we found in Quay. A few of them we’ve found over the years. Pretty cool. (…..) Quay River life cycle monitoring. So the Quay River is an important cultural site for the Hellsic people and is a large protected conservancy. Salmon in this river were not always well monitored in the past. So researchers, Will Atlas and the nation began studying their life cycle. And here we have a map of where the Quay River is located. And can you show where we are, where our site is?

S54: So the weir is just sort of… Quay River weir. Okay, this slide shows a traditional and a modern

S02: fish weir. The traditional cedar weir we used in Quay for a number of years, but it just couldn’t stand up to the heavy rainfall and high flows. It would just crumble under our eyes and we would be destroyed morally in season. So eventually we thought it was just time to build a more robust weir. And that’s what we have here is the aluminum weir. It’s a floating weir. So it creates less drag against it in high flows. So it can really… It holds up well in the Quay River. Thank God. (….) Yeah, so the old cedar weir was still my favorite. It’s still very cool and beautiful. And I miss it. But this new weir just makes work a lot easier for us. So don’t worry about the… (….) Uh, AI tool development. Um, yeah, so the success is… Oh, sorry. Can I check the previous next slide? (……)

S54: Yeah, do you want… Okay. Jer is handing this slide over to me. So Helsic have been partnered in the Salmon Vision Collaborative since that first grant in 2021. And the Quay River really has been a key test bed for the development of this technology. Uh, so her now uses the weir data in season to manage their food, social and ceremonial fishery at the weir, uh, which ensures sustainability of the harvest and that we’re meeting the sort of biological escapement goal for the population. And these guys harvest around 500 to 1,000 sockeye

S02: annually to distribute to Helsic households. Uh, yeah, recognition. Um, the success of the Helsic Integrated Resource Management Department has been recognized across Canada as we’ve received the First Nations Technology Council’s innovative award for our work with AI, um, in large part to this man’s help. Um, our weir program was also featured in an IMAX film called Running Wild, um, that highlights the importance of wild salmon. Um, today our weir program is a model for other First Nations who want to use both technology and traditional knowledge together. The data we’re collecting is also helping governments and indigenous communities make better decisions about protecting salmon. Um, yeah. And a few, uh, a few years ago with the knowledge of expected salmon returns, we can decide what number is appropriate for harvesting sockeye for the community. (..)

S54: Okay. I’m going to go fast. I know we’re out of time. So the AI has been trained now to detect 20 different species of fish and mammals. And actually this year with a round of retraining that we did, the Quay AI count of sockeye is within 2% of human reviewers. So we really are at the point of having solved this video counting challenge. We have a growing network of partners around the Northeast Pacific region from Chignik in Western Alaska, all the way down to the Klamath Basin. Um, and we have hardware manufacturing partners and scalable cloud infrastructure, uh, that allows us to apply this quickly in new sites. So the next step for us, because we don’t want to spend the rest of our lives chasing government grants through these fickle funding cycles is to form an enterprise that can sustain this work long term. And as a part of that, we want to make a fundamental commitment to co-ownership to the first nations tribes and local organizations that make it possible. This is a video of the technology working and I wrote this cheesy talk, uh, slide title, which is swimming upstream towards a new model of AI. And I think this is a lot of what we’re hearing about in this room. So this isn’t going to be a novel idea to folks that are already thinkers in this space. Uh, but as we incorporate, we want to commit to 50% of the equity in the company being held in a cooperative structure, which is owned by the nations. So they’ll own a stake and they’ll receive profit sharing proportional to the stake that they own in the company. Board seats will also be 50% indigenous partners. And we also plan to pay a data dividend to license their data so that we can uphold OCAP and care principles and pay nations to use their data in model training. (….) So where do we go from here? I think, you know, AI presents opportunities and it present risks. And the more that local communities and indigenous communities can be in the driver’s seat, can see a clear path to benefit and ownership of these tools, the better off we all are. Um, in our society. Uh, and I’m, I think we’re both really grateful to be here listening and learning to all of you, uh, about your own journey in the space. And we’d be happy to answer questions after.

S15: So thank you so much. And also a lot of people made this work possible. So I want to give Ben credit to you. (…..)

S21: Amazing. So there’s something a little fishy about me giving you 10, you taking 15 minutes. (.) Sorry, I couldn’t, I couldn’t help myself. So let’s try and be back at half past and I’ll give you an extra five minutes. How’s that sound? But I’ll start calling you back at half past. Uh, there’s cookies up here. I had a sample. They’re really good. Uh, enjoy your break. (2 minute[s] pause) Let’s test, testing. Okay. (40 seconds pause)

S48: Man, so we’re, we’re, uh, do you have a HDMI port here? //S50: I do, yeah. You do have? Yeah.// Let’s just plug in it. (………) So as you can, you can bring it back. What’s going to happen when you get, uh, presented? Okay. So yeah, make sure you, careful what you choose. (…….) //S48: I love when people scare me. (6 minute[s] pause)//

S21: I’m just a five minute warning. If you could start making your way back to your chairs, that would be amazing. We’ll start back in five minutes sharp. (1 minute[s] pause)

S48: Everyone, we’re going to get started very soon. So please come back to your seat. Please come back to your seat. We’re getting started in two, three minutes. Thank you very much. (1 minute[s] pause)

S21: Everyone, if you could make your way back to your seats, that would be amazing. We’re going to get started right away. If you could make your way back to your seats, that would be amazing. (2 minute[s] pause) Everyone back to your seats. Let’s go. (17 seconds pause)

S37: Everybody, everybody has to sit down now. (26 seconds pause)

S21: Excellent. Thanks, everyone. So next up, I’m going to try, we have, uh, Shanai Gwynn. Métis founder of Pipi Guan, Patai Guan, and Wasa Guan Kese Wasu Gwynn.

S13: What’s that?

S21: How’s my Cree lips? (..) Host of the Settle Down Podcast. (.) So she’s going to come up. We’re going to have a 15 minute presentation from her. I also wanted to let folks know the program has shifted for the end of the day. Before, so we have minister coming in. Um, so before the cocktail hour, we have a few shifts. So don’t get all excited and get up and, and run around too early. Uh, just stay seated. Uh, we do have a few announcements that are pretty exciting. So stay chilled. We’ll get to the cocktail hours fast enough. Um, but yeah, come on up. (……..)

S27: Tansay, Tansay, Mahegan, Oyoyo, Susqueyo, Netsigasan. My name is Shawnee Gwynn. Just kidding. Everyone gets my name wrong. Um, I am Métis. I’m a descendant of the Fergussons and the Cunningham Clans. Um, in St. Albert and, uh, Grewart, Alberta respectively. And I’m also a descendant of Michelle First Nation, which is, um, the only nation I believe in Canada that has been completely enfranchised by the Canadian government. Um, so that’s a little bit about me. I’m a mom. Um, I want to say congratulations to all of the Pathfinders. You guys are incredible, incredible. (…) It’s extremely rewarding to see so many of our people getting involved in this technology. It’s so exciting. We need you. Don’t stop. Um, with that, I’ll get into what I’m doing. Um, so Wasigan Kisawatsuan, uh, translates to, uh, kind or, um, sorry, kind electricity or kind energy. And so when we went to ceremony to get, you know, the okay, should we move forward with doing what I want to do, um, we received this name. Um, and the elders shared that, um, traditionally, the sound of thunder, um, was a very loving and kind sound. We weren’t afraid. We were, we knew that that meant the rain and sustenance for life was coming, cleansing of the earth. Um, but in modern day, a lot of new people to, um, to hear and even some of our own people who don’t understand those teachings get scared. And so when she told me that, I thought, wow, that is incredible because that’s how I feel about this technology. It scares me, but I think we can make it a kind and loving tool if we put our values at the core and we as an indigenous people be part of governing and understanding how to, to move forward with it. (.) So my vision, um, for the non-indigenous folks, when I say matriarchal, I’m not saying the opposite of patriarchy in terms of a triangle with women at the top being in power and control. I mean it from an indigenous worldview and that’s that circle model. That’s where everyone has a say, everyone’s voice is heard, there’s transparency, accountability, and we work together. And so when I learn more about AI, um, I’m not in, I’m not a tech person. Um, I’m a public relations specialist by trade and, um, I have another company that is an indigenous, thank you, an indigenous public relations agency. And so when I got involved with AI, I found out how much bias and racism, how much misinformation was involved in building the tool as it exists. So not only were they like, hey, for your idea, why don’t you use AI? AI, I was like, great, so I have to try and solve online racism bias towards indigenous people with an already racist bias tool. That will be great. Um, but I believe we can do it. So if Elon is gonna move forward with Grok, then we need that indigenous auntie that’s gonna stand up to Grok. And that’s what I feel. Yeah. (.)

S25: So that’s what I’m trying to do here.

S27: Um, so what we are, have built and what I’m gonna show you today, because when they said you had 15 minutes, I was like, I’m not gonna explain this. People already here are majority gonna know what I’m doing. But with my PR firm, I found that my majority indigenous staff was being psychologically, spiritually, emotionally harmed every day, um, just by doing their jobs, by going on social media, by reviewing news articles for their clients, seeing the harm that was spoken about our people with. And that’s something that I’ve experienced my whole life. Um, and maybe because whatever reason I didn’t really prioritize my own, but when I saw how it impacted other people I really cared about, um, I thought, okay, I have to do something. So we’ve built a model that highlights, um, colonial perspectives in your writing and corrects it and tries to encourage and from an indigenous worldview, while also trying to de-homogenize any education that you have. But what’s really important are these three pieces that we design around. And it’s been so incredible to see so much of this similarity in all of the Pathfinders today, working around sacred knowledge, not inputting that, giving consent at every layer. Even the keynote was talking about how consent and engagement never ends. I’m just like, yes, yes, yes. Um, so with that, I want to show you how it works. Um, here’s our model, (.) uh, Wasik and Kisa Watswin. When you log in, you can choose between a writing assistant or a chatbot. Um, in the writing assistant, you can actually input something. So I went ahead and I’m going to say trigger warning. I went to Reddit, found a terrible comment, and I put it in there. Um, and so you’re going to see how redlined it is. Um, this is what happens when you put the comment in here. It underlights everything that is harmful. And you can go to each one, click on it, and it’ll tell you specifically why that sentence is harmful. And it’ll give you an explanation and then it’ll tell you how to improve it. So you can apply that and change the perspective, change the hate, change the bias in real time. You can also go here and say, I want to see how they look together, what I had inputted versus what you’re providing me. So I love this because it’s completely redlined. And over here we have, this is how we respond. This is the type of response. This is what we want to be putting out into the world. So with that, you could also go into a chatbot where you can ask questions. But today I’m going to show how the chatbot works in TELUS’s environment, which is really exciting. And also with our app, you can go in to learning insights. And this is exciting too because it shows you, are you consistent? Are you making progress? Are you using the suggestions, engagement, and what’s the writing quality? So here it will tell you how many times you use generalization and stereotypes in your writing. How many times harmful framing and bias was used? Identity and terminology, historical awareness. So I’ve just been using this with all terrible content. So that’s how we keep pushing and testing it. So that’s how it works in our model. But in the TELUS environment, what we are able to do is license the tool to TELUS and within their own AI infrastructure. And then working with Marissa’s team, who is the lead of reconciliation at TELUS, we also gave it TELUS’s guidelines. So when you see a response, this isn’t how Wasigan would respond always on its own, but it’s informing the employee how to work with best practices within TELUS, but also reframing things from an indigenous worldview. So a big shout out to TELUS TELUS is because the way that we have been able to move forward with our program, our product is because TELUS gave us free access to their AI sovereign factory, which means my product is as close to OCAP as I could possibly get it without having to use Amazon or Meta. And they’ve also given me human power. And through that, they call it purple testing, which is red and blue testing, and have pushed our model to the limits. And that’s indigenous and non-indigenous people testing our product that I didn’t have to pay for. I don’t have any money, right? Most of us don’t. So what we’ve done is we’ve put this model into TELUS. It acts as a guardrail, but also answers from our model. So what I’ve done is I’ve just gone and pulled a couple of comments that I have seen, and I’m going to put it in here. So this comment is, why do indigenous people oppose all economic opportunities? We just want to help. And it feels like pulling teeth to get them to understand the benefit of them partnering on the project. Okay, Wasigan, what do you think of that? So this is how it responds. I hear your frustration. But it’s actually the opposite. And it talks about how we actually do partner. And the pulling teeth, that’s a response to generations of harm. And so it goes on to give you more and more information. And also corrects a lot of the things that are harmful in your comment. that we’re not here to say, that we’re not just there to say no, that we have the right to self-determination, and that it’s about accountability, and whatever else it’s going to say. It’s going to go on for a while. So that is great. And what I’m doing here is, the hope is to take that emotional labor off of us. When I was listening to the keynote today, I’m just like, I wonder how many times she has been pulled aside to explain why her work is important. Why she has to focus on the work that she’s doing. Why, like, why she answered something a certain way. Instead of just focusing on that amazing work that she’s doing. And so how many people that are indigenous in the room has ever been asked to be a hub of information for indigenous people, be the indigenous expert on top of your job? Oh, only a couple. Oh, no, more going up. I know I have. And even as a friend of non-indigenous people, I get asked all the time for them to help me. So here, I think they do ask about TELUS somewhere. But what is happening is, they also will tell you how to work within the TELUS model. So here’s another one. Should I use the term digital native in our new tech strategy? No, you shouldn’t. And then it goes on to tell you why. So think about how, this is actually a real example that came from a very large organization, not TELUS. They asked me if I could put it into Wasigan. And so I did. And when I got back to them, they were like, this would have saved us eight different directors time, four days worth of emails. channels. And so we put together our brains quick. And we were like, that’s probably, I don’t know, uh, almost, you know, $50,000 worth of company time, if not more, um, that went into just trying to solve this issue that you could put into here and get that response. So I’m not interested in putting in sacred information, traditional knowledge. But what I am interested in understanding, how do communities want to be spoken about? How do you want to be engaged? How are there history pieces that we want Canadians to know when they’re coming to work with you? And so that’s what gets me excited is that people might just come ready for once. And that excites me. So here we have the digital native example. And then here’s how it works with TELUS. TELUS now tells you, based on our commitments and our guidelines, this is what you should avoid. And these are the risks that come with it. So it’s really an amazing tool. I’m biased for this. Um, and I just think that there’s so much that can be done with our product. Um, I also just wanted to put this one in as well before I, because I know I don’t have a lot of time. And, oh, actually, I want to pick on Minister Solomon today. Um, so, sorry, he’s not here to defend himself. But he used the word stakeholder today. And I was like, oh, that is such a good example. I have zero minutes left. One quick thing. (11 seconds pause) How do I engage Indigenous stakeholders? So, right away, it starts talking about the, the answer. And it should, there you go, shift your mindset from stakeholder to rights holders. And so that is such a common example of language that is used flippantly, but is harmful to us. And it, it puts, um, a very harmful historical norm, I guess, that is reminding us all the time. And so, Wasigan, we are still in our beta. We’re looking for funding, but I wanted to share it all with you because I need more champions. Um, either if you want to test the tool or be involved in it somehow. But I also wanted to encourage other Indigenous people to keep going, because we are going to be what makes this product safer. We’re going to be able to help manage how and when it should be used and the impact on the environment. And that’s one thing that I get really, one of many things I get really excited about with my relationship with TELUS is when I’m using their AI solver model, it is using renewable energy. I think, I always get these stats mixed up, so forgive me, TELUS, but 75% less water use and 99% renewable energy. So, to me, I feel like I can sleep at night a little bit better knowing that my impact to help my people, to help non-Indigenous people, is also not harming the earth at a crazy rate. So, thank you for listening to me, IHI. If you have any questions, please come find me. Take care. (52 seconds pause)

S21: We’re just waiting for our next guest to arrive. Let’s sing a song, but you don’t want me to do that. (..) I could dance. No, no, no, you really don’t want me to sing. They were singing karaoke yesterday, and they invited me up to the stage. They went, no, no, no, let’s not do that. But it was really great to watch the Pathfinders hang out and sing and, you know, this is the great thing about Indigenous folks. We come together, we laugh, we have fun, we have a great time. So, while they were making me cry of how profound and great the work that they were doing and coming together and doing, it just, it was so moving. But everyone has a great time. But as far as we’re waiting here, has anyone thought of one or two of their three things that they’re going to action from today’s proceedings? Does anyone want to volunteer anything that they’ve thought of they’re

S41: going to take away? Yes, come on up. Three things that I want to take with me today, tonight. First of all, the Pathfinders program is excellent, and I hope that next year grows a little bit bigger, and we wouldn’t have been able to do it without Lindsay, Jacob, and Margaret. So thank you. And the second thing I want to take away is ancestral intelligence. That was a new one on me. I am so grateful I got to hear that. And I hope that that synergy about our ancestors continues to rise, especially in indigenous communities across Turtle Island. And the third thing is the opportunity network with people like Ryan and Jeff Ward and so many people in this room. I’m going to be following you, Michael Running Bear and his wife Caroline. Oh, Running Wolf, sorry. I gave you a new name, sorry. Okay, oh no. But yeah, I just, I want to follow you wherever you go. I probably won’t

S21: stalk you though, but I will follow you. Wonderful, wonderful. Well, our guest has arrived, and I’m like over the moon about this one too. So I’d like to take the time now to introduce the Honorable Rebecca Chartrand, an Anishabe Inu and Métis leader. She is responsible and serves Canada’s federal minister, serves as Canada’s federal minister of Northern and Arctic Affairs, as well as the minister responsible for the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency. Please put your hands together for Minister Chow Chan. (27 seconds pause)

S39: Hello, everybody. It’s a pleasure to be here with you today in Montreal, Montreal, where the traditional territories intersect with several First Nations. (.) I also want to thank the organizers of today and some of my team members who have traveled with me, Josh Giesbrick, Connor Lavallee, or is my other team? Oh, there he is. Eamon, Carol, who’s at the back. So if there are any questions, oh, Joanne Panera sitting right there, and I think that’s all we have in the room. (.) Brad, there we go, Brad. Okay, so any questions or follow-ups for me, just you can get a number from one of these great folks here. (.) So thank you for welcoming today for this important discussion. It’s great to be here alongside leaders, industry, and Indigenous partners. Artificial intelligence, we know, is changing many parts of our lives. countries. It’s reshaping how we work, how we learn, how we access information from relationships to making larger decisions, such as projects of national interest. As we move forward in building a responsible approach to artificial intelligence, we know that AI must work for all Canadians, not the other way around. It must help grow our economy, strengthen our communities, promote Canadian culture, and respect the unique identities and priorities of Indigenous people. (.) Artificial intelligence presents significant opportunities to strengthen communities, businesses, and public services across the North. It can help improve productivity, address workforce shortages, modernize operations, and support better decision making. AI also has practical applications for the North, health, including climate adaptation, environmental monitoring, emergency management, infrastructure planning, and improved access to information for government services. Through investments that we’ve been making through the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency, otherwise known as CANNOR, these opportunities are already becoming a reality. In the Yukon, Bizant has developed Interlay, an innovative tool that removes sensitive information information before it is shared with AI systems. This allows organizations to benefit from AI while protecting data sovereignty and confidential information. Also in the Yukon, Delta View has developed software that brings together data from multiple sensors and makes it compatible with AI systems. This will help governments, researchers, and industry analyze information more effectively, leading to faster and better informed decisions on issues that matter to Northern communities. In Nunavut, CANNOR is supporting the Nunavut Economic Development Association to develop Inuit-led machine learning, tools that will help communities prepare development plans and funding proposals. These tools are being designed to reflect local priorities, cultural knowledge, and community goals. In the Northwest Territories, CANNOR is supporting the Inuvik Tech Society to deliver training in AI, digital literacy, and online safety. Prosper Northwest Territories is also developing AI-powered business tools and practical training so entrepreneurs can adapt these technologies with confidence. So together, these projects demonstrate how Northern businesses and organizations are adopting AI to develop practical solutions that reflect Northern priorities and meet local needs. And at the same time, we must recognize the challenges. Many Northern communities continue to face digital infrastructure barriers to reliable internet access. Closing the digital divide remains essential if everyone is to benefit from emerging technologies. We also know that AI systems can reproduce existing bias and discrimination when they rely on incomplete or unrepresentative data. Indigenous peoples have often been underrepresented or misrepresented in data. If we fail to address these these very gaps, AI can reinforce inequities instead of reducing inequities instead of reducing them. There are also legitimate concerns about Indigenous data, sovereignty, Indigenous languages, cultural knowledge, traditional practices, and community information. It must only be collected or used with consent and appropriate oversight. Indigenous communities must have control over their own data, how it’s collected, used, stored, and shared. That control strengthens self-determination. It protects cultural knowledge. It protects cultural knowledge and ensures that technologies that serve communities is the focus rather than exploiting them. That is why partnership is so essential. The future of AI must be community-driven and co-developed with Indigenous governments, organizations, and partners. Indigenous voices must help shape how AI is designed, governed, and used. Strong partnerships are key to that. that. Ensuring AI is developed and used responsibly. Representation is also essential. As AI becomes increasingly integrated into education, employment, health care, and government services, it shapes whose perspectives are reflected and whose voices are heard. That is why it is important to ensure AI systems respect Indigenous culture, Indigenous culture languages, lived experiences, and ways of knowing. This helps build trust, support, self-determination, and reduces the risk of technologies reinforcing exclusion or discrimination. Our government is taking action on this. Through Indigenous Services Canada transformational approach to Indigenous data, we continue to invest Indigenous-led statistical institutions and governance capacity. community. These investments strengthen Indigenous control over data, and it is the foundation for responsible AI development. In May, Canada also launched the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, AI for All. This strategy will help Canada lead in AI innovation while ensuring that development is grounded in trust, responsibility, and national sovereignty. It includes new legislation, investments, and programs, and programs that will help adopt AI responsibly over the next five years. The strategy includes targeted supports for workers, communities most affected by technological change, including Indigenous peoples. It invests in practical training, work-integrated learning, skill development, while supporting Indigenous-led AI initiatives that strengthen language, culture, innovation. We’re also expanding the regional artificial artificial intelligence initiative, which is delivered through the regional development agencies to accelerate adoption and commercialization of AI across Canada. There are seven RDAs. Through CANNOR, businesses and organizations across the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and National Artificial Intelligence Foundation will receive greater support to adopt AI technologies. By working in partnership and respecting Indigenous rights and data sovereignty and investing in people and communities, we can ensure that our artificial intelligence creates lasting opportunity while preserving the knowledge of communities in the right way. Together, we can shape AI and its future to ensure that it’s inclusive, that it’s responsible and grounded and grounded in partnership. So thank you for having me here today. Miigwech. Maseecho. Nakamik. (11 seconds pause)

S21: Just, um, we have some gifts here too for you. So, uh, my name is Mick Elliott. My spirit name is Okamawitik. And, uh, I’ve just spent the last two weekends in Sundance. And, um, this is Deborah. So, I’m from the the work that you’re doing. And it’s, uh, such an honor to offer this to you. And as you take this, we ask that you smell it and hold it and think of us and all the work that’s ahead of you to make sure that it really is AI for all and hold those around you accountable. Because it is such a heavy lift for all of us in this room to make sure that Indigenous peoples aren’t left behind like everything else. And so, I’d like to offer this to you as, as a former Pathfinder and representing the current Pathfinders and all the future Pathfinders that will come. Please accept this and our thanks for all

S41: the work that you’re doing. Thank you, Minister Chartrand. Uh, it’s an honor to meet you. And we have a couple more gifts that we would like to share with you. A medicine, uh, pouch. Um, my apologies. I don’t know the artist, but, uh, I bought it at one of the powwows. And, um, got some matching earrings to go with it. Hopefully you like beaded earrings. And this is Morgan, who is Mi’kmaq. And she wants to share a few words. (.)

S22: Um, just on behalf on the Pathfinders, um, we just wanted to thank you, uh, so much for coming here and giving us your support. Um, it means a lot. And on behalf of the Pathfinders as well, we wanted to thank Lindsay, Margaret, and Jacob once again for making this all possible. (22 seconds pause)

S13: So, um, so, um, so the next panel is, uh, about the, uh, Arctic intelligence. So I’d like to

S21: introduce the next moderator, Ali Lang. And, uh, Métis accessibility, accessibility strategist based here in Montreal, uh, who works on digital inclusion and indigenous data sovereignty. Welcome. And, uh, you’re welcome to bring the rest of the panel up. Thank you. Thank you.

S36: So, yeah, let’s gather on stage. We have Natasha McDonald. And we have Lyle Fabian. Lyle. And we have Jasmine Redfern. And then we have the Honorable Minister Rebecca Chartrand joining us for the conversation. Surprise guest has been revealed. So it is my absolute honor and privilege to be facilitating this conversation today. I was invited to, and it’s my very first time doing so. And it’s just an incredibly important conversation to be a part of. So thank you for the trust. And I so look forward to diving into the conversation today. So, uh, I have already been kindly introduced. So we actually have a bit of a, a tight timeline. We have 45 minutes. We have four panelists. (….) Okay. The panel has been shortened. Okay. Okay. Fantastic. So without further ado, if you would please each take a moment to introduce yourselves. (………)

S28: My name is Jasmine Redfern. I’m a lawyer from Iqaluit, and I’m the managing director of Small Economy Works, as well as a newly appointed ethics commissioner for the Hawaii First Nations in BC, and the former chair of the Nunavut Human Rights Tribunal. Thank you. (……..)

S10: Hi, nice to see you again, Rebecca. I’m Lyle Fabian. I’m originally from Northwest Territories, a small community called Ketlow DG First Nation. I own a company called Ketlow Tech Communications, Ketlow Tech Fiber, and Ice Fox Data Center. And basically, what we are is that we’re working together to put together a northern infrastructure corridor in the Northwest Territories, and basically taking a look at, you know, how we can build redundancies and communication critical infrastructures in the Northwest Territories, and building large generation revenue models that can help diversify and build sustainable economies for indigenous communities. All right, thank you. (……)

S06: And Unlakut. My name is Natasha MacDonald. I grew up in Gujarabic until I was about a teenager, and then moved south. South meaning anything outside of the north, of course. We all know that. And I’m currently a consultant with my company called Silatusarnik Community Solutions, but I’m also vice president of Heritage Lab, which is here today. Get a chance to view our mural in the back corner and stop in and say hi when you get a chance. So, very happy to be here. I also work on the Inuit Nunangat University, the first university for Inuit, led by Inuit, developed by Inuit, for Inuit, based on Inuit knowledge, traditions, and language, which will be up and running by 2030. Countdown. (11 seconds pause)

S39: Hi, everybody. I am Rebecca Chartrand. I am Anishinaabe. I am part Dakota. I am from Treaty 4 territory in Manitoba. I am the MP for Churchill Kiwait Nukeski, which is three quarters of Manitoba. It is the fifth largest riding in the world. It has 73 communities in it, 42 of which are First Nations, and 19 that are remote, isolated communities. As the Minister of Northern Arctic Affairs, I also support the work within the territories, including the Yukon Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Inuit, Nunangat, so that includes Upper Labrador, Upper Quebec. It is 40% of Canada’s land mass. It is a vast geography, and it is a very exciting time because we’re seeing huge investments in the north like we’ve never seen before, but it is very important that these initiatives are Indigenous-led, rights-holders-led. That’s a strong stance that I’m taking as First Nations women, and I believe that is where a strong dual-use lens has emerged in the work that we’re seeing as it continues to unfold in the north about supporting projects of national interest. Thank you. (…….)

S36: So, thank you so much, Minister, for introducing the space in depth and so holistically and really giving us a sense of what is happening up north, but I’ll just go around with a lightning question in one minute or less. Please paint us a picture. What does Arctic AI look like today through your lens?

S28: I can begin. So, I think when we talk about Arctic AI, there’s definitely some projects related to language, cultural preservation, but I think Arctic AI is so much more than chatbots or large language models. Arctic AI is increasingly about infrastructure. We have autonomous drones doing mapping projects. We have data-enabled search and rescue operations, telecommunications. (.) and increasingly, and increasingly, and increasingly defense. We have over $40 billion committed to projects in the north, 32 billion of which are going directly to creation of military bases. So, more and more, I think we’re seeing that Arctic AI is, the surface is about software, but increasingly it’s about land, it’s about peoples, it’s about connectivity, it’s about infrastructure, it’s about data. And it’s importantly also about governance. Thank you. (…)

S10: I’m going into a circle here. (.) So, I guess, when I think about Arctic AI, you know, I don’t begin with, you know, these things that everybody’s so used to about is, you know, chatbots, right? I think about nurses in rural and remote communities, you know, that need better access to diagnostic tools without sending sensitive information to thousands of kilometers away. And we’ve just seen a few of those samples today. I think about communities using sensors and local knowledge to monitor wildlife risks, water, roads, and also changing ice conditions in the north-west territories. I think about transportation systems, telecommunication networks, electrical infrastructures that can identify problems before they fail. (.) But none of these work reliably without a physical infrastructure underneath it. (..) And AI requires fiber, electricity, data centers, storage, cybersecurity, and people that can operate those systems. (.) That is why we’re building, you know, Catlotec Fiber and developing IceFox data center. And Catlotec Fiber would be a digital highway where IceFox would be, provide a secure storage and computing. Smaller modular facilities across a localized network that could place digital capacity closer to our indigenous communities. And so, to me, Arctic AI is not just one enormous computer somewhere in the south, serving the north remotely. It is a distributed network where communities can access computing closer to where they live and retain greater control over their information they produce. (…)

S06: And to keep it quick, thinking about Arctic AI, I think more about on-the-ground level of use of AI. And it varies across our Arctic. And when I say Arctic, for me, I think about Inuit Nunangat. And so, we can’t paint the same paintbrush across all of our four regions because it varies. There’s a lot of work that still needs to be done in terms of digital AI literacy to those of us who are creating data centers. Or to those of us who are using AI and technology to protect and preserve language culture through technology. (..) One of the things that I think we also need to acknowledge is that Inuit, and again, I speak of Inuit. (.) Inuit, we’ve practiced the principle of being Hanukdurnik, which is one of our Inuit Haime Yattuhangit principles in that we have been resourceful and adapting to every new technology that has come our way as a way to survive. We didn’t become less Inuit, we didn’t become less Inuit by using AI as a tool to keep us moving into the future but maintaining who we are. (……..)

S39: Yeah, thank you for that. So, I think when we’re thinking about the huge undertaking of the North, so in the last 10 years, we spent $10 billion on infrastructure in the North. But as we move forward, we’re going to be spending $80 billion. And so, with that, we’re having to modernize a number of activities that we carry out in the North. The NORAD modernization, for example, is a big one connected to national security. But when we’re looking at what’s happening on the ground, there are a number of initiatives that are already taking place. And one of them is addressing climate change. How do we build? Where do we build? Because we’re building at a scale that we have never seen before. It’s unprecedented in the North. So, we have to ensure that we’re relying on good data, good data mapping, and we’re able to use AI tools to help us achieve that. Another example in which we’ve been using AI is to support the regulatory process. So, when we think about the modern treaties and the way in which we’re building in the North, we have to ensure that we’re maintaining the regulatory process. Because they are born out of the modern treaties, so we’re trying to find efficiencies, modernizing the regulatory processes, while maintaining the integrity of the process. But, historically, projects have taken six to ten years to move through the regulatory process. But we’ve been able to move two of the projects forward within a year. That’s Grease Bay Road and Port and the Mackenzie Valley Highway using new technologies. And one of those technologies is a pilot project we funded through CANNOR that is helping us collect data. So, environmental assessments, water management, wildlife management, all of the types of pieces of data that you would need in order to make informed decisions as you move forward. So, we piloted it with the Northwest, with the Mackenzie Valley Highway, and so we now have that in the regulatory queue. It is a process that is owned and governed by the boards that are supporting those processes. And so, that’s where we’re already seeing huge efficiencies in how we do that. And there’s strong partnership and collaboration between government and between the rights holders in the North. Because, at the end of the day, the regulatory process is owned by the rights holders. So, that, to me, is a really good example of showing how we’re using AI to advance and modernize the ways in which we’re moving projects forward. Um, but there’s so many examples, um, that I can give in terms of what else we’re doing, um, but I’ll leave it at that. (.) Thank you.

S36: Thank you so much. I feel like there are so many tangents, and I just wish that we had hours to talk on stage. (.) Um, so, right now, it is not just AI. We know that military interests, as you’re saying, resource extraction and data infrastructure are all showing up on this land at the same time, each with a different reason for being there. So, when that many outside interests converge at once on Arctic land, who determines who gets a say, who doesn’t, and how are decisions being made? And I’ll direct this one to you.

S06: Thank you. Um, I appreciate the question. And the way I think about it is that across Inuit Nunangat, again, I speak about Inuit Nunangat, uh, these are Inuit lands, these are Inuit territories, and we’ve been there for millennia. So, any decision about, uh, data centers, about how AI is used, about military operations, about, uh, mining, about, uh, any of these matters has to be done, uh, alongside us. As Inuit, we are, uh, we are, uh, the, the purveyors of this land, we are the, uh, protectors of this land, and that any decision must not be done, uh, unilaterally, uh, over us, and must not be done, uh, in a perfunctory sort of consultative way. Um, and, and, and I feel that this, these are the things that, uh, are happening today in a lot of our communities where, uh, AI is being placed into, uh, into different areas of technology, into different areas, uh, uh, into different lands without proper, uh, not even consultation. I, because I despise the word, but I can’t find another word that, that fits better. Um, I’ll use an example where a new data center is being put up, uh, in Canada, uh, in Canada, and I think we’ve all heard about it in the news, and the farmers on that land heard nothing about it, learned about it on the news. (..) So, that is something that, when I hear, uh, that there’s going to be, uh, you know, uh, um, AI for all, uh, and that everyone will benefit, but, you know, without, uh, discussion, without, uh, approvals, without decision making from those that are, uh, um, affected, these are not meaningful, uh, uh, uh, efforts.

S36: Thank you. (..) So, we’ve heard a lot today about data sovereignty. So, very simply, I think data sovereignty means that if, if it is your land, or your knowledge, or your people, that you decide who touches that data, and you decide who profits from it, or who it serves. So, we know that frameworks like OCAP CARE and Inuit-specific data sovereignty protocols have existed for over 30 years to make that a reality. (..) Canada’s new AI for all strategy talks about building sovereign infrastructure, but it does beg the question, sovereign for whom? So, what will it really take to build these protocols into the foundation of every company and government that is operating in the North today, and who, in your opinion, is really getting this right? (…)

S25: Okay. (..)

S39: Thank you. Um, yeah, that’s an important question. And so, when we think about, um, ownership and partnership or collaboration, I think some of the things that we need to look at are Indigenous ownership of land, Indigenous ownership of knowledge, and of rights. Um, I think that should be the starting point in how we move forward with any project. Um, and if we’re looking at it more specifically, things like, you know, title to harvesting rights, um, cultural and ecological knowledge, which is so important in the North, um, especially when we’re looking at, uh, national security. Um, we cannot assert sovereignty without presence, and we know that Inuit, um, and Indigenous peoples have been, um, living in the North, um, since millennia. Um, we also want to look at, um, decision-making authority over land use, which is why, again, we need to start, um, from a rights-based perspective, and each, um, territory and region has its own agreements that, uh, that we must layer in as, um, inherent parts of these processes that are not delegated, but that are also protected under Section 35 of the Constitution. Um, when we talk about governance, ownership, ownership of, um, any part of this, and we have to look at it from government’s obligations around safety, around, um, environmental protections, um, around, uh, funding, infrastructure, uh, emergency management, national, uh, sovereignty, and supports for regulatory oversight. So, I think there’s very distinct roles each play, and when we’re looking at building the North, we do have a responsibility to build ethically, but also ensure that we’re enforcing the rule of law, and the rule of law has already been established through, um, a modern treaty agreement. So, again, for me, it comes back to regulatory processes that are owned, um, uh, by rights holders in the North that cannot be overlooked. Yeah. (..)

S36: So, I’ll turn that to you, Jasmine. So, you chair the Nunavut Human Rights Tribunal. So, you have spent years watching what happens when individuals and communities have been harmed and work to find a way to meaningfully address that. So, as AI systems and data centers are showing up on Indigenous land in the North, how are you thinking about the harms and advantages?

S28: Thank you. So, uh, just to clarify, I’m the former chair of the Nunavut Human Rights Tribunal, but, um, one important thing that adjudicative work really teaches you is that often harm occurs before the law is actually ready for it. Um, typically a matter comes for resolution after harm has already occurred. Um, and with that, uh, (..) any remedy that’s available for some type of resolution, it’s significantly weaker than would have been, um, consent, uh, than would have been, uh, any forms of, uh, ongoing accountability or the human oversight that should have occurred over those, um, before the decision was actually made. Um, AI harms in the North are unlikely to be any kind of science fiction, uh, imagination that we might come up with. It’s actually more likely to be, um, a recreation or exacerbation of existing banalities, um, and, uh, what’s the word that I’m looking for? Uh, administrative harms, um, or a widening of existing gaps. Uh, it’s more likely that the harms are going to come from, uh, investment decisions, uh, policies that prioritize administrative ease over, uh, equitable investment or impact. Um, this morning, Minister Solomon referenced, uh, forthcoming legislation, uh, and of, right, for, towards a regulatory framework, and I think that it’s important when we talk about harms and opportunities that we talk about meaningful implementation of mechanisms that center consent, that provide meaningful opportunities for intervention before harm has occurred, um, and that there are meaningful, equitable remedies for peoples impacted. (…)

S36: So, Lyle, (.) I heard you use the word hyper-development. So, my understanding is that this is a pattern where massive AI campuses get built and almost nothing is staying behind for the people who live there, so we’re not seeing any long-term local business benefits or long-term GDP for the community, but you are really out there doing the heavy lifting, raising capital, laying the fiber, and building data centers. So, what do people misunderstand about the reality of your work and how are you flipping the script on hyper-development so that these projects are leaving a legacy of true community ownership and inclusive hiring? (.) Well, you know,

S10: hyper-scaling technology is one of the biggest pushes right now for, you know, meta and, you know, companies like OpenAI. You know, one of the things that I see is that, you know, data sovereignty is all about ownership, right? But at the same time, we see a lot of investments happening in Canada that are, you know, like with Bell and TELUS and so on and so forth with federal funding and dollars. These are great, but really, what they’re investing in is shells, right? Buildings and operations, but really, who owns the equipment on the inside is basically the critical question that we should always be asking is because even though that we’re partnering with these organizations, you know, because they’re going to be proposing a metadata center in Alberta, that’s great and all, but really, you’re investing in something that somebody else still owns outside in the U.S., right? And so that has a lot of impact in regards to, you know, real change, real jobs, real technology, and real innovation because with the U.S., they have this thing out there called the U.S. Cloud Act and really, basically, what it comes down to it is that the U.S. Cloud Act is designed to protect U.S.-based tech companies and not only U.S.-based tech companies, but at the same time, U.S. tech firms and not U.S. citizens and that’s what the U.S. Cloud Act operates on. And so when we invest in these tech partners, you know, to bring cloud-based services and hyperscaling technology, (.) who really owns that, right? within that building and that equipment because if we don’t own it as an indigenous peoples, we have not changed the direction and the trajectory of our communities in regards to long-term training, education, and at the same time, long-term sustainable economic development in regards to infrastructure ownership because it’s infrastructure ownership such as fiber brings long-term sustainable revenue generation models. And owning the data centers, not only the building, but also the equipment inside that building, can generate, you know, 16 to 23 various revenue generation models that, you know, that we can build on language models, large LLM models, cloud-based storage, digital assets, digital backups, all based on OCAP principles. If we control the layer one technology, which is fiber, and if we own the data centers and the equipment inside those data centers, then you have real, real true data sovereignty. (….)

S06: You know, I always try to figure out how I can make a real-world example of some of the things that we’re dealing with today. And thinking about, you know, (.) indigenous-owned (..) AI tech companies, data centers, and any of the like, I think we have to think about what that actually means. Because when it comes to indigenous-owned, that’s where we get respect and reciprocity and responsibility and relevance to our communities. When you have big tech like Microsoft, like Meta, like Google, like any of the big tech companies coming into our lands and building data centers, they don’t have any of that. (.) Here in Montreal, just about a year ago, Amazon just closed ship, right? And so all the people that had good jobs with Amazon because Amazon decided that they didn’t want to have their people unionizing and trying to figure out how to have better benefits for themselves, then they just closed. So we have to think about these kinds of things. Amazon doesn’t have a vested interest in our communities and in our people. (.) We do. (..)

S36: Amen. (……..) So in some conversations that I’ve had with people from the North, there is a sense that infrastructure and relationship building can still default South, so connecting Northern territories and cities with the rest of Canada rather than really connecting them to each other. As we know, the North is not one place. It is many different governments and nations. So dreaming big, what would it really take to strengthen those internal ties without flattening the North into a single Arctic story? And that is open to anyone. (…)

S10: Take that question. You know, the long-term investment, you know, for our Indigenous communities really depend on one thing, and that one thing is infrastructure ownership in fiber optic telecommunications. and the reason why I believe that’s the key differentiator to all AI because AI relies on one thing and one thing only, which is access to broadband connectivity. if you do not own the highway (..) that those ones and zeros, you know, transport over, (..) and when those ones and zeros exit that fiber network, it needs to go somewhere. It needs to go to a place where it’s stored. So if we own the highway and we own the exit tool, which is the data centers, then we can start building, you know, real revenue generation, economic sustainable development for Indigenous communities and Inuit communities too. In the Northwest Territories, it’s always been about, you know, resource extraction. So when are we going to take a look at real sustainable economic long-term development in regards to infrastructure ownership? That’s the key differentiator between infrastructure ownership and resource extraction. (..)

S36: Thank you. And I see that already the zero mark has been reached. It came way too fast. I’m going to go ahead and take us just a few more moments. So this has been a really fantastic discussion. Thank you so much for being here, all of you. In one minute or less, what is one thing that you would want people in this room to take away from this discussion?

S28: I can say (.) it’s easy to think of the North as this, like, desolate place with low population and lacking capacity. But I, it’s important that I think we recontextualize that as that the North has been chronically incapacitated. And rather, the same things that make addressing some of the challenges in our regions that much more complex, it also means that the solutions that are born in the North are that much more innovative, resourceful, creative, and resilient. And I know that because at Small Economy Works, we are a Northern-born organization and our education pathways have proven themselves in the North and been replicated across the South. So I want people to start to see that the Arctic, as other Arctic nations have already recognized, is a potential place for innovation that we could also similarly be leaders in tech innovation and in these spaces if we were properly resourced and had the adequate opportunities and infrastructure to support that. I hope that was one minute. (…..)

S10: You know, my take on the one-minute pitch, I guess, is that, you know, I believe that, you know, the need for connectivity is always a big thing for me. (.) I believe that the North is ripe and ready for an investment today, but at the same time, building those sustainable partnerships that really benefit local, indigenous, and Inuit communities. It’s not going to be Meta coming in and giving us, you know, (.) giving us a data center. It doesn’t change anything. You know, you have outside powers benefiting from those kind of investments, right? So we need to, the North is not empty, as you said, you know, because we’ve been here for generations and we are the technology leaders. The Jolly Jumper, right, is one that was made by an indigenous woman. The Kayak, we can name numerous technologies that have been developed by indigenous peoples throughout Canada that a lot of Europeans use to this day. And so we are continuous innovators from the day that we are born to the day that we die. And every indigenous person, I believe, carries that innate invention (..) and knowledge within them. (……..)

S06: Nicely said. So one minute. I want us to recognize (.) and open our eyes to where we are today and the opportunities and the challenges that we have and we need to contextualize that. In the North, Canada didn’t pay attention to the Inuit until the Cold War after World War II. That’s when other nations started to think about coming to the Canadian North and so Canada had to determine that there were people living up there and the higher Arctic relocatees. I don’t need to go through that history. That was the only time they came and paid attention to us. Well, where are we right now, right? (.) With the president down south talking about taking Greenland, potentially Canada, where we have the Canadian government buying submarines. Where do you think the submarines are going to go? Into our open waters in the north of Canada. So, understanding that the big attention that is being put into development in our Arctic take everything with an understanding that nothing is for free and nothing is for our benefit, only our benefit. And that if anything is going to change in our communities, if we are going to be, continue to be the stewards of our lands, we have to make those changes in those decisions because they’re not going to do it. We have to stop waiting for the federal, provincial, territorial governments to say, oh my gosh, we better take care of this. Well, they’re not. It’s us. (.) And pay attention. (………)

S39: Thank you. I just want to build off of what Natasha said. Very important. (.) So, under the strategy that we discussed earlier, you know, the government will be introducing new legislation that will come with investments and programs over the next five years. So, but what the opportunity is in front of us is it’s the opportunity to innovate. It’s the opportunity to be the problem solvers of the issues that we’re dealing with in the north in a way like we have never seen before because you’re right, Natasha, it’s not somebody coming in who’s going to say, okay, we need to build this technology for this specific problem. It needs to be the people that are living and working in the north and who understand the lay of the land, its history, its people, and its language and so that’s why I’m really excited about this new initiative because we’re looking to support as many new up-and-coming (..) entrepreneurs and I want to acknowledge Lyle and the work that he’s doing. I was very excited when I had first met him over a year ago and continue to get excited about the updates that he’s providing because for me, one of the things that I’m looking at reforming right now is Nutrition North and we know that a food subsidy alone will not solve the food insecurity issue. We also know that there are a number of developments happening at the same time. So it’s all of these partnerships and bringing people together. there are so if he’s building a data center, how do we create, you know, how do we use the heat to create food, right? So garden, (.) to create like a greenhouse in the north, vertical hydroponic gardening, for example, working with the education systems to do that. and there’s huge, there’s huge projects underway in different parts of the country where they’re using AI to grow food and to do that continuously throughout the year. And these are the projects that I am talking to various people across the north about. Like, I want to know who’s willing to step in and take these initiatives on to create food processing facilities in the north so that we can create a food economy where communities are determining what it is they’re growing and distributing to their communities but also maybe looking to grow beyond that because we are opening up, you know, a diversified economy with other countries right now. So to really dream big but I know, you know, we have to start with projects, proof of concept and then keep building them up. So looking for those innovators out there those are the types of projects that we want to get behind and put some money into. So thank you so much for coming as the Minister of Northern Arctic Affairs. I am trying to stay attuned to what’s happening with AI, especially in the north. It’s why I was really happy to receive the invite and to participate. So looking forward to hearing what the collective data has been and seeing what we can do with that. Thank you. (.)

S14: Thank you, Minister. (….)

S36: Yeah, to close, we really do know what gets decided in these next few years in the north with data and land will ripple for generations and I’m truly glad that you are all doing the work you’re doing and you’re a part of that. So thank you. (….)

S21: Wonderful. Thanks so much. (..) Now I’d like to (..) invite Valerie Pissano back up, Mila’s president and CEO to talk about this wonderful organization. Come on up. (27 seconds pause)

S08: Is this working? Yes. Okay, last but not least, drumroll. It is my honor to set the stage for our final speaker of the day and maybe most importantly I’m very proud to announce our latest, greatest, very exciting partnership with Polartic Canada. (.) I’ll let you speak to everything that you’ve envisioned for this organization but from my perspective the keywords are mission-driven, technically strong, women-led, indigenous-led and profoundly community-focused. The inspiration for everything you do has come from this deep understanding of what communities in the North need and how I can serve and how to do this in the proper way. So I had the incredible privilege of meeting Leslie with a few of my colleagues a few weeks, months ago. It doesn’t feel like it was so long ago and you came in generously and shared your vision and your enthusiasm and so much of your talent. You’ve moved to Canada to really kind of embed yourself in the privileged ecosystem we’ve built here and put everything that you’re building into the service of some of the things we’ve talked about today and things that we care a lot about. (.) Really sitting at the intersection of Arctic sovereignty, indigenous leadership, climate adaptation and so many more things. So just, it really is an honor. thank you for being here. Thank you for your trust and very much look forward to everything that the MILA community will be able to enable, enhance, provoke, build, inspire with you and your team. Thank you. (15 seconds pause)

S33: We’re going to be flexible here. (.) So thank you again. I will stick to the three B’s of public speaking because I know that I am between you and happy hour, which is be brief, be brilliant and be seated. so this has been an amazing conference. I’m so honored to be here to share this again. This is my second year here for the Pathfinders and to hear what they had to present and how they were addressing those different challenges. (.) So I have a thing for maps. Can’t see it right now, but there’s a great map by the Inuit Circumpolar Council, which doesn’t have those pesky colonial geopolitical lines on it. and it shows the Inuit throughout the Arctic. I am from the very western part of the Arctic. I’m Yupik, Alaska native. My family is from the Akichuk area, so I am your very western cousin, auntie, soon to be elder with all these greys coming in. So I started Polartic because (.) we had a big winter storm that came in and an early freeze in Nome. There was a big challenge for being able to get our heating supplies and our oil in and our, for our communities. So being able to understand how that sea ice was going to form and where that was going to form was critical for those communities and we didn’t have it because it wasn’t important because of the lack of people that were in that area. We see that now even today in, in Alaska. There are two people in the state that are working on ice charts in Alaska, which becomes a big problem for being able to understand and forecast and work with our communities to be able to supply them. So being able to have that information, to be able to forecast that out, to be able to support supply chains, shipping, different organizations, defense, again, in our communities are at the heart of that. So being able to have this technology rooted in and our traditional knowledge, being able to support the, the people who need it the most, but to also grow those economies in ways that really support and understand the people who live there. So, um, I couldn’t be happier than to be here with Mila to be able to, to announce this partnership and what we’re going to build together and the importance of how it’s going forward in the Arctic. And I think we heard on this last panel as well, the, the challenges with that, of the infrastructure, the data, the information, the people, and bringing all of those together. This technology allows the, um, the communities to be able to put their information into a system where they control it to be able to, uh, benefit from that in, in a very direct, tangible way where we have hunters falling through the ice, uh, because of climate change. Again, we’re seeing different changes in the polinias and how they operate and where the, the, the different, um, narwhal are, are migrating. So, being able to have this technology create that kind of infrastructure and digital infrastructure to be able to support that is so critical. So, um, I’m, uh, one of the big points that I just wanted to get through because I feel like this has been kind of a theme throughout from a sovereignty perspective. Um, I’m a former Air Force officer. Um, I joke that I wasn’t a very good one because, uh, one of my favorite phrases in the Air Force was, do you have the authority to tell me no? And there was a lot of people who would tell me no very constantly in terms of, like, no, you can’t do that, no, you can’t do that. And very rarely did they actually have the authority to tell me I couldn’t do that. And one of the things that I’ve seen throughout this, uh, conference and to hear some of the different ideas is that, uh, we’re not taking no. Uh, people are coming up with their ideas and even though there’s a lot of people who are saying that, like, you know, oh, well, that’s not, like, you know, technically feasible. It’s like, yeah, it’s not for you, but for us it is. And so, being able to, to not listen to some of those naysayers and to build what you know is important and the communities need. So, thank you, everyone.

S21: All right, and now I’d like to bring, uh, President Lisa Mesner from the Heritage Lab, who’s the sponsor of our, of our cocktail hour. (…..)

S14: Thank you very much. (….) I’d like to begin by thanking Mila for the opportunity, in particular, Lindsay, Jake, you guys have been, um, great (..) partners in our, um, project. Um, so I’ll start with myself. I’m the President of Heritage Lab. I’m also the Deputy Director for our School Board, who serves the 14 communities in Nunavik. (..) Um, like many other Nunavik, we have noticed our language, language diminishing. Um, if you look at statistics, you’ll see that we’re very strong in Inutitok. I believe in Nunavik, it’s around 95 percent mother tongue speakers. But in reality, we see that diminishing very quickly. And, of course, we’re concerned about that. Us at Heritage Lab, we believe we have a part to play. it’s, um, we all have a part to play in ensuring the, in our, that our language is preserved. Heritage Lab is an Indigenous-led, non-profit organization. We’re building technical, uh, technology tools for language preservation and revitalization in Indigenous communities. Our mission is to empower Indigenous people with technology tools to support their language and culture, preservation, revitalization while building self-sustaining capacity. So we do a lot of work with our youth to ensure that we have the capacity within communities. Um, we began from a shared commitment to supporting and strengthening Inutitok in Nunavik through innovative, community-driven language technologies. Today, that work has grown into a broader commitment to helping Indigenous communities access, govern, and shape language technologies on their own terms. If I can take a minute to introduce our Board of Directors. They’re such a great, dedicated group of people. Um, I’ll ask you to come up. You’ve met Natasha McDonald. She’s our Vice President. Uh, her strengths, amongst others, are in policy and decolonizing systems through technology. Natasha, can you come up? (…….) I also have on our Board, Dumas Imanyuk, who could not be with us today. He is, uh, in France, on vacation with his family, a very well-deserved vacation. His specialty is really in technology, creating games in Inutitok. And he’s the head of our school in Ivoivik, so he’s also dedicated to education. Yasmin Charara, Yasmin Charara, Yasmin Charara, Yasmin, if you could come up. She has many years, um, dedicated to education, and in particular, she’s worked with our first language teams in Nunavik closely. Um, last but not least, Elias Mukanis, who’s involved, he’s been in Nunavik for decades, involved in youth empowerment, school (….) and many years in education as well in Nunavik. Um, I’d like to acknowledge and invite our Senior Director, Ali Mehdi, who wears many hats. Um, like many others, we do not have long-term funding, so Ali does, Ali, um, we’re so grateful to have him on our team. Um, and I’d also like to, I mentioned earlier that we train youth, um, to ensure that we build capacity within our community. We have a few of our communities. We have a few of our communities. We have a few of our youth with us who work with us on the project and work in the communities. (.) We have Sean Ananak. Sean, if you could come up. He’s our language specialist from Tamaswalujuak. We have Lori Maluktu, who’s our, she coordinates our project, our project coordinator, Lori. We have Ima Aknak in the corner. Ima Isagit. She can’t hear me. So she’s our lead artist for the project. Um, You know, all of our art comes from our artists within Nunavik, so she’s our lead artist. Um, we also have with us Rosa Lee, who we partnered with the Anishinaabe communities recently. So she’s a youth working with the Anishinaabe on their project under, um, so she works, she’s sort of the Ima for them. Um, currently we’re creating tools, like I said, with Inuit and Nunavik and Minwashin, who are an Anishinaabe language protection and revitalization organization, while training local youth and communities, thus building long-lasting community capacity. We have with us working on the piece in the back. I already mentioned Ima and Rosalie is also working on some artwork back there. Um, each of our projects has their own language committee in place who guide the project. So the, the, the Minwashin project, they have a group of local, um, community members and experts who are guiding their, their project, and it’s the same for the project in Nunavik. (.) They approve all the data sources that feed our technology tools, including the AI tools. They are a body that represents the community, the region or nation to ensure that they have control over their data. (..) In addition, we’re proud to say that our servers and data are stored on indigenous lands. (.) Uh, we’re creating tools for a variety of sectors at the moment, including education, medical, and culture for our communities, in addition to tools that are open to the public, um, for language preservation and revitalization, depending on the community and nation, of course. (..) Um, we’re quite aware that we’re in a race against big tech, who are taking our data, they’re scraping our data from our communities, and they’ll package it and sell it back to us. Um, we’re, as I mentioned, we’re non-profit. Uh, all these people, our board of directors, they’re all volunteering their time because we believe that we have a part to play and we have the capacity to give back to our communities. (..) We also believe together that together we can help indigenous languages throughout the country and beyond. We have developed a range of tools that we’ve built and are easily transferable to other communities and nations. I’m just going to share with you a quick clip on some of the tools that we’ve developed. (…..) With no sound? Aw. We have read-along tools. You need to hear it, okay? Oh, here we go. (19 seconds pause)

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