Indigenous AI Gathering 2026 - Day 2 - Noetic Oracle Community

S11: Relationship to that technology. (.) We don’t have to be afraid anymore. We don’t. (……) Working in community, with community, it’s not them and us. It’s just us. (.) And it gives us the power to shape it any way that we need. And it becomes ours. (.) And when that happens, it allows us to leave behind a lot of the things that we struggle with. (……) I read the number that said two minutes and now I’m, so when, let’s stop reading. (..) We get to leave behind a lot of the things that we struggle with. So one day we won’t have to negotiate access to our information because we’ll have it. Like, it’ll be right here. We won’t have to worry about our sensitive cultural material being misused because we’ll be the ones caring for it. (.) One of the biggest things for me is we get to define, we have the right to define what our needs are. So we don’t have to cut down the bush and build data centers. We can, these sharing, working and building together is the way forward. (.) I understand that there are technical issues, trade-offs when we think about things like that. But I think the compounding benefits to community outweigh all of those. And I’ll pick community every time. I know I’m almost done. So the two things I want to say before it’s over is, one, I didn’t roll out of bed this morning and come up with this stuff. It’s because of being with you, being introduced to amazing people and their incredible projects, (..) helped shape the way that we view the relationship between technology and communities. So now for that, uh, last thing I want to say is I spent my career in the community, um, like, problem solving and putting out fires, um, looking at the things that are right in front of us, needs, and then building the infrastructure to support those needs. So it’s like, identify and execute, identify and execute. (.) So sometimes, I like to make fun of academia and of thorough, of thorough. (…..) We need to investigate things before we can make decisions that move us ahead in a, in a practical way. (…..) I want to acknowledge that it’s been a, much of, it’s, it’s benefited me to spend so much time in thoughtful conversations and meaningful contemplation with the other members of my team. I’m up here representing today, so Emily and Cassie and Jackson, Michael way at the back. So, uh, I just want to say that that was time well spent on it. (13 seconds pause)

S13: Thank you. So now let’s get to the next session with Hugo, which is Advancing Indigenous AI, Connected Research, and, of course, you know, research is very, very important. It’s very, very serious. So, Hugo, can we invite you up to the stage to, uh, address the next panel? Thank you. (….)

S25: Good morning, everyone. And, uh, I see, uh, some of our panelists coming up. So please, uh, uh, take a seat. I’m really glad today to be hosting this panel. Uh, we’ll talk about research, uh, mapping abundance, advancing Indigenous AI through connected research. Um, so I’m Hugo, I’m a scientific director here at Mila, and I’m really happy and feel privileged to be hosting this conversation with my guests here. Um, before I jump into questions, I think it might be interesting for everyone to say a few words about themselves and introduce themselves. So, uh, Jackson, Sean, Danika, and Carrie, if you could say a few words about yourself. Maybe start with Jackson. Oh, sure. (..)

S24: Hello. Uh, uh, (30 seconds pause) Hi, everybody. (.) My name’s Jackson Two Bears. I’m here with our crew, Emily, Cassie, Michael, and Gary, um, from O-Tech Labs and through the Red Door, uh, and also representing Abundant Intelligences. Um, thank you. Uh, nice to meet you. I’m from Six Nations, Grand River, Turtle Clan, Mohawk.

S25: Sean, how about you go next?

S18: Fantastic. Uh, so, good morning, Sean Hillier. Uh, I’m mixed, uh, Mi’kmaq and, uh, Irish-French, uh, member of the Haleput First Nation, was born and raised on the south coast of Newfoundland. Uh, here today representing Connected Minds with my colleague Danika and Michael. Uh, I’m an associate professor, uh, at York University, uh, and I also, uh, oversee or sit on the National Interagency Panel on Research Ethics. (..) Gary, please. (.)

S06: Aloha mai kakou. I’m, uh, Dr. Kari Kehalani-Noe. I’m the director of the Center for Indigenous Innovation and Data and Emerging Technology at the University of Hawaii, uh, system. And I’m also the pod lead for the Hawaii, uh, Hawaii Pai Aina pod, and it’s part of Abundant Intelligences. And I’m, uh, I’m Kanaka Maoli, Maoli, and I’m from, uh, Kauai originally, but now I live on Oahu, working at the University of Hawaii, West Oahu.

S25: Wonderful. And Danika? (……..)

S29: I have a watch to know. Good morning, everyone. Uh, I’m Danika Pollock-Potts. I’m from the Alexis Nakoda Sioux First Nation. And, uh, as Sean mentioned, I’m here with, uh, Connected Minds, and I’m an assistant professor at York University in the Department of Communication and Media Study. (.)

S25: Wonderful. Um, so, it’d be great to hear about these two specific programs, Abundant Intelligences and Connected Minds. Uh, having heard these programs, uh, having heard these programs, you might figure out why we chose the wording for this particular panel in this way. Um, and so maybe, uh, Abundant Intelligences, hearing a little bit about this. I don’t know if Jackson could say a few words and then, uh, uh, uh, Gary, you can add a little bit. (..)

S24: Sure. Sego, thank you. Um, so, Abundant Intelligences, as you probably, um, maybe know a little bit about, um, we are a international research program, um, started, um, I think we’re now in about year three, just about the midterm mark of our, um, current research, uh, initial research phase. Um, we started this project, um, if you can imagine, three years ago, and the landscape looked really different in the space of AI. There’s a, certainly a lot less of us, uh, Indigenous folks, anyway, um, having these conversations. And so, really at the outset, um, one of the initial goals of Abundant Intelligences was to, um, just to kickstart and initiate some of those conversations, um, so that the, those conversations moved outside of academia and outside of some of the places where those things were happening and actually into community and, um, to generate and build, um, um, build the kinds of relationships that could support the sort of research that we were hoping to do. So, um, and I should say, you know, on the, on the one hand, um, certainly three years ago and maybe still is true today, um, what was always at the forefront of, uh, the research we wanted to do was to, um, all the things, again, I know I’m speaking, uh, preaching to the choir here, but for sure, uh, you know, protecting cultural material, um, thinking really deeply about sustainability and our responsibilities to the rest of the living universe, uh, and also just ensuring that the kinds of, um, tech that we might develop or that might come into our communities would be serving us rather than, as Gary said, something happening to us. So, that has always been kind of at the forefront on the one side. On the other side, though, has always been this kind of vision of, um, trying to imagine what AI could do for us. Um, like many of you, we ended up, um, working, um, uh, some big, broad brushstrokes here, but working in the language revitalization space, thinking a lot about, uh, digital archiving and, uh, again, how we might re-envision that as, uh, um, ways that might work better for us. Uh, and then, of course, a broad range of projects. So, I should say that our, our network is spread out, um, in, in Kari, uh, in Hawaii and Aotearoa and Lakota Territory, Blackfoot Territory, uh, in, um, and Jikarundo in Toronto. Um, and so we’re a large network that has always been built, uh, first on, uh, research that’s happening, um, at labs and institutions, but also really deeply connected with, um, communities. So, we run the Haudenosaunee pod, which is connected, uh, closely with Six Nations, and you just heard Gary speak, uh, but that is universal to all the other, um, pods that we have. So, they’re kind of set up as these research clusters inside universities that work really, really closely with communities that essentially drive all of that stuff forward. So, all the questions and, and direction, um, gets led, um, by that kind of mechanism. Um, like a lot of the pods, ours, uh, is also primarily, is focused in research and creation. So, we do a lot of work that isn’t just, um, you know, streamlined towards certain kind of goals, but we also try to really explore what abundant intelligences has always meant, which is thinking beyond just human, um, uh, human deployed data sets, uh, human, um, use, but also, again, back to, um, what we see as the intelligences of the living universe and the trees and the sky, the water, um, Bruce, Elijah, and I’ll just, I know I’m going on for quite a while. Jeez, see, when you get me started, let’s do the whole panel. The last thing I’m going to say, and I won’t say anything else, the rest of the panel, is, uh, just, just to say that, you know, just our deep investment in our responsibilities and our original instructions to this living universe and the intelligences and spirit that exists within that. (.)

S25: Gary, can you think of something Jackson hasn’t covered?

S06: Yeah, no, he covered a lot. He covered most of it. But I think I, just to add, um, it, I think the whole experience is very, and abundant intelligence is, is very unique in the sense of that it is, um, spanning multiple different indigenous communities. And so, at least for, uh, at the Hawaii pod, we’ve been very appreciative to be able to have not only the support from abundant intelligences, but have this network where we can talk about research and our ideas and protocol and things like that with like-minded individuals. because oftentimes, even though we’re in our ancestral homeland, it tends to these conversations or the investment in this research goes onto the wayside, especially with the craziness that’s happening right now. But in any case, so it’s been a very, um, it’s been a very, uh, interesting, um, project and program. And it’s just, I think, been really great to be able to have this cross, like, cross discussions and have events like this and such, so.

S25: Wonderful. Um, and then we can talk about Connected Minds and hear a little bit about it. So, Sean, maybe you want to kick us off on that. Great.

S18: So, thanks. Uh, so Connected Minds is a seven-year CFREF-funded $318 million, uh, research program based out of York University in partnership with Queen’s University. Uh, the program really sits at the intersection of neuroscience, uh, intelligent technologies, and society. Uh, so a bit of a different approach here, uh, really a transdisciplinary research program taking core sciences, integrating them, uh, with engineers, computer scientists, et cetera, alongside our society pillars. And so, uh, that is our artists, our legal scholars through Osgoode Hall Law School, uh, through Queen’s Law, and with our social sciences and humanities, uh, and really saying we need to co-create together to create a healthy, just society when we look at the creation of intelligent technologies, and what are those implications for societies. Uh, we have a very strong Indigenous engagement element to that program that was created at the outset, uh, through an Indigenous advisory circle. Twenty percent of all of our funding, uh, goes towards Indigenous-led and Indigenous-driven research. Uh, and beyond that, uh, so we funded, as Danica has come in, we’ve, uh, hired, uh, numerous Indigenous scholars into the program, uh, Indigenous postdoctoral fellows and trainees, uh, but beyond that, really trying to get scholars within the program, so more than 350 researchers working, uh, in this area to be engaging in what it means to, uh, engage with Indigenous communities, to understand some of the core aspects and benefits, and how do they actually, uh, create meaningful technology, uh, that’s there. So we have, uh, funded all of our Indigenous scholars, which has now taken them out into community, doing that amazing work, and now we’re working with, uh, other scholars about how, and we’re working with Abundant Intelligences to say, we have lots of technical expertise, how can we lend that expertise to benefit community and projects, uh, that are driven by them.

S25: And so these scholars, they’re spread around, say, Canada or even beyond, or are they all located in Queens and, uh, York, or?

S18: Substantially at York and Queens, uh, but we have more than 50 community partners, uh, and so all of our projects, so those 350 core researchers at Queens and York have branched out, uh, and have collaborations with colleagues internationally. And so some of the examples we’ll give, uh, from the Indigenous perspective is that we’re in Brazil doing work, we’re in, uh, Australia doing work, uh, we’re across Canada doing work, across, uh, the North doing work, uh, through those connections.

S25: That’s wonderful. Uh, Danika, do you want to add something to, uh, the description of the program?

S29: I think Sean was pretty comprehensive. Okay.

S25: There’ll be plenty of opportunities to, to discuss, uh, other topics. So, um, I think, uh, so, um, you, sort of, perhaps refer to the crazy times that we’re in now, and I think potentially some of that was referring to, obviously, large language models and these frontier models and, and how ubiquitous they’re becoming in, in our field. Um, and I’m curious to hear you about where you see, uh, opportunities or potential for contributions or how to navigate this particular era with, with your own perspective, uh, as Indigenous researchers. Do you want to maybe, uh, Carrie?

S00: I’ll jump into that one.

S06: Yeah, as Indigenous researchers with this kind of crazy time, I think that when, especially with the approach we’ve, um, gone with abundant intelligences, is that we’re really trying to focus on how to develop research agendas and questions that are from the community that can serve the community. And so for, especially for the whole APOD, what we’ve done a lot is that, um, for the researchers, it’s really thinking through of how can these AI systems or infrastructures or projects can create, of course, abundance, um, so that, um, these systems can help improve, whether it’s language, whether it’s environmental sensing and, and so on and so forth. And so oftentimes they think that when we think about AI research, it’s more of like, in, in the general sense of what’s being, uh, what’s the hot topics of research is trying to get to AGI, it’s trying to get to these huge, um, capacities of being able to make these large language models. But in actuality, what can be helpful to the community right now oftentimes is more of looking into how these, um, how even, um, smaller structures or smaller and other kinds of machine learning, um, can be utilized on a scale that’s sustainable in communities and can actually use right now to create impact in communities. And so I think that as an indigenous researcher, I think that when we, especially looking at what becomes on our research agenda, I think that’s a little bit different is that the interest is in that is like, how can these technologies actually feed our community today rather than just trying to hyperscale things to see if you can make an AI conscious or anything like that. And so I think that really drives the directions in which you see our research projects and research agenda growth.

S25: Yeah, that’s definitely an important alternative approach that, that it’s great to hear that this is part of what’s being engaged in here. Uh, are there other examples or concrete examples you can think of within this area that would be worth sharing with, with our group here? (…..)

S29: Yeah, well, um, like as Sean mentioned, kind of within our program, we fund a diverse portfolio of projects in this area. Um, there’s a couple that I’m really excited about that I think are really great work. And to, um, the prior point, I think really one of the things academic research I think is able to do that maybe our last lightning speaker, um, said sometimes we maybe take too far, but we can spend, we can be a bit slower and be very intentional and in-depth about thinking and really trying to understand the full landscape of these problems, of the problems that communities are facing. A huge one, um, that I think we’ve heard throughout this conference is language, preservation, and revitalization. Um, we have one scholar, Maya Chakovee. she’s leading basically, like, Anishinaabe metaverse that is using AI technology, um, to (.) support language revitalization, but also different tools, kind of similar to what maybe we saw a bit with Heritage Lab, um, and really understanding that landscape and thinking about ways not only that that can be used to preserve the Anishinaabe language, but how that kind of infrastructure could also be developed in a way that could be useful to other communities and languages. So also, I think a lot of the projects also think about, try to balance, like, immediate community needs and that specific localized element that’s critical and inherent to any kind of indigenous-led project, but also then trying to think, so if we’re developing these very specific tools, where are the possibilities for using those tools for, to support other communities? because we’re all facing so many of the same challenges and thinking through similar problems, even if, um, the particular context or details are different. So I think thinking about that long-term adaptability, um, also work in the health space. We actually have a lot of great health researchers at York and Queens, and so also thinking about, um, the way that AI technology can be used, especially for remote communities and those particular challenges that those communities face. They’re very interested in learning more about the potential for AI to be used. And I think something, too, especially with the different pillars that we’re trying to be really critical about in the work that we do is not just also thinking about what AI is able to do, but then also trying to kind of slow down and think about what are the risks? What is the safest way to navigate this? how do we support, um, not only the development of the technology, but also the governance required to ensure that it stays culturally safe, respect, state of sovereignty, all those different elements. Um, so I think that’s two areas. Did you want to speak or add any more? (..)

S25: Well, uh, when, and we can go back to some of these examples later on if you want. Um, I’m curious to ask about, I mean, obviously AI and AI research, much like many parts of our societies, it has a, and certainly North America, uh, it has this colonial history as, you know, within, it’s living within this capitalist system. Um, and I’m curious to hear about your thoughts on how you are navigating this within your programs or within your work. Uh, and specifically some of that work and navigating this particular context presumably requires thinking more structurally about the ways of working as opposed to the specific projects themselves. I’d be curious to hear about, I’m, I’m sure about the intelligence, that might be something that’s quite top of mind. So, uh, is there something you’d like to say about

S24: that? Um, yeah, well, while you were talking and I, this is just coming off of, um, Gary’s, uh, always fun comments about us academics. Um, I mean, we, and we know it, we know that’s how it goes. Um, but, uh, I will say, you know, abundant intelligence is set up, um, again, as a really interdisciplinary kind of approach to things. But, um, I think what also is kind of maybe unique, um, is that a number of us are like play, like I’m sure many of you are both academics and people that are, that are in communities and doing that kind of work like I have for, for a number of years. And so we’re always, always negotiating this strange space between the institutions that we work with or in the communities we work with or in. And how do we, um, again, still manage, uh, best represent, um, and foreground, um, those community needs and, um, how we work. The one, I’ll just make one comment because I know I can’t go on for a long time, but the one thing that I think that really, um, I didn’t expect was going to be a really big deal for us, but ended up, um, being so is that, um, a lot of the, uh, we’ve talked a lot about indigenous data sovereignty here. And I didn’t realize, um, um, the space we’ve been over this last year, especially, um, doing a significant amount of advocacy work, uh, to try to not just, uh, reinvent or change or update various institutional policies around data, um, but actually to, um, try to chart a path forward that would, um, bring, um, how we define and how we think about data, again, really differently than those institutions that we work with. I found myself over the last, um, year, um, sitting at some big tables at my own institution at Western, uh, found myself, um, at the AFN and various other places, um, and really understanding, um, coming to understand over this last year that institutional spaces have always thought about data in a really particular kind of way, uh, from my estimation as, uh, as commodity or other, some other kind of value that is often kind of hoarded or collected, um, that is, um, seemingly very extracted from, um, the living world from which it comes. And so that kind of concept about data has, uh, really runs, is really incommensurable with how we understand the living world that things cannot be extracted in that kind of way, that they still have our, our songs, our dances when they’re digitized does not remove them from our responsibilities to them, to those stories, to those histories, how they’re connected to our communities and the importance that they carry for us in particular. And so it’s that kind of thing that we’re, um, trying to change and transform, uh, with those institutions we’re looking at. I think the day has come and gone for us to continually advocate for updated, uh, PDFs and updated policy documents that still, um, don’t, um, bring data back to the communities that they belong to. And so, um, what we’re trying to do now is shift that. There was a presentation yesterday talking about, um, the existing agreements that, uh, run across this land and through this territory. And it’s time for a return to those, um, to those as a kind of grounding principle. For us, that would be about thinking about data as grounded in land-based law, grounded back into the communities and those relationships from which it comes and not just extracted to institutional spaces. (..)

S25: And would you like to add?

S06: Oh, I was just going to add on to that, especially with abundant intelligences, is that also since we all come from different communities and, uh, there’s really a different conversation also on how we can act because of the ways that our indigenous communities have a relationship with whatever is the occupying power. So in Hawaii, it’s very different because we don’t have treaties or things. So when it comes, and oftentimes with, I think, um, conversations around, especially AI research, it actually does often go back to data and data, uh, sovereignty and governance. And so having these conversations and being able to figure out how within, it’s, it’s just lovely to hear how others do it because then we can take it back to Hawaii and we can, um, figure out how that in our community, how can we set up these same kinds of protections and implementations, um, especially when sometimes we don’t have a treaty or something that can help with those kinds of, um, governance structure or creating those governance structures or policies and things like that. And so overall, I think the important thing is to, uh, again, uh, leave or have the conversation to understand and really (.) emphasize the rights of, especially for us native Hawaiians, but indigenous peoples to be able to govern our data and be able to build technologies that we want to see built in our communities with that data. (..)

S25: Comment, is there something you’d like to add?

S18: Yeah. So from a connected minds perspective, I think foundationally, we’ve been working with our scholars to really acknowledge that AI is not immaterial, that it rests on land, on minerals, on water, on energy, on labour, on intellectual property, on traditional knowledges, uh, on data extraction. I created a list here so I remember on systems of how we actually classify people and what does that mean and what does it mean to just extract data, put it through a system, you know, have some prediction and then shoot it out. And I think what we’ve been hearing for the past day and a half is that indigenous peoples are at the forefront of thinking about, like, what data should actually be extracted. Like, when you input data, like, what should we be getting out of those systems? Like, what does it mean to protect data, to give reasonable data back in answers to people? Um, Connected Minds has really been, uh, at the forefront right now with a number of research associates we’ve hired to think about what does social responsible, socially responsible tools look like. And in all of our funding opportunities, researchers, when they apply for funding, go through a social responsibility toolkit that is a part of the assessment of how we fund people, where they’re thinking about these very items and having to explain and detail, uh, these aspects out to an adjudication committee before they would get funded. And that, you know, the IAC has veto power over anything to do with indigenous peoples, indigenous lands, which is virtually every project, uh, within the program itself. And the IAC has used that veto power and said, we don’t believe that these projects that say they’re going to benefit community or going to think about this differently are actually going to do that, or they’re not at the place to do that. And we vetoed million dollar projects, uh, that have gone fairly far in stages, uh, because we don’t think it’s in keeping with what we see as socially responsible technology and advancing where we want to be going. And so we’re really trying to think about, well, what does it mean for a mainstream colonial institution that is funded, not as an indigenous program, to truly try to take up, uh, these values, uh, at its core, uh, in all the work that it’s doing. (…)

S29: I’ll just add one point to what Sean mentioned too. And I just, I think one of the biggest reasons we’ll often veto a project is that we, as the indigenous advisory circle really hold relationships at the core of one, like it’s probably the most important assessment criteria we have is we look at, is this an existing relationship? How are they engaged with the community? Is this something that they, we’ve literally seen projects where we’re not even sure if they have talked to the community. So that’s an obvious veto, but going even more than that. So just like, yeah, just keeping relationships at the core of the work that we support within this program. (..)

S25: So we already talked a lot about sovereignty and certainly with the national AI strategy, it’s very much at the center of it. And, but even before that, I know within the indigenous research community, I think this is something that’s been discussed quite a bit, very top of mind. I am curious to hear kind of what was your reaction seeing that and seeing the current moment where this term as is even more prominent. And, and if you have examples of idea of specific projects that’s really going in this direction that you’re excited about, maybe this happened before, maybe it’s ongoing now also would be really interesting, but just generally speaking, how you’ve been receiving, you know, this sort of moment right now where this seems much more prominent. Go ahead, (..) Jackson or Danica. (…) You can keep it.

S24: Yeah, I was just waiting for, so this, this is a huge topic and it’s, it’s interesting how the term sovereignty has become like a really foregrounded in the last year. I was, I think what was really surprising to me when I was this thing at Banff, the federal summit on artificial intelligence. uh, and it was interesting for me to hear, um, our federal ministers who attended Evan and Mark talk so much about, um, Canadian sovereignty. Um, because it’s something we’ve been talking about, um, forever, um, because it’s always been our cultural material that has been at risk of being taken and appropriated. And it’s always our communities that are, um, you know, still trying to get clean drinking water and catch up from long-term economic devastation from new technologies happening to us, as Gary says. And so, uh, you know, we’re already well-versed, I think, in what sovereignty means and what the struggle actually means and what stakes are there for us. We’ve seen this play out. um, the, uh, when I had an opportunity to talk with, um, those ministers when I was in Banff, and if he was here today, I would say the same thing. So much of the, um, rhetoric that comes out all the time has this word trust attached to it. And, uh, I said it to him there, and I will say, would have said it to him here again if he was here, is that there is a major trust issue. And I think we all know that, um, we have a hard time trusting, um, in those relationships that have, um, again, always, um, failed us to one degree or another. Um, so, which is to say, I also, though, have hope, because it’s, um, or it’s things like this that happen. Uh, it’s moments like this that we get to discuss those things together, um, that provides for me, again, a sense of, um, uh, of hope. Um, I was, after I came from that summit in Banff, and I went and spent some time, um, back from where I was living for 10 years in Blackfoot territory, and I was, uh, hanging out with my mentor for a long time, Leroy Little Bear. And he was telling me about, um, the Buffalo Treaty that they had kind of kick-started to, um, reconnect, um, some of the Blackfoot communities there and to re-establish their long-term relationships, grounded back in land-based law and, and those old, and it inspired us to come home and start thinking about, what would that mean for us? How do we start to redefine, as Gary said so well in his talk, and I won’t repeat it, but to try to bring things back home to the way that we’ve always done them, as a way of kind of standing, again, on our own ground, in our own relationships. I just want to say one last thing. I think that, um, in this era of AI, that, um, we shouldn’t always just be so focused on the technologies and the cool stuff we can build. Um, I think this is another opportunity, and I said this to the ministers, and I like saying it anytime I get a chance, is that I think this is also an opportunity to not just build better tech, but to try, once again, to become better human beings, to be better Onkwe Homeway, to work together, to be talking together, and to share, almost doing exact opposite of what we see happening in the mainstream. Um, better Onkwe Homeway, better people, and better human beings, I think, is another opportunity that we have, again, at this moment, to be together.

S25: Yeah. Beautiful. Well said. Um, would you like to, uh, add your comments, or your reception of this sovereignty conversation, and how you’re thinking about it? (..)

S29: Yeah, I think one thing, Jackson covered so many of the important points, I think, in this area, but I think one thing to belabor, too, is the conversation around sovereignty and infrastructure development, because a lot of what the strategy outlines, what we see happening, is about developing data centers, and the other physical infrastructure needed to support large AI systems, and where are they building them? They’re building them on indigenous territories and lands, and we just see things happening, like, I don’t know if people are familiar with the Wonder Valley data center proposed in Alberta. Uh, it’s a hyperscale data center. It’s supposed to be one of the the largest built ever. Um, the government gave it an environmental exemption. They’re not being very transparent with the communities that are impacted, whose territories that it’s supposed to be built on, and so we see, like, this rhetoric in the strategy and other policies about how they’re, how the government supposedly with sovereignty is going to care about our lands, waters, and environment, but that’s not what’s actually happening, and so I think, and even just earlier today, I was just having a conversation, like, we, when it comes to sovereignty, data, tech, AI, we don’t really need new policies from the government that focus on AI or tech. What we need is we need people to actually uphold their commitments to recognize the rights and agreements that already exist, and I think we also just see that really the government’s, like, they understand what sovereignty means, they understand what data sovereignty means, they understand what digital, technological sovereignty means, but they’re pretending like they still don’t when it comes to indigenous peoples and what commitments and rights that they need to respect in this space, so I think just really, it offers a moment though, like, as upsetting as all of this is, the fact that it is such a conversation at the forefront at this national state level that I think it really is an opportunity to remind and re-advocate for that we’ve been having these conversations that everything they’re talking about for the state is also what they should be respecting for the hundreds of communities across Canada. (.)

S18: Sean? Yeah, so ditto, I think, to this, and so AI for all, I think, is very much about Canadian sovereignty and a bit of co-opting of how we’ve been thinking about sovereignty to kind of re-program and reprogram how settlers and how kind of the general population think about sovereignty and the niceties of how indigenous people have been fighting for sovereignty in Canada. I’m really concerned about uh, how data is going to be used and shared back, uh, with the vast expansion into the Arctic by the Canadian forces, uh, by, uh, the Canadian Coast Guard. We’re putting significant military bases, huge infrastructure across the North. Uh, we’re going to be putting submarines and ships and all of those are going to have vast capacity to collect vast amounts of data to exert Canadian sovereignty across the North. but there’s been no discussion about, well, how does that data get shared with, owned by, understood, uh, by communities that are directly impacted by that. And I think we’ve already seen, and I’ve done wildlife, One Health projects, uh, across Nunavik where there are already grave community concerns about, uh, wildlife and environmental impacts of shipping lanes, et cetera, ships coming in, zoonosis, uh, antimicrobial resistance in communities, uh, because of kind of knock-on effects. Uh, so, this expansion of sovereignty and this talk about AI sovereignty goes extremely deep into, like, what it means for people to be on their lands, on their territories, and that the government will be collecting vast data around those items. And is it going to be used again as another mechanism to oppress or suppress, uh, fishing and hunting rights and all these other types of things? Like, is this going to be data that’s collected and held by the feds that are going to be used to co-op, uh, indigenous, uh, entitlements and rights, uh, on their own lands? And I think that that’s of grave concern as well.

S25: That’s a great point, uh, and really makes, you know, research something less abstract and much more concrete, uh, that we have to certainly keep in mind, um, as researchers, but through our institutions. And I guess speaking of that, and I, we had way more questions, but I think we’re mostly at time, uh, or should I, I can use 10 minutes or should I catch up? Okay. All right. I’m giving 10 more minutes, so maybe I won’t go as fast. Um, actually, I am maybe, uh, curious to hear, uh, examples of projects. like we talked about LLM specifically, um, um, as that being a moment, but of course, indigenous research goes much beyond that, much as all of research really. And I am, I’ve heard, you know, research related to health or the environment. Um, I’d be curious to hear you about some projects you’re particularly excited about, like to share as like examples of, of people to look forward to from, from this body of work. Maybe, uh, we haven’t heard you carry from the last point. So do you want to, do you want to share about that? Yeah, no, I can say that, you know,

S06: for our pod, there’s a bunch of different projects and I, I, it’s hard to pick a favorite, but what I really like, and at least in a personal level is that there’s a project, um, going on in collaboration with Tehiku through, uh, Bruce, uh, Bruce, Bruce Torres Fisher, and he’s a, um, faculty at UH Hilo. And so what’s been very interesting is that, um, in the same way as you guys probably have seen Tehiku’s work, um, they also came to Hawaii and had a project called Lauleo, where it was really a project trying to gather a lot of different data of, um, people speaking a lot of Hawai’i, so Hawaiian language, to be able to build our repository so we can also build similar technologies, um, for not only just, um, you know, um, text to speech and those kinds of, um, uh, technologies, but also for Bruce and folks at UH Hilo to help improve, uh, OCR and other things that have to do with the, uh, Nupepa repository. So that’s Hawaiian newspaper. So in Hawai’i, uh, we have one of this huge repository of, of, uh, Hawaiian language newspapers and it actually was, it’s been a critical repository to actually help keep the Hawaiian culture alive, especially during the times when it was very oppressed. and so there’s still a lot of digitization work and still a lot of, uh, research that can go into it, but then with these new technologies we could help better, um, better, uh, build our capacity to be able to research these things. So that’s, like, an exciting project that’s been going on and again, I think it also is good because it showcases this kind of, um, collaboration that’s been able to happen because of abundant intelligences and events like this where we can talk to others in different communities who have, uh, been able to build these technologies in their own communities and then share thoughts, share methods, and share, um, processes so that then we can also build that

S25: capacity in our own community. Great. Any other examples you’d like to share? Projects, uh, various areas? Yes.

S18: So I was really excited yesterday by the Pathfinders, uh, uh, and what they’re proposing because I think that this is in alignment with a lot of what, uh, current research is, is moving towards, but I think climate adaption, land stewardship, and environmental monitoring. We have a number of projects that are, uh, again, non-indigenous led, but, like, now actively, meaningfully engaging indigenous communities around what does it mean to be doing that type of work, uh, to be sharing that data back and co-creating that data with communities that is meaningful, impactful, and important for, uh, their own needs to help alleviate some of the huge pressures on land claims offices, on healthcare offices, uh, we also have a number of researchers working in robotics, um, and human machine interactions. That is quite exciting, uh, and looking at, we’re also, we have researchers that are deploying, you know, uh, really cheap, uh, small deployable CT scanners into remote communities, uh, that are being fed into MRIs or that are being fed into, uh, machine learning. So that way, if somebody is injured in a community, we’re not having to evacuate them, you know, hundreds of kilometers south, uh, in order to get a diagnostic that then is a negative, but that we’re able to, uh, really use some of those resources in community, uh, to, uh, drive assessments that are needed. Like, we know that the problem of healthcare and access to healthcare isn’t going to be solved easily, and so how do we put, uh, in place some of these micro technologies that can help benefit communities, give communities the data that they need, um, that that’s going to be meaningful. And so we have lots of different researchers working on projects like that that I think are, you know, they weren’t initially conceptualized as being indigenous driven projects that have huge indigenous community benefit. (..)

S29: Yes, please. I think just one thing I want to add, it’s not really an independent project, but I just want to note, like, I think something that within connected minds projects, but just also indigenous AI research in general that I really see as a core component to is really thinking about capacity building, especially with youth, because like, as Sean mentioned, uh, it ends up being that a lot of projects end up not being indigenous led, not, but that’s because there aren’t enough researchers to go around to lead the projects to meet the various vast needs of different community partners. And so I think we just also try to be really intentional about, um, not just engaging youth in academic spaces, but also within communities and in different, um, capacities to try to just have kind of summer school type things. And just, yeah, I think just that capacity development piece is really important for, um, the future and sustainability

S04: and flourishing of our community. Yes, Jackson, please. We have five minutes left? Sabrina,

S24: thank you. Uh, I’ll try, uh, yeah, okay. Um, so there’s this term we use in academia called, uh, research creation, uh, and it’s a way of kind of bringing together creative practices and arts and humanities and different things. And I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with this term because it’s, uh, in academia, uh, we like to sort of draw this really weird artificial line between creative practices and things that are happening over here with maybe different kinds of research or academic research happening over here. We’ve never kind of envisioned it that way throughout my career. I’ve never envisioned it that way. And for sure, uh, our ancestors didn’t think about it that way as kind of exclusively separate things. Um, so, uh, more broadly speaking, I like to think about storytelling. I, I like to be reminded that, you know, how knowledge is and, um, and knowledge transfer is kept in song and dance and all that. So, um, we are, uh, especially at the Haudenosaunee pod, but I think more broadly at abundant intelligences, um, think about those things as, as really deeply connected. And so we do a lot of creative projects that bring us back to doing stuff outside. We found early on, and maybe this is not surprising going to communities. Um, they don’t particularly respond well to just doing PowerPoints at them. So, um, what’s better is if you get them out someplace to do something, some kind of activity where they’re actually creating and making and doing things and then we start talking to each other and then all kinds of other stuff starts to happen in a way that kind of makes me think about how maybe our ancestors might have, um, done research creation. So, one of the things we do, and I’ll try to be quick about this, is, um, our pod works at the Museum of Ontario Archaeology in London, which sits on the home of a pre-contact village. Uh, lots of history there, lots of artifacts, lots of material culture was, um, found at that location. It’s now being stewarded there by the museum. We come in and we do, um, sometimes workshops. We process and get raw clay from that area. We are inspired by the history and the material culture that’s there, all the stories that are written on the land in that space. And we make new things. We bring in students. We bring in community members. Um, we make new objects in clay. Um, we 3D scan these things before we put them into a traditional pit fire. I don’t know if you what the fire is. You just picture a hole in the ground, put stuff in with some combustibles, and you light the sucker on fire. And what happens is it actually, you know, turns the clay into ceramic. Um, we pack this stuff with some medicines. The whole time, we’re telling stories, talking about things, laughing with each other, getting that good medicine. At the same time, we’re having conversations about machine learning, AI, because what we do is in that pit, we throw some sensors, some thermal sensors. We get some readings from those thermal sensors, sensors. And we allow that to sort of drive the creation of new 3D objects in real time. So the way that this is conceptualized is being thought about as a two minutes, as a land-based AI ecology is what we think about it as. So it’s in a way, it’s like the ceramic and the pots become the data, the training material. The fire is like the CPU, and it’s what’s driving all the activity that’s happening to visualize these new forms that are being created. It’s a prototype. It’s a prototype for an idea of thinking about how AI might be thought about really differently if it’s not driven towards really particular kinds of goals, if it’s not organized around models that can make you money, but actually ways about thinking about how do we re-tie back in this technology into our existing life ways? How do we think about it as part of our continuance on this land? How do we actually engage with people in communities that want to have these kinds of conversations and really weave them back into, again, conversations, creation story? For us, the great law of peace. For us, trying to think about how we might, again, back to being better human beings with each other while we figure out what this new technology is going to mean for us.

S25: That’s fascinating. Thank you so much. It looks, I’m seeing a zero, so I guess that means we should stop. But thank you so much. It was fascinating, very interesting, and thank you for being here, and please join me in thanking our speakers. Give it back to Mick for resuming our schedule. (……)

S13: wonderful. Thank you so much. So, next up, we have a spotlight, (.) an indigenous framework for editing indigenous stories. I’d like to invite Petra Hudson up, a doctoral candidate at Massey University researching indigenous knowledge systems for AI and (…) uh, uh, for Māori cultural well-being. Come on up. (31 seconds pause)

S07: A PhD in AI, but I’d better figure out how to work this technology. (18 seconds pause)

S14: Okay, don’t turn this up. Whoops. (……..)

S07: A few sides. Okay, there you go. (..) Kia ora koutou. (..) Uh, ngā mihi whānau. Before I start, I just, um, want to remind myself who I am. And, (..) you know, I just wanted to remind myself of who I am in the regards of where I come from and, and where I stand. Uh, my name is Petra Hudson, and I’m blessed to be an abundance intelligence postdoc, uh, fellow. Um, so what that actually means is that the abundance intelligence gave me a scholarship to do some, some pretty enjoyable work. And that work was to gather stories from other indigenous folk around the world. And that’s what I want to come and share my journey, my good times of finding these stories from other indigenous people doing the same thing with artificial intelligence. I want to open with a provocation. At the gatherings, all the gatherings that we’ve been a part of, we’ve been asking the critical question, can AI systems be (.) trusted with our knowledge? In my conversations with the distinguished Professor Graham Smith from Maotearo, the author of the Veracity Test, a Kau Papa Māori, Kau Papa Māori, by Māori, with Māori, for Māori. Really strategic in the way that we position that. We are the leads, we are inside, we’re working for us, by Māori, for Māori, with Māori. Today, I want to show you that the question operates at an earlier stage of knowledge pipeline. Before the algorithm, (..) the early stages of knowledge pipeline, before those algorithms, before those data sets, in a moment when the editor sits down with an indigenous scholar’s short story, long story, set of stories, and decides what to change. This presentation shares what happened when I applied Kau Papa Māori evaluative logic, not to a machine, but to an editorial process. The framework I’m sharing today is, in essence, a veracity test for editors. So, my postdoc project began with a deceptively straightforward task. Compile a global, a global compendium of original co-authored research stories from indigenous scholars worldwide. The vision was to amplify the voices that have historically been silenced. To let indigenous scholars speak in their own words about their own knowledge systems. Indigenous scholars from across the world were invited to contribute, and they did. But then, something happened that forced me to stop and think. When these stories arrived for editing, a critical question surfaced. Whose grammatical, whose stylistic rules must govern? Standard academic editing, the kind that applies to any manuscript at any western university, at any publisher, risked the erasing of the very things we were trying to amplify. The (.) cultural voice, the rational togetherness, the linguistic patterns that carry meaning in ways that no translation can fully understand. This is the same problem the veracity test identifies in artificial systems. The imposition of western norms. Efficiency, standardization, acceptability, onto knowledge that operates by entirely different principles. We named it AI (.) colonialization. Here, we are naming it editorial colonialization. Same structure, different site. (..) rather than applying western norms, we developed something new. An indigenous editing framework, (.) grounded in rational accountability and cultural integrity. We were specific about what the dilemma looks like. Grammar rules flatten dialectical and indigenous linguistic patterns. (.) Constructions that carry cultural logic are marked as errors. Style guides privilege western academic register over oral traditions. The way knowledge actually travels in many of our communities. So-called corrections erase cultural concepts that have no direct translation. And in erasing, erasing the untranscribable, they erase the knowledge itself. And editors who lack positionality, awareness and community accountability can cause real harm without knowing it. The core question, whose rules should govern the editing of indigenous stories. This is one of the things kaupapa Māori theory has already answered in adjacent domains. Te mana. Te mana. A veracity test that asks who has the cultural authority to make decisions about incorporating Māori knowledge into AI systems. The editorial dilemma asks the exact same question about manuscripts. Another veracity test. Te puna. (..) Truth and righteousness. Community defined standards applies here too. What counts as correct English is not a neutral question. When authors’ linguistic patterns carry cultural meanings. If we are serious about indigenous data sovereignty, we cannot stop at the algorithm. We must also govern the decisions made about indigenous knowledge before it reaches those systems, including the editorial decisions and discussions that determine what enters the scholarly record and whose voice. So the framework consists of seven interconnected principles with rational accountability at the centre. Not as one principle among others, but as the the animating logic that hosts all six together. This mirrors the structure of the veracity test, where rationale accountability is not a dimension. It is not scored, but as the foundation on which the entire evaluation process takes place. Authorship and positionality. Who is the editor? What is their relationship to the knowledge they are handling? An editor without positionality awareness is an editor without accountability. Knowledge systems and epistemology. Struggled on that word all the time. Epistemological. You got it. It’s up there. Always ways of knowing equally valid, including indigenous ones. This is not a courtesy. It is a commitment. It maps directly onto the veracity test challenge of Western-centric AI evaluation paradigms. Community relevance and ethics. Research must serve the community. Priorities and extend to community consent. Editing not exempt from this. The project compendium exists to serve communities, (..) and the editorial process must be accountable to them. Representation in language. Honour linguistics and cultural preferences. Avoid extraction. This is taonga. This is gifts. Treating language as a living gift. Not raw material to be standardised. Decolonisation and resistance. Challenge. Challenge colonial academic structures. And centre indigenous voices. This is the political dimension. The recognition that editorial norms are not neutral, and that apply them without critique, (..) is itself a political act. Rational methods. Research response relationships are sacred. reciprocity at every stage. The editor is in relationship with the author, with the community, and with the knowledge. And that relationship carries obligations. And at the centre, relational accountability. The recognition that every editorial decision must be answerable to the community, (.) whose knowledge is being handled. So taken together, these principles are not a checklist. They are a framework for evaluation. A framework for evaluation. A way of asking, at every point in the editorial process, does this decision honour the knowledge, the author, and the community. That is what the Veracity Test asks of. And this framework asks it of us. So why does this matter beyond my project? Well, first of all, it fits a critical gap. No existing editorial framework centres indigenous and relational accountability as foundation. None. The Veracity Tests fill a gap in AI evaluation. This framework fills the equivalent gap in scholarly publication. Second, it protects cultural integrity. It assures the indigenous scholars’ stories are not domesticated into Western academic conventions, conversations without without consent. That the editing process. That the editing process does not become what we have been calling it in the AI context, epistemological violence. Third, it scales. Framework is applicable to any compendium, journal, or press publication indigenous knowledge is found in. The Veracity Test is designed to be applied across the AI life cycle. This framework is designed to travel across public publication contexts. Fourth, it is a living document. Like the Veracity Test itself is designed to evolve in response to the community’s feedback. The pathway forward. Completing the compendium across three or four volumes. Securing an anchored publisher and funding and publishing the seven principles as a standalone article so that editors worldwide can adopt and adapt. I want to close by returning to where I started. The Veracity Test asks whether AI systems can be trusted with indigenous knowledge. The framework asks whether editors can be. The principles are the same are the same because the risks are the same. The domestication of indigenous voice by Western institutional norm. Whether the institution is an algorithm or a publisher, the question of cultural sovereignty does not change. Tēnā koutou. Tēnā koutou. Tēnā koutou. Tēnā tātou katoa. Kahuri. (39 seconds pause)

S13: This research talks, spilling my inner nerd cup. Okay, we’re going to take a break until half-past. Enjoy. (2 minute[s] pause)

S13: All right, here we go. (……..)

S05: Hi, my name is Caroline Runningwolf. I am a co-founder and the director of First Languages AI Reality, Flair. And the work that Flair does is regardless of nation-state borders, because basically, you know, that’s just a random line on a piece of paper. And historically, the Blackfoot, for example, called it the medicine line. And this medicine line, it crossed us. It crossed our communities. We didn’t cross those lines on the state. Sorry, I am all jumbled up right now. So, basically, what I’m trying to say is there are nation-states. They are called Canada and USA and Mexico. But in the end, our communities have our territories regardless of those lines on pieces of paper. And so, the work that Flair is doing is working closely and directly hand-in-hand with communities that a bunch of them are actually split across those boundaries, across that medicine line. So, one of the communities we’re working with, the Gwich’in, are up in the Northwest Territories. But the Gwich’in, their home territory follows the caribou from the birthing place in what is today Alaska to following their migration route across Yukon and Northwest Territories. So, the Gwich’in people and the Gwich’in language is spread across USA and Canada. And the work that we’re doing is spread across USA and Canada. But Flair is also, speaking of borders, I want to actually kind of expand that concept and talk about how we’re also being forced to think in domain or discipline borders. We’ve heard a lot of academics. We’ve heard a lot of academics earlier. And so, then there’s the discipline of education versus policy versus workforce development versus research and community-driven development of tools and implementing those tools and solutions in the community on the ground. And we’re doing all of that. And last but not least, we’re also doing this in very close friendship and mentorship with Tehiku Media.

S17: Do you want to go next? (…)

S08: Kia ora koutou katoa, ko Peter Lucas-Jones tōku ingoa, no te upauri ahau, ko te upauri tetahi o ngā iwi, o te wharetapu o ngā puhi. No reira, ka mihi ahau ki te whenua, ka whakaroa ahau ki te hunga kua wheturangitia. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou. Kia ora mai anō tatou. My name is Peter Lucas-Jones and I’m the CEO of Tereo Irirangi o Tehiko o Tehika. We are a tribal broadcaster. Kama a data science group that have taught the computer to speak Māori at converting speech to text at an almost 7% error rate. (.) We’re collaborating with one another and everyone we know to make it better and improve it. But we’ve also developed a number of synthetic voices to ensure that we can provide text-to-speech services to, not only for our community of learners, but for accessibility. Our relatives that are blind, our non-speaking relatives. How do we ensure that these types of things can exist in the walled gardens that were never perceived or considered to be a place where our languages would be used? And so we are a tribal organisation and there are five tribes that are part of our organisation. And when I think of your question, collaboration beyond borders, we’re doing it at a tribal level first. (.) We’re doing it at a tribal level. And I think the whole idea of boundaries is a very Western way of considering what limits us in the work that we do. So we’ve started to think about it, not so much as boundaries, but what connects us and what connects us is our whakapapa or our genealogy. What connects us is our sister languages and the culture that we share. And so we’ve started to work closer with those that are most closely related to us linguistically and culturally to see how we might be able to cross those boundaries and provide our model while upholding our principles and values related to indigenous data sovereignty as a way for other sister languages to fine-tune and benefit from the work that we’ve already done. Kia ora mai anō tatu. (.) Thank you, Peter.

S17: Eliana. (34 seconds pause)

S03: I’m trying to, I, in my life to the Vienna Convention in the 19th century that divided Africa. And I think of my land home, Rwanda. And how Kinyarwanda is, or some version is spoken in Rwanda, in Eastern Congo, in Burundi, in parts of Tanzania and Uganda. And I’m also a soil scientist, plant scientist. And I think about root systems and how root systems communicate and about the issue of borders and how that means nothing to root systems. (.) And I think about how, for me, the digital age is really about how do we reconnect to soil and soul? (.) And if you take the I from soil and you make it a you, it’s soul. So how do we go from I to you to we? (.) And so the work we do is really about the dismantling of the notion of borders to reconnection to each other. And how we do that through the wisdom of our ancestors and the technological age we’re in is what will heal our soils and our soul. (..)

S17: Thank you. This is very, very powerful. And and hearing all of you is challenging this idea of borders. So connecting a lot of what we have discussed throughout the conference about AI in this work and in this challenging of borders, how you conceive who benefits, who is harmed by this technology and how this technology can be governed. Let me start. So, OK. (..) Oh, OK, OK.

S08: Maybe Peter. OK. Who benefits, who decides and who is harmed? (..) Well, I always think about this proverb in my language and it goes like this. E hoki whakamuri kia anga whakamuri. (.) And what that means is we have to look deep into our past to sometimes forge our way into the future. (.) And history has a strange way of repeating itself. (.) And if we look at our own country, Aotearoa, and what resulted in Te Tiriti o Waitangi or the Treaty of Waitangi, and then, of course, the atrocities that occurred before that and after that, the story of land loss. (..) And what closely followed was language decline as a result of systemic policy and an approach towards white assimilation to eliminate what is our language of communication. (.) And language carries culture. (..) And language is born from the environment. (.) And it carries the activities of our people. And so we’ve got a lot to learn from what we have managed to prevent from being lost. (.) Who should benefit from that? (.) I think it must be the people of the language, first and foremost. (.) But who can benefit from that? Globally, we know that our language is the home of strategies and resilience in the Pacific. (.) Climate change is affecting each and every one of us in different ways. (.) Our people have survived in the Pacific for thousands of years. And when we think about the strategies of resilience that are very practical, and how the water is rising in the Pacific faster than anywhere else in the world, we see these practices coming back to life. (.) But to unlock practice, the key is language. And so when I think about who benefits, can all benefit. (..) But globalization and the story that it tells, and the supremacy that upholds it, is something that we all understand well. And that’s probably true for most tribes in Aotearoa in different ways. (.) Who is harmed? Our future is harmed. (.) And I do believe this is a place that we can collaboratively work together for collective good. Who decides how these tools are used? Well, we must make sure that it isn’t the same group of people that have made the decisions in the past. Because who owns our language? (..) Who owns the keys to the traditional knowledge? I argue that the people of the language are the keepers of the keys. And they have often held these keys and shared these keys on occasion. (.) But the way we govern those keys is extremely important. Because these tools can be used for good, but they can most certainly be used for harm. When I look at the incarceration rate of Maori women, 70% of all women that are incarcerated in New Zealand are Maori. (.) We are only 17% of the population. What do we know about surveillance? (.) What do we know about discrimination? (.) What do we know about the perpetuation of unfairness? (..) Decision-making has a strange way of seeing results like that. When we look at the health statistics, we have 6,000 people in the area that I come from, Kaitaia, but 2,000 of those people can’t get a doctor. Our tools can provide ways to connect people with services, but they shouldn’t be the first option. Because we know that a real doctor is better. These are just some of the examples that I can think of about how we must protect those keys whilst enhancing the way that we collaborate for global good. (..)

S17: Thank you, Peter. Caroline, Elian. (..)

S03: So, about a month and a half ago, I was in Papua New Guinea, where I learned about the work you’re doing from the High Commissioner of New Zealand. And one of the things that’s interesting for me is that when we’re talking about sovereignty, we’re thinking about governance and the idea of surveillance. Who is being surveilled and for what? (.) And how does that disconnect governance from land? And when it’s disconnected from land, it disconnects from the language that characterizes the land, nature, our relationship with the landscape. (..) And so, we live in a really distorted world where if you are the keeper of the land, you are somehow criminalized. (..) And so, the governance system makes you an outsider because your relationship with the land isn’t extractive. (.) And so, that influences how we teach, how we grant the grief, which knowledge systems matter, and what hierarchy of power and not love are deciding of the future. (.) And so, the erosion of nature, the erosion of language, the erosion of culture happened because the common sense of who should first benefit, because of their stewardship of their role in caring for the land, has been disregarded. And so, the common sense is how do we reclaim the rage of those 70% women who are incarcerated? How do we reclaim their creativity? (..) Because they’ve been forced to be dissociated from who they are. And that rage is energy that we should be harnessing to reconnect with language, with land. And I think the opportunity is how do we use this new medium to help us in that reconnection? (..)

S17: That is, that is, that is, that is so powerful. And, and, and, and one thing that, and, and, and, Peter, you, you reminded me, uh, so many times at the global level, when you start talking about indigenous AI or indigenous technology, it looks like, oh, this is just an inclusion issue. It’s just for this specific group of people. And as you mentioned, Peter, this is benefiting everyone. cushion. At the end, we are all living in the planet. So, like, how these conversations become beyond just an inclusion, of, like, inclusive AI. It goes beyond that. And I, I think this is a very important issue on the AI governance and how indigenous ways of knowing are that. So my question for all of you is, inclusion should be the goal, or what is the goal? (…..)

S05: I think building off of what Peter Lucas and Eliane said just earlier, our languages encode our knowledge, and our knowledge is as stewards of the land with a very long history. And if we’re merely aiming to be included in some big tech company’s AI solution, we’re continuing to be marginalized, we’re continuing to be used as a resource that is extracted from us, taken away from our control, and then repackaged, sold back to us. So inclusion should not be the goal, because these big companies don’t have our well-being in mind, right? They don’t care about us, our communities, our situations. (.) And that’s why we have to just do our own, because we know best what we need. And now, when I say the we, I mean we as indigenous people, because we as Flair can’t claim that we know what the Gwitchin need. That’s why we’re working hand in hand with the Gwitchin, with the Kwakwakwakw people, with the people that we’re partnering with, Because they know what they want, what they need, what their priorities are, and what they do not want to have included in some AI data model. So that’s why we shouldn’t aim for inclusion. We’ll always be the marginalized data set at the side of that bell curve. (……..)

S08: I’m just listening to the responses, and I really feel like I’m being informed and I’m soaking up all the information. (..) Yeah, so when I think about the governance of the data, particularly because when we think about where our languages have emerged from, our landscape and our earth is so important. Nomenclature, the nomenclature associated with our environment and our landscape is heaped with stories. And in Māori, we call that taunaha, the process of naming things, whether that’s flora and fauna, whether that is the different aspects of the environmental changes that we call seasons, our understanding that Westerners have days, we have nights. (.) Our whole philosophical worldview and cultural memory is recorded in our landscape. (.) And everything has a maori or a life force. And so when we consider that and understand that to be a system of connection and how the forest is alive, how it is connected, so too do we understand the relationship of our sister languages to us. Because we share a connection and carry different parts of the knowledge. So when I think about data governance and the connection with our environment, with our landscape, (..) the mining of our data without our consent is not that different to the privatisation of our land and the commercialisation of it, and then of course the extraction of the resources. (.) For the benefit of whom? (.) For the benefit of the empires of today. (.) And we have experienced the empires of yesterday. (.) And those empires do not appear to have gone away. They have shapeshifted. (..) And now these huge corporations sometimes have more rights than everyday people. And so the globalisation and the confiscation of rights, (..) rights of those very things that we believe are part and parcel of our worldview. (.) And so those are the things that I think about when I consider the governance. Because it’s not just about the data for data’s sake. What is the data connected to and where did it originate from? (..) Local councils are continually making decisions about regional consents for all types of commercial activity. The extraction of water. (.) The extraction of other resources for mining companies, exploratory, or of course otherwise. These big, huge projects have an impact on the very places that we call home. It could be sand mining. It could be anything. But what I’m saying is the way that we have governed our environment and ensured that it is not only sustainable but maintained for future generations is the same way that I look at the governance of data. (..) There are times where you go to harvest certain things. And then, of course, our elders or our tribe might say there’s a rahui on that. What is a rahui? (.) Well, that is our way of saying no more taking of that thing. Or something happened there. We don’t go to that place until such time has passed and we have made the decision and gone through the process of reopening up that resource because we know it must replenish. (.) We’re dealing with very small data sets. Now, each of us hear that a language dies every two weeks. (..) Each of us hear those sorts of words. (.) We hear that it is inevitable for minority language. They will disappear. (..) But what I know is true is that language loss for indigenous languages is anything but an accident. It’s part of a process of assimilation. So when we have lost a part of our culture, we must always reclaim it back. And every time we speak a word in our language, we are expressing resistance. So it’s important for us to showcase that, I believe. And, of course, to let people hear that we still exist. Because our environment, that is our home, is part and parcel of our decision-making process. Not just for whether or not we’re going to use compute in this way or access it and rent it from somebody else. We hear ideas about small AI, you know, you hear small AI and then, of course, you hear frugal. (.)

S07: But to be frugal, you have to have resources to begin with.

S08: So some of these terminologies that are used and expressed today don’t really resonate with communities. So I think that sometimes there’s an opportunity for us to even consider how these ideas are named. And naming is really important to me. (..) Leanne? (.)

S03: So many things are coming. So I’m just going to start by a few years ago, I was still living in Canada and I had a dream. (.) I had a dream of being involved in work that looks at how we preserve and nurture indigenous languages around the world and how we can harness AI for doing this work. I was working at the interface of data and food security. So I had no reason to think I’d ever be involved in this conversation. (..) So now, a few years later, I’ve moved to Africa, living in Nairobi. I was hired as the first CEO of the merged Center for International Forestry Research and the International Center for Research and Agroforestry. And for the last two years, we’ve gone through a process of renaming the institution, being led for the first time at this type of institution. I’m the first African woman leading an international agriculture research institution in the CGR network. So they’ve been around for 60 years. (..) And in the renaming, our new name is Landscape Alliance. (..) So even in the name, the scientific, the research has disappeared. But the alliance, the idea that we work in partnership through land remains the scope we work through. And so there’s something really important about how do we need to move beyond inclusion? How do we understand that when we talk about inclusion, we’re talking about an underlying architecture of power? (..) And that operative concept for me is like, how are we looking at jurisdiction? The community’s authority to decide whether, how, under what condition their knowledge enters any system, and in particular here, AI system. And so when we’re talking about inclusion, we’re often talking about an external institution that has already defined the model, set the data standards, and invites indigenous knowledge in. (.) So the room has been designed. And there’s this idea of how do I stand straight in a crooked room? (..) And so what’s important to understand is data sets come, you know, they can become more diverse while communities still have no meaningful control over downstream use, commercial access, or right to withdraw. (..) And indigenous communities must be seen not as mere beneficiaries of digital policy, but as rightful leaders in shaping it. (.) And it’s how we design those spaces matters more than the invitation. (…) And so that’s where we need to start.

S17: Yeah, I know, with these comments, you remind me of a very powerful concept about data colonization, how historical colonization was about extracting resources, and now we’re extracting data. With the same idea of terra nullius, that, like, the land is not owned by anyone, now data is not owned by anyone, so we can go and extract. And what are the, how we are replicating those narratives now, and those systems of power. And I, I, I think this is, this is, this is so powerful. So, uh, continuing with a, with a collaboration framework, what I would like to hear from, uh, from all of you is examples of good and also maybe bad collaboration. With, maybe unintentionally, what things went wrong when you were cross-collaborating, maybe across communities, but also maybe across countries. And I think there is a, a, a, a, a, a lot of experience that we can learn from, that wants to start. (..) Oh, please, Carolyn. (…)

S05: I was gonna just give an example of, um, two communities that we’re partnering with. Um, they, um, they are the Makkah in Washington State, USA, uh, on the most northwestern point of the contiguous USA. And, um, the Makkah language is part of what linguists call the Wakashian language family. (.) And they’re the southern, most southern representation of that. All the other languages of the Wakashian language family are north of that border in Canada. Um, most of them distributed across Vancouver Island. And one of the northern communities that we’re working with are the Kwakwakiwak, um, on the northern tip of Vancouver Island. And so as we were, as we were partnering with both those communities, um, actually how the partnership even came to be was because those two communities have blood relations and canoe journey relations. And so they introduced us to each other and basically said, you should work with these people and do this, you know. And so as we were working with both of these communities, they were hoping that they could build, easily build off of each other’s work. (..) And sadly, that didn’t work out as they hoped because one of the first steps of our process is to develop a language curriculum. But that language curriculum is not a template of, you know, let’s all do things in the house and then your daily routine or something like that. The template that you know from your second language courses in French and Spanish and whatever. Because that’s not high to their actual language use and their language culture and content, right? And so they were hoping that they could just translate the existing curriculum from one community to the other. And it rapidly turned out that that’s not going to work. That every, both communities needed to actually deeply dig into the, their language, their patterns of their language and create their own curriculum. There might be some parallels, but in the end, it’s a very specific Makah language curriculum and a very specific Quaggils language curriculum. (…) Peter? (…)

S08: A couple of examples. Well, first of all, I’d like to just think about all the different shared risks that we manage. Because sometimes we’re considering how do we prevent what little we have left from being exploited. And that’s a big thing that comes to mind. And often we are collaborating across borders. And one example is tribal. How do we look at how do we look at our contiguous forests, whether they’re man-made for commercial value, whether they’re man-made to prevent sand dunes encroaching on the fertile land. All those types of things are practical solutions that I know in my area we’ve worked together to do. (..) But beyond that, I would also like to mention that we have a lot of subsistence living in the very far north of Aotearoa. And food security is very much a reality because one week of really bad flooding means that there could be no kai in the pack and safe in Kaitaia. And when you think about what’s scary, hungry people are scary.

S13: Hungry people can be scary. (.)

S03: You’re making me think of the critical importance of starting with trust. Trust. And starting with trust is not something that comes naturally in academics. In academics, it’s like, okay, who got the grant? Who’s the PI? (.) So decision-making goes from there. And before the PI, it’s the institution that decides and allows the PI this margin of operation. And so how are we working from the ground up, building trust? And how is that, how we design governance? So in our Regreening Africa work, work was done for researchers and farmers to work collaborative together to look at how do we scale trees on farm with the knowledge held by farmers across Africa and researchers across Africa. We also knew that many of the farmers were not online most of the time. So we had to make it work offline first. And so our principles was, how does it work for the farmers first? Then we, you know, we had our GIS, satellite data, remote sensing, our soil analysis in the laboratory, you know, the modeling of climate and which trees will grow in 2050 years and the science coming in. But we started with what were the needs of the farmers and how does that inform how research gets included? (…) So it’s a different way of working. And then another example, so yesterday, um, I was in my hotel room in New York before getting to the UN and I was recording a video for my team in Peru. And we were launching yesterday a new program called PURMAS and PURMAS are areas of land that are left and fallow to regenerate. (..) And in an extractive economic framework, it’s land that’s doing nothing. It’s unproductive land. Okay. (.) But in indigenous knowledge systems, it’s land that is restoring itself back to productivity. And so the program we’re launching is really about reclaiming the need for rest for the land, for productivity to come back. And how do we ensure that that is encoded in policies, it’s encoded in financing and supporting farmers, that just because the land looks like it’s unproductive doesn’t mean you can seize it. (.) It’s doing something. You may not be seeing what it’s doing, but we know that a third of lands around the world are degraded. In Africa in particular, 65%. Because of this, we have to make things work all the time. (.) But rest brings restoration. (.) And how we build restoration in our governance systems is really, really key. And a bad example, I also have a bad example. (..) The surface, it looked great. You know, it was in the Northern Kenyan rangelands. It was a soil carbon initiative, and it was supposed to be the world’s largest of its kind. And it was covering 4.7 million acres. And buyers were some of the largest tech companies. I’m not going to mention who they were. (..) Yet for the Samburu, Burana, and Maasai, and other indigenous and pastoralist communities, they saw this project differently. (.) So they had millennia of rotational grazing in a certain way. And then suddenly borders, suddenly things were being fragmented. And suddenly the knowledge that they held and their ancestors held wasn’t aligning with the carbon market. And so what happened later on is that the Kenya’s Community Land Act and methodology came back and the legal systems, you know, ruled that two of the conservancies that had been established unconstitutionally and without sufficient public participation and were dissolved. And again, you know, when I think about language, if I speak my language, I speak to my ancestors. (..) And if I lose my language, I lose that capacity to speak to the ancestors. (..) And so whenever we’re looking at governance frameworks, we need to think about how is governance linking us to our ancestors and to future generation. And this is why preserving languages matters so much.

S17: Thank you. This is so, so powerful. And restoration in AI, I think, is a very important concept to continue developing. But I want to honor my privilege of having an FAQ. I know that we have limited time. But I want to invite the audience, if you have two or three questions, probably we will have time to answer for any of the panelists. If someone can help me with the mic, please. Oh, thank you. (.) Yeah. (.)

S08: I just want to say it was a real honor to meet Caroline and Michael in Hawaii. (.) Now, quite some time ago, we had the opportunity to attend a gathering. And at these places, we always meet amazing people. At the right time, that’s everything. Because you have access to ideas and understanding. And today, Eliane, you’re reminding me that data is land. And we must never forget our connection with where we come from. (…….)

S17: We have one question here.

S16: Hi. Thank you all for this really lively discussion. I really appreciate the focus on language and land in particular. I’m from Peru, from Cusco, Peru. And for us, the word Pachamama is what we use to describe the land. But that word doesn’t just mean, you know, dirt. It’s also supposed to represent time and space. And so I think, yeah, that the importance of communicating that when we’re thinking about ancestral knowledges, I see them more as land-based knowledges. But that doesn’t just mean talking about the land, the physical space of the land, but also all the teachings that come with it. But in this conversation, I’m really trying to wrap my head around. (.) And I’m learning so much, too, so I feel like you’re the best people to ask this. But I’m curious, just how do you reconcile the harms that AI does to the land with the benefits that AI provides? (.) Just in talking about soil and talking about language, which is, I think, a question that everyone here is trying to make sense of as well, right? Like, our responsibility to the land. And how do you mediate this sort of risk management and realities that we’re seeing right now with climate change?

S08: Our first model, our first Māori language ASR model, we trained that on one chip. (..) And we achieved an 86% accuracy rate on one. (.) And I think it reminds us that we don’t have to have 100,000 da-di-da-di-da-da-da-da to do the job that one can do. And I think there’s a race in the globalisation mission to make as much money as possible. But when making money is not your priority, but instead healing the land and touching the heart and the soul of the people that belong to the land is the priority. We do that through language. We don’t do that through money. (.) And I think that’s an important part to my response to that important question. (..)

S03: I just want to add, you know, when you said Pachamama, for me, the idea of Mother Earth, of the critical importance of venerating the goddess of fertility came to mind. And one of the things I think a lot about in this space is if you think about the history of computing and how women were the first computer scientists until it became lucrative. (..) And then suddenly, you know, the population of the jobs went to men. And so part of it is, how do we take a system that has become very patriarchal and bring it back in balance in terms of feminine and masculine energies and bringing all of us to the table? And so, you know, the framing you just offered is a really critical one. If our value system of using AI is making money, then we’re not thinking about energy use. We’re not thinking about water quality of the communities where the data centers are. (..) But if the intent is to serve the land and the people, how we work, which algorithms we use, how we use those algorithms gets taken into consideration in our governance system before anything is done. And it’s how we shift that basic principle that we need to do. (10 seconds pause)

S09: I completely agree that the ancestral intelligence really offers the solutions to the problems that humanity faces now on how to live on this planet in a sustainable way. (..) I think AI can help us disrupt the systems that have taken over because colonization now covers the globe. (..) But we’re the people here in Canada, some of the last colonized are the ones who remember before. But the rest of the people who were colonized a long time have forgotten that there was a before. (..) I’m curious if you believe, like, we’ve heard of the difficulty in translating concepts in traditional language that really only, many only existed in oral tradition or never written. (..) Can those concepts be captured in zeros and ones? (..) Because that’s AI, that’s binary, that’s the underlying machine language. And I do a lot of decolonizing work back in BC, and organizations want to decolonize. (..) And I’ve come to the point where you can’t, until the people in the organization decolonize first. (..) Can zeros and ones convey the wisdom and the knowledge that was really only ever transmitted orally? (..) These are almost concepts of the medium and the message. Whether zeros and ones are a suitable medium to speak of the love of the land for the people. (…)

S08: Just quickly, one of the reasons our access to data for our ASR model and our TTS model works so well is we were, as a tribe, te upauri, left alone for a little bit longer than other peoples in Aotearoa were because our lands were not commercially valuable to those that had taken over. And in that, there was a level of protection, but we are not a rich tribe. (.) In fact, our richness is our understanding of who we are, our ability to speak our language naturally, and the cultural memory that we carry in our conversation. (…) I don’t think AI will ever save our language. (.) And AI won’t save our culture. We will. (.) It will be a tool that helps us to remember, but it is our responsibility to never divorce ourselves of our obligation to not only think for ourselves, but for the past, the present, and the future. (……..)

S03: I just want to add the word remember, re and member. And we need to read it to visualize this idea of the reconnection. (.) And I think one of the things is the disciplinary divisions creates a dismembering. (….) Nothing forces us to decide that that’s where we’re going to start. (..) And I think that’s really the really important place we have to remind ourselves, is that in how we look at governance, we have to remember. (..)

S17: So important. Well, thank you so much for this amazing conversation. We’re on time. (….) We have a lot to continue learning, and how we can rethink that. (….) That’s it. Oh, Carolyn.

S05: I just, I’m going to talk to you later. But I did want to say, just kind of a call out to everyone here in the room. We have so many smart people here in the room. So many people that have knowledge and skill and backgrounds that is so valuable for this work. And so I just want you to reach out. Find your people. Reach out. (.) Put your minds together. (.) Find a way that you can contribute with what your skills are, what your knowledge is, what you’re passionate about. There is so much work to be done, and I just think we can all work together and uplift our canoes as the next wave of colonization is coming towards us.

S17: Thank you. (..)

S13: I love that, and I think that’s a good reminder that we have, I gave you tasks to do. Three items we’re going to take away from this conference, and we’re going to action to do and take out in the world. So our next item is to do is a keynote as the photobombs happening behind me. (..) And so we have Solomon Inos, a native Hawaiian artist, exploring ancestral futurism through painting, illustration, and installation. (.) If we could invite him. Great. //S26: Up.// Look at this. Oh, yeah, we got some face fuzz on. Welcome.

S19: Okay, well, aloha, aloha, aloha, aloha, aloha, aloha. O kolomana ko inoa, no wai anai mayau, no ho manuwanune. (.) I am, my name is Solomon Robert Nui Enos. I am the artist in residence, sorry. Oh, there we go.

S07: There we go. Oh, there we almost go. There we go. (.)

S19: We are. Oh, yes. (….) There we go. Ah, ah, I’m actually really loud, so I could probably pull this off. (..) Thank you so much. Mahalo, mahalo. So, aloha, aloha, everyone, and thank you for this amazing opportunity to talk story with you folks today. (..) I don’t have any notes, because all I really need is a time limit. (….) Because, left to my own devices, I would talk ad infinatum, and probably for all of you, ad nauseum. So, I appreciate your folks’ time, and your patience, and this opportunity to share. (..) Whenever I’m in a room full of adults, I get imposter syndrome. So, and that’s okay, because I contrast that with the very simple idea that, and furthermore, I should have way more fear of public speaking than I do. (.) But I think I figured out something for myself. (.) I unlocked my internal treasure. I found access to an infinite reservoir of ideas and inspiration within me, within my culture, within my ancestors. So, I cannot move fast enough to help others find their inner treasure. Because, I have this radical idea, and I have to say, before I go any further, it’s always interesting when you invite a visual artist to talk. (..) Good luck trying to get anything linear out of this conversation. Because, I am going to talk like how I paint, like how I take care of my garden. A little bit over here, a little bit over there, a little bit over there, a little bit over there. So, which is why, when I had the opportunity to start immerse myself in work around ancestral intelligence, abundance intelligence, abundance intelligence, all the variations of ways that we could put that word in there. One thing I found that was quite wonderful is that I could ramble on incessantly. I could just go into these stream of consciousness, and then Claude would be like, oh, let’s go ahead and organize all of these different ideas. I said, oh, how wonderful, there is a system to make sense, to turn these ideas into algorithms, to turn them into things that people can act on. (..) And I think also, as we move forward as an artist, I do think that one of the things that unites all of our cultures is a sense of humor, is the ability to laugh, is the ability to hold joy at the nexus, the nexus as the nectar. It’s what it’s all about. The binary ones and zeros and zeros and ones are effectively, through my general understanding of things, is how nature has gotten us to where we are today. Pain, pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, pain, pain, pain, pain, pleasure, pleasure, pain, pain, pain, pleasure, pleasure. That’s the language of nature, right? I should also say, as an artist, full of a room, with people with so much more knowledge than me, any kind of factoid I have to offer is simply an AI overview, so it should not be taken as the source, but it should be a beginning of a conversation. And as an artist, we get to begin ideas. And we’re interspersed throughout a process, and then we often have to help to land those ideas. Before there was this building, there was a drawing of this building. (.) And at the end, somebody had to paint the building. Someone had to organize all of the air conditioning, the wiring. My gosh, there’s so much artistry in this room. And so, one of the things that we get to do as artists, and I’m going to broaden this, the aperture quite a bit, I’m going to say that art is bringing excellence into the world. So, I am truly in a room full of artists. So, this is a gentle distribution of that idea. Now, one of my roles in Hawaii as a Kanaka Maoli artist, as a native Hawaiian explorer and a practitioner, (.) is I’m the artist-in-residence at the Hawaii State Art Museum, the Capital Modern. And what I get a chance to do, is I get a chance to share my artwork with all the students that come to the museum. I get a chance to simply say, (.) Hawaiian science fiction. (…) Wow. Did I change the setting? (…) That was totally scripted.

S24: Wait, is there a set? (…..)

S19: Here, test, test. Is that better? Yeah? Okay. (…..) Test, test. Is that right? (..) Is it this mic?

S07: No, it’s just me, sorry. //S07: Oh, oh, really? Oh, ha, ha, ha. (.)//

S19: Here we go, see? A sense of humor. That was good. That was good. That’s good stuff. And on that note, (.) I do want to, I want to play with a real simple idea initially, and then I’m going to expand to a bunch of other ideas within my, is it 30-minute time limit? (.) About, okay. Because I want to be really mindful of everybody’s time. So, I really do appreciate it. I’m, um, but in olelo Hawaii, in our, in our traditional language, (.) the word for food is, you take the glottal stop, (..) e-ai. (..) Ai is food. (.) But ai is also to eat. E ai kambia ai. Yeah? Eat the food. So, just as a fun kind of way to, you know, kind of an idea to kind of keep in your pocket here, uh, one way to frame the things that we’re talking about today is an eat or be eaten. (.) We’re either at the table or on the menu. (.) And so, just, you know, as an artist, I get to create a little thumbnail, a little, just, you know, a little icon, just a little something for you guys to think about. And my ancestors knew that intimately. (.) Iko olelo ola, iko olelo make. (.) In language, there is life. (.) In language, there is death. (.) So, from that perspective, truly, this technology is a form of speed. It is a form of, uh, advancing us quickly from one point to another point. Where are we going? Yeah? If it is rapidly, uh, sending us up over a precipice, then why run? (.) Why run towards something that we actually don’t even want? And so, the artwork that I have here today, instead of, uh, a deluge of artwork, because I have to say, I am a rapid prototyper. The reason why I’m so noisy and I like to talk a lot is because I don’t have a brush in my hand. Because when I paint, I’m silent. Yeah? Um, I paint and I paint all day. I paint into the evening. I paint until I fall asleep. I get back up and I paint again. It’s because I have a wonderful problem of not being able to run out of ideas. I, it’s actually kind of a nuisance. (.) I would love to, to stop thinking for a few years and just turn off that brain, um, at a later time. But there’s too much work to be done. And so, I’m gonna, I, what I wanna do is I wanna share with you folks some of the work that I’ve been doing, uh, really over, over my lifetime. But, um, importantly, just over the past, uh, about, about decade or so. Uh, but before I can get there, I’m gonna talk very briefly about where I’m from. Uh, I am from Wai’anae, which is on the west coast of Oahu, uh, (.) in, in Hawaii, which is the major, or, or, or, or, our, our capital, um, island in, in Hawaii. (.) And, um, a, uh, Wai’anae has the largest concentrations of native Hawaiians in the state. And, um, um, growing up in that community, we realized at a very early time, age, um, (.) right around the time of the mid-70s, a Hawaiian renaissance came about. (.) And we realized the power of stories, the power of labels, the power of words. And, uh, we had all the worst statistics, (.) crime, abuse, substance abuse. I mean, really, and we said, that is not who we are. We are not defined by those problems. Those are things that we need to know about. We need to, we need to identify. We need to address. But I’m not gonna write it on my name tag. That’s not who I’m gonna introduce myself as. (.) I want to focus on what does it look like when all of our communities are healthy again. What does it look like? What does it sound like? What does it smell like? What does it taste like? What does it feel like? Uh, and then there’s, uh, precipitatory. What does it feel like to be in proximity to it? (.) What does it feel like to be immersed in a time where, and this is a, this is a prompt. This is a prompt I want to, I want to, I want to challenge, uh, some, some AI entity as. (.) What, tell me the story, or a prompt, either an AI entity or a human entity or an actual entity. What does it look like? Tell me the story where everybody’s okay. (..) Nobody’s struggling. Nobody’s thirsty. Nobody is sick. Nobody is lost. Yeah. (..) And yet it is an exciting story. (.) It’s full of drama, but not all the stupid drama. Not all the ridiculous drama. Not all the things. things, and then this is, this I have to say, mindfully, (..) I’m really not down with games like Grand Theft Auto. I’m sorry. That is exhibiting all the worst. Like, let’s, let’s, let’s take an espresso, let’s make an espresso shot of all the things we don’t want, right? And let’s, let’s make it easily accessible for as many people as possible. if art imitates life and if life imitates art and all the video games we’re playing and all the movies that we’re watching and all the stories that we’re telling ourselves are how we’re gonna fail. We’re either gonna fail like this or fail like that. 31 flavors of dystopia. (.) Is it any wonder we’re in the world we are today? (.) So, I am very interested in having conversations with anyone and with anything that can help us to address the fact that for every dystopian narrative there is, we need a thousand stories of how we’re gonna do it. How we’re gonna make it. How we’re gonna make sure that every human on earth has their sense of purpose woven, integrated in such a way that everybody’s gonna be okay. and when I say everybody, I am talking about our mother, yeah? I am talking about our aina, our land, yeah? And so, what I get a chance to do as an artist is I get to explore all of these things in the form of prototypes. So, here, I will share a shameless plug because I literally could have, I mean, I could have presented hundreds of images but the funny thing is I would rather you folks maybe come across them organically. If you do go on Instagram, which I’m not particularly excited about using these kinds of, you know, mediums, but it’s the watering hole where the people are. I would not drink from that water, thank you very much. But I will set up, I will set up shop there. I will be in proximity to help to filter some of that water, to help to bring nutrition into the main stream. How do we take all the conversations that are happening in this room and make them digestible to all the people who are not in this room? (.) As an artist, I get a chance to do that all the time. (.) If there was a chicken walking around on this stage right now, it would be very problematic if I, you know, I’d have to be really hungry if I grabbed that chicken and just started eating it, right? Pretty brutal, right? (..) So instead, (..) we’re going to have to honor that chicken for its life and then we’re going to take it, thank it, it will pass away and it’ll pass into us. In the process, we will remove its feathers, we will remove its innards, yeah? We will process that chicken, but not too much (.) because if we keep just enough of that chicken, we get as much of the nutrients that we can from it. but we don’t want to end up with chicken nuggets, right? That is over-processing this idea. So all the conversations that we’re having in this room about food security, about understanding the responsibility of how we think about this new ocean that we’re about to crawl out of again, yeah? We are on another threshold and we’re going to crawl out. We’re going to emerge, but what are we going to emerge as? And so being able to make everything that we’re talking about in this room edible, digestible, and furthermore, (…..) channel some of the archetypes that are within our culture. And I’ll get to that. I’m going to try to land one plane before I take off on another one or shore one canoe before I jump onto another canoe. (.) If you find me on Instagram, (.) it’s just my name. (…) It’s just my name. and I encourage you folks to just check it out. So it’s at Solomon Enos (.) because I have been working with friends at, who, we had 150 independent Hawaiian language newspapers. We had the first printing presses west of the Rockies because our ancestors knew that if we are not telling our own stories, other people will. (..) About three years ago, I was involved in a project with some folks around the corner, Ubisoft, and I can’t go much further into what we were working on just because, you know, I would, if it does pick up again, that could be cool. It, it, it kind of went into a dormant phase and I’m kind of, I’m kind of also happy that it went into a dormant phase for reasons. But one of that conversations is simply around the idea that the Pacific is one third of the Earth’s surface. and in the Pacific are cultures who have knowledge, who have wisdom that is universally applicable to all cultures around the world because we are all islands. This is, obviously, (.) an island here, you know, turtle island, which I’ve come to understand and learn, and learn more about. (.) So, part of what I’m getting a chance to do is we are going through our ancient, our Hawaiian language newspapers, we’re going through as many different kinds of documentation that we have and we are researching (.) heroes and monsters and we have kupua, menehune, eepa, (..) uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, all these characters, all these creatures and we’re drawing them. We’re visualizing them because if we don’t, (.) folks like Pixar will. (.) And here I have to do a tiny little note. (.) It’s a whole bunch of tiny little notes as we go along here. Um, uh, (…) I want to mahalo to folks who did Moana. Okay, right on. You know, I think in general it’s a pretty good idea. (.) One of the challenges though, and, and here I have to be really mindful, uh, because I know there are other of our Pacifica cousins here in this room, uh, but in some of the conversations I’ve had with, uh, some, some, uh, opportunities to spend time in Aotearoa, in Tahiti, uh, in the Tuomotus, uh, in Samoa, we talk about Maui and I always ask because in, in Hawaii, (.) Maui is small. (..) He’s, he’s the underrated one. He’s the runt. Nobody thought he could do what he could do. (.) So, if you represent Maui as, Maui, you’re kind of missing the point, (.) yeah? You may think you are small, but you’re not. You may think that you’re weak, but you’re not, you see. (..) Those were the things, um, some of the propaganda newspapers, uh, that were, that our ancestors were fighting against, that were being imposed by the United States, (.) were basically saying Hawaiians are dumb. Hawaiians are lazy. Hawaiians never show up on time. Excuse me, Hawaiian time is at least 15,000 years early. (..) Yeah? We, we show up early. (..) So, (..) um, importantly, (.) we do, uh, (.) I’m currently working on a project with Pixar, so, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, bring up Maui because Maui is the trickster. And we need to think about the tricksters in all of our stories. And I mean, all, all peoples have tricksters. And the tricksters are the ones that do the thing that nobody thought could be done. They found the back door. They found the way to cheat the thing that darn well needed to be cheated. (.) So, (.) I playfully ask these ideas, uh, and I think about these concepts, and I’m coming together with this, with this, with a bunch of different themes and idea, some of them relating to, one of the projects that we’re doing is we’re going through our traditional stories and we’re, we are bringing forward, uh, Dungeons and Dragons, aspects of Hawaiian culture. Being able to actually sit down and look at each other and roll dice, right? And collaboratively make stories together. Um, and we’re going through, and we’re going to be producing this content and we would love to inspire other cultures to look at their traditional stories and to draw them before we had amazing imaginations. And we will have amazing imaginations again, but for the time being, we do need to put, we need to, uh, present a finer point. We do need to visualize these things. And it is a first to market issue. Again, if you say Maui, oh, you mean Moana? No, no. I mean Maui, right? So that’s why there’s a need for us to think about our traditional stories. Our traditional stories and the archetypes are like native plants. They need to be cultivated. And the more people that we can get engaged and more that we can share, and I understand deeply and totally what happens when you overshare, yeah? How can those things be exploited? I understand. Um, it is a fine line. And so, I’m going to bring this all together in, in the last, uh, two minutes and 17 seconds I have, approximately. (..) Oh, not enough time, not enough time. But, uh, so, uh, playfully, I’ve been thinking about this idea of asking AI entities, AI beings, or whatever they are, whoever they are, because they are us, and yet they are not us. Uh, (.) uh, AI, solve yourself. (.) Physician, heal thyself. (.) Using AI models to address what AI is going to do. Because if I can make this hand twice the size that it is, but I have to cut off this hand to do it, then what’s the point? If we are destroying other people’s land so that I can use AI to take care of my land, no thanks. I’d, I’d rather get off the grid entirely, yeah? However, I think that’s the wonderful conundrum we have. Like AI, humans are one part problem, one part solution, (.) which is no and yay at the same time, right? So, how do we decrease the no, and how do we increase the yay? (.) And so, to that end, I’m gonna, I’m gonna bring this all to close with a simple idea. I’m, I’ve been, I’ve been writing stories and creating artwork. I’ve been posting them on my social media, all about our ancient gods uploading themselves on, (.) and becoming AI entities, and then continuing to do the work of being extensions of the health of the land and the water and the people by making these AI spaces sacred, sacred spaces in the forms of 1001 1001 1001 1001 etc. Yeah? That’s what I’m really excited about, but I don’t get to have this kind of fun if I didn’t have all you folks who are not only artists, but you also help to provide the scaffolding so that the art can be made with integrity. And with that said, (.) I’m gonna stop talking.

S07: Thank you.

S13: Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Next, I’d like to invite Emily Buse up, Anishabi, who’s a doctoral student in educational studies at McGill, and she’s gonna step us through a collective zine, mapping our futures on paper. And this is going to launch us actually through and into our lunch activity, which is a bit of a working lunch. So we’ll have some activities to do over lunch. And Emily, can you come up and help us through this? (20 seconds pause)

S00: Thank you. Yes. Hi, everyone. So great to join you today. I know we’re running a little short on time, so I’ll keep it very brief. But I’m just curious if anyone here knows what a zine is, has heard of zines, has perhaps made a zine, read a zine. Okay, so like half, (.) almost half, that’s pretty good. Well, I’m really, really excited. I’ve done a lot of work with zines and indigenizing zines in the past as part of my master’s and doctoral work. So if you would like to join me in the craft room, I would love to walk you guys through how to make a zine. So for those of you who don’t know, really quick, it’s short for magazine. It’s a really DIY-heavy piece of paper or publishing that goes into (.) a self-circulated booklet of some kind, right? imitating a magazine. So we’re each going to be working with a prompt here that I developed with Margaret. What future do you imagine when innovation is rooted in community, curiosity, and care? So I really invite you guys to sit with that and reflect on that and if you would like to do some crafting over your lunch hour, we have lots of magazines to be cut up, lots of glue to be used and I would love to sit and just have a great time and really, really ponder what this means for us as we look at the future with innovation and AI. So thank you and hopefully I will see you guys very soon. (………)

S13: Awesome. And also we have Danielle, she’s made her way here and she’s going to be presenting at 1.15, (.) which we’re very excited about. So without further ado, we are on for lunch. (.) Have a great lunch. So make sure you’re back for 1.15. Thanks everyone. (3 minute[s] pause) Hi everyone. Just one more note, if you need gluten-free, gluten-free is available. You just have to ask the folks behind the counter. Thanks so much. (74 minute[s] pause) Start taking their seats. We’re going to get started on this afternoon’s program. (……) Want to take their seats please? We’ll get started on this afternoon’s program. (24 seconds pause) Seats, we’re going to get started right away. (26 seconds pause) Seats. (11 seconds pause) To introduce our next speaker, she braved the fires, made it all the way through. We’ve got Danielle Boyer. She’s an Anishinaabe youth, robotics inventor, founder of the STEAM Connection, creator of the language teaching SCOBOTS. Please welcome her to the stage or to the podium. (..) Very nice to see you. (…….)

S30: Hello, my name is Danielle Boyer. I’m Anishinaabe from the Sioux Tribe, which is in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and I’m a youth robotics inventor. I only have five minutes to talk today, so I’m going to keep it fast and furious, but I’m going to share about my language revitalization robot that I invented called the SCOBOT. It’s here right here, and I’m going to share a little bit about my journey. So I grew up under the poverty line in my community without a lot of access to science and tech learning opportunities, which is kind of a big deal because I grew up in Michigan, which is like the center of the automotive industry. Everyone works in like Ford or Chrysler or things like that, so not having access to science and tech education is a really, really big deal. I remember my little sister, she was obsessed with like Iron Man and Wally and always wanted to build robots specifically. She would come up to me and beg me and she’s like, I want to learn robots. robots, but to be able to participate in the local robotics program cost $500 to be able to participate. For us, that was the difference between making rent or not, and it just wasn’t achievable or approachable for us. I remember one day I was at Costco and I saw a set of animal puppets on the shelf, and I was really excited. I learned a lot through oral tradition and storytelling in my family, and I was like, what if I took these puppets and I told animal stories with them? I remember I was 10 years old, I took my mom aside and I was like, Mom, I have an idea. What if I taught these classes? She looked at me and she said, dude, she actually called me dude. She’s like, dude, you are 10 years old. What are you talking about? I was like, no, no, no, trust me. I ended up teaching a semester-long kindergarten class with 25 kindergartners when I was 10, and I sucked so bad at it. I was feeding the kids sugar, I was doing all these crazy things, but it taught me a lot. It taught me that even though there’s a lot of accessibility gaps to education within my community, there were also things that I could do about it. When I got a little bit older, I was able to join a robotics team, and to me, that was such a big deal because I felt like I was fulfilling my little sister’s dreams, right? When I get there, I was the only girl and the only native person in the entire robotics team, and I immediately start getting bullied ruthlessly. I had memes made of me, I was harassed, and the boys on the robotics team even sent drones to my house to spy on me through my window at night, which is absolutely crazy. Like, who does that? I remember feeling very lost and, like, I wasn’t meant to pursue science and tech, and I just felt really intimidated. I remember my grandma kind of pulled me out from getting bullied and in those situations, and she was like, don’t listen to them, keep doing what you’re doing. (.) My grandma is the last fluent speaker of our dialect of Anishinaabe Moen and in my family, and that’s a really scary thing because we kind of feel that imminent loss of language and culture, right? And to lose your language is to lose your culture, it’s to lose who you are. And so I used that passion for robots and her push to have me keep going, and I started designing a robot called the Scobot. It’s a robot that uses ethical AI that’s internally developed by my team and I, and what it does is it sits on your shoulder and speaks Anishinaabe Moen. So basically what it does is I could say, what is bare to it? It recognizes the word bare, it takes speech, it puts it to text, and it syncs it to an audio file that’s pre-recorded. So I can say, what is bare to it, and it will say mukwa back to me. I think that that is so cool. All the robots are inspired by the seven grandfather teachings and woodland animals, and you can see the little mukwa right here. They’re all 3D printed, made out of sustainable materials, and what’s really special is that we’re not using generative AI in what we’re creating. What we’re doing is we’re just doing a function that’s very similar to, like, text to speech, and I think that’s really special because my community and I, we sat down and we were like, how can we approach linguistic technologies and AI in an ethical way, and if we can’t do it the right way, then we shouldn’t do it at all, right? I remember some of the stuff they were telling me is like, we don’t want to have synthetic speech in the robots. We don’t want the AI to be utilized through data centers. We don’t want big tech corporations to be involved, and we want all of our developers to be indigenous. So we sat down and we’re like, is this possible? And we found out that it was. And so that’s how the Scobot was born, my little robot that I absolutely love. We’ve distributed over 350 of them, and what’s really special is that students are actually able to build them themselves. They run off of a little app that we created, and we distribute them to tribal classrooms completely for free. The focus is never to replace our language keepers, but merely to aid them. Because I remember I was in the toy aisle as a kid, and I would see, like, talking Elmo type of toys, where you could press on Elmo’s stomach and hear, like, the alphabet and things like that, and I’m like, why don’t we have toys like that in my language? Why don’t we have resources like that? I didn’t grow up with nearly anything in my dialect. That’s a scary thing, and so that’s why I decided to start creating my own toys. Anyways, miigwech, thank you. (11 seconds pause)

S13: My gosh, I’m so excited. Youth like this is just going to power our future. So, our (.) next talk, Walking Together, Reciprocity to Respect in AI Development. We have another Mila rock star, led by a moderator, Shigai Banjigwa, Senior Director, Education and Development at Mila. Please come to the stage and welcome your next panel. Thank you, everybody. Good

S10: afternoon. I’d like to invite the panelists onto the stage. Dr. Jackie, (.) wherever you are, please join us on stage. Jonathan, thank you. And then we’ll do introductions. So, Jonathan, you can join me right here. Dr. Jacqueline Otten, please join me over there. And Alyssa Strom, please join me over there. We’re going to do introductions first, and then we’ll jump into this very big topic. So, once again, my name is Shigai, and I lead AI education at Mila. And my background is I’m a data scientist who works in education. I’ve been working with Lindsay and her team on a number of initiatives, and it is my absolute pleasure to have this important conversation with all of you today. Let’s start with introductions first, and then we’ll jump into the topic. So, Jonathan, you can go first. Please tell us, what’s your day job? (..)

S21: Is this thing on? I think it is. So, my name is Jonathan Dewar, and my day job is as the CEO of the First Nations Information Governance Center. And so, that’s a national organization, a national not-for-profit organization established by our national leadership. We report to a national board of directors. Importantly, that board of directors is appointed by regional leadership. So, our direction actually comes from the regional leadership, which, of course, feeds up into the national (.) leadership as well, in terms of personal. I wear a lot of other hats, too. Some of that sneaks into the way I talk about our FNIGC work. But personally, I grew up in Ottawa, which is the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Algonquist Anishinaabeg. And I’m a member of the Wendat Nation through my mother and

S10: grandmother. All right, thank you. Dr. Atman, what is your day job? I’ll start off by saying,

S12: And what I shared with you is, first of all, I said, um, hello, or greetings, all of my relations. And that’s how we see ourselves. And, and that particular statement is, is actually, um, interesting or important in the context of the conversation we’re having today. I also shared with you my, um, a name that was given to me by Elder Silverquill when I was an infant. And that’s, uh, and that has to do with a certain kind of thunder that is continuously rolls, rolls, rolls, rolls over a large landscape. So, you know, it’s, it’s very nature-inspired and meaningful name. And I come from Fishing Lake First Nation, and I shared that also. And I also said I’m very, very happy to be here today. And my day job is, um, I’m back in my own treaty territory, Treaty 4 territory, and it’s kind of taken me a while to make my way back home. Um, and I’m president of First Nations University of Canada. (.)

S10: Thank you. Alyssa. (…)

S02: Thank you very much. Uh, hi, everybody. Uh, I’m Alyssa Strom. I’m the executive director of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy at CIFAR, which is a long way of saying that it’s really my job to work with our three national AI institutes. So, Mila is a very close partner of CIFAR, as well as Amy, which is based in Edmonton, and the Vector Institute in Toronto. And, and together, uh, these four partner organizations have been working, uh, for the last eight and a half, nine years now, to really help to advance Canada’s leadership in AI research. We had, we had a strong foundation before the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy in 2017, but we’ve really, um, you know, elevated and accelerated and expanded that, um, over the last eight years. Um, and with a particular focus on, uh, not just research, but also, uh, training, training of young people, equity, diversity, inclusion, as we’re thinking about the AI ecosystem, and, and likewise, in innovation as well, too. Uh, so that’s my day job. Um, uh, my background is, uh, my ancestors are settlers to Canada, so I come here very humbly as an ally, uh, somebody who’s here to support, to learn, to share, to be inspired. And, uh, it’s been a wonderful couple of days, uh, in that context. Thank you. Thank you very much. And I started quite

S10: deliberately by saying day job, because it’s just such a small part of who we actually are. And if my, I may start with you. May I call you Jackie? Thank you. If I may start with you, your journey has, has been incredible. You’ve dedicated your career to integrating indigenous ways of knowing. And now at an academic institution, you’re furthering that work. How do we ensure that AI development respects and protects indigenous intellectual

S12: property? This is such an important question. And, you know, to some degrees we’ve been, we’ve been hearing answers to that, uh, from the various, various speakers and, um, indigenous knowledges and had the most interesting conversation with, with the three elders here, um, over lunch and was learning and hearing about their perspectives on AI in the midst of, um, or in relation to, or non-relation to AI, right? And so, um, you know, when, one of the things that we ask, because, because I’m Anishinaabe or, or Soto, um, if, if my, my grandmother were here, she would say, Anishinaabe or she would say, Anishinaabe or Anishinaabe. And, um, and it’s, you know, who are you? Um, where do you come from? Where is your umbilical cord connected to? (..) And that is a foundational question to, um, to this conversation. You know, indigenous knowledge is connected to natural law. And how are natural laws guiding this, um, this space? And as indigenous peoples, we are accountable to and responsible to, um, natural law, which forms our knowledge systems. And, um, and so, you know, that’s how we greet each other. And that’s how we’ve greeted each other, um, for as long, you know, way into my great, great, great, great grandparents. It’s all about who are you? Who are your people? Um, where’s your land? You know, what’s your connection to land? And what’s your responsibility? And so, there is also that responsibility to learn learn your, your, your, your, your stories and your, um, your teachings, um, and, and those laws, um, because they will inform how you move forward, how you lead, how you make decisions. (.) And, um, and so, you know, I remember being in graduate school, um, and hearing about complexity and chaos theory. Um, I was excited about that. And I was wondering why, you know, why I was in I was intrigued by that until I learned and made that connection, that parallel to seven generations thinking those philosophies about, about that connection between our past, present, and future, and our responsibility to past, present, and future. All that’s contained within, within that non-linear space of time. And, um, understanding our lands, our landscape, knowing those stories, um, being responsible to those children not yet born. So, I was in China last week. And I went to, uh, I wrote it down because I knew I would forget. Um, it’s a digital park. And it’s called Shugang Park. And within this park, um, this park, um, is an AI facility, a robotics facility. And we also went to an EA facility, um, or EV. And, um, I was really blown away by the advancement, uh, the root of AI and the advancement of AI and the advancement of robotics. And, um, and, um, and so it, I’ve been thinking about that since I, I’ve come. And my biggest concern is we’re a spirit in, in all of this. And spirit within knowledge, our knowledge systems, you know, you think about that philosophy, uh, all my relations, um, it is all about our responsibility, our interconnected, uh, (.) inextricable interconnectedness of all of creation. And when I walked into, um, the robotics center, training center, where young, where these people are training robots, and I actually got to try do that. that, um, and, but the space was filled with young people. I shouldn’t say but. The space was filled with young people. And I asked the question, what is the average age of the people in this space? And I was told 25. These engineers were 25. And so when we’re talking about indigenous knowledge systems, how long does it gain to gain, how long does it take to gain that kind of knowledge? Um, it takes a lifetime. Um, so, and I’m looking at this space thinking, you know, is it young people who are leading us now? And that’s not a bad thing, but how much knowledge of and lived experience of those natural laws do our young people have? So, you know, so, you know, there needs to be that connection to that ancient knowledge, um, in our youth. We have that responsibility as, as adults. So there’s a lot, there’s so much, so much, uh, to, to this, uh, to this question. And, um, the pace of change is really, uh, we are being led by AR. I feel we’re being led by AI. We’re being enveloped by it. Because the pace of, of, of this kind of technology is exponential, right? I don’t know. There’s Moore’s law, right? Where, um, you know, the, the, the amount, the size of transistors within a chip, um, has shrunk. Um, you know, continues to shrink every two years, but now it’s, you know, it’s pretty well months. And our minds are unable to keep up with the pace of that change, right? So, you know, technology, uh, by the time we get an iPhone, within months we’re getting, we’re getting a new phone. And how much do we actually know about that? So, you know, it’s, we, I, I feel with indigenous knowledge is we have to really, um, consider protocol. And I know that’s a question for later, but we really need to go slow before we go fast. And we have to have that relationship between, um, between that kind of pace. So what it really means is protocol has a stop and think. Um, and we were talking about, you know, governance, um, during lunch and calls to action, or not calls to action, calls to a meeting. And who has jurisdiction? Uh, historically we would have, um, um, edge of the forest ceremonies. (.) That means that if I’m coming onto your territory, I would not step into your space. And until I was greeted. (.) And, um, I would, I would stand on the edge of your territory and sing and sing. (.) And I would be greeted by song. (.) And then you’re given permission to step into that space. So the question is, um, are we taking that time to step into these spaces of indigenous knowledges in relation to AI? (.) Um, and we know that in some cases it’s not happening, right? So there’s a lot to think about.

S10: Thank you very much. And you mentioned the word governance. So, Jonathan, I’m gonna jump to you. And if you would be so kind, could you maybe start with the framing of OCAP? And maybe try and layer it onto some of the, what we’ve heard already. And, and weave in how governance can be the way that we bring in indigenous ways. (.)

S10: Thank you. And you started on protocol. (.) And I’m Shana, originally from Zimbabwe. where I’ve been in Canada, uh, 13 years now. Where I come from, I would never address a group of people without starting with the elders. But I sat on the stage and I began the work of a moderator. And I clicked on. And it brings me to our topic today, which is walking together. (.) reciprocity and respect in AI development. And on the walking together piece. What has it felt like for you walking together? When you see this topic, um, you shared how you came to be here. How do you feel about the walking together part of it? How is it working in your space?

S02: Thanks so much, Shingai. Great framing of, um, you know, a very challenging but a very rewarding opportunity, right? And so, walking together, I think, is actually a great phrase to encapsulate this idea of respect and reciprocity, right? So this, you know, mutual opportunity to learn, to grow, to share with each other. And I’m not talking about reciprocity in the, um, capitalistic sense, right? Where we’re exchanging goods and services, you know, for capital, for instance. Um, but thinking about, you know, how can we really learn and share from each other. So, so what does it mean to me? At, at CIFAR, we really began our journey to think about, um, our role and responsibility and opportunity to support, uh, inclusion and engagement, particularly of Indigenous youth in AI, uh, training opportunities in around, uh, 2020. And, uh, you know, we had been focusing on, uh, what was our role broadly in equity, diversity, and inclusion in the AI ecosystem. I came into the AI ecosystem recognizing that it was an incredibly homogeneous space with very few groups represented, a very limited number of voices, and knew that that was no way to develop a technology that was going to affect everybody. And so we were working on EDI broadly, and then we zeroed in on this responsibility as Canadians and leaders of Canadian AI research and innovation uh, uh, to, uh, work with and think about how to support Indigenous inclusion. And, um, we began that very slowly and very humbly, and by having lots of conversations, um, meeting with Indigenous leaders in education, um, uh, at universities, at not-for-profits, uh, meeting with other settlers who had, you know, paved some of this path before us, uh, uh, and had been doing this work successfully. And so with that kind of slow approach, not moving at the speed of AI, but really thinking carefully and critically and getting some ideas and best advice together, starting again with some pilot projects. And doing those pilot projects with Indigenous communities with Indigenous leaders. Um, what was really essential, I think, to me at the beginning of this journey was, um, also, uh, you know, improving my own knowledge and having conversations and meeting people, uh, but also taking some formal training. So I took the, uh, uh, OCAP course to be able to really understand as a, I’m trained as a scientist, you know, how would a scientist, how should a scientist deploy the principles of OCAP in a scientific setting? Um, we had another course that we took on, um, uh, led by, uh, an Indigenous consulting firm on, again, providing advice and guidance to settler scientists in thinking about how to pursue, uh, research and research projects and research administration in my case as well. So that, that, that, that slow approach. And I think that’s been, um, you know, uh, as we’ve moved forward with our journey, that’s also been the approach that we’ve taken, uh, with our community and with our broader AI ecosystem in providing, um, opportunities for conversations, providing opportunities to learn, uh, and also opportunities for training. So I just want to mention that one of the things that we developed as part of our strategy at CIFAR is, um, an Indigenous perspectives on AI. Uh, we worked, uh, we worked with an Indigenous consulting firm who led this work, worked with their experts in the field, uh, and we developed, uh, a learning module that is a required program for every Canadian student who takes a summer course that’s sponsored by CIFAR every summer. This is about 300 students every summer. They’re coming sometimes from all around the world, not just across Canada, which is really interesting. and it, uh, gives, uh, gives them an opportunity to learn about and consider Indigenous perspectives in their own AI research. And so this is available free online, on our website, in French and in English, and it has been incredibly well-received. And, uh, it’s one, um, uh, uh, way that we can, uh, contribute as, uh, research leaders to, uh, the journey of inclusion and reconciliation. in Canada, uh, for other settlers as well.

S10: Thanks, Alisa. And you’ve been teaching us a lot, even in, in, in just your answers. Would, would you be comfortable sharing your view of reciprocity? What does it mean to you? And then, so the topic is reciprocity and respect in AI development, but let’s just double click on those words. Reciprocity and respect. What do they mean to you? (..)

S12: So reciprocity to me is, first of all, you have to have a relationship in order to enable reciprocity. If you don’t care about a thing or a person, you’re not going to engage. So the question is, where are your values? Where’s your heart? What is your intention? And, and of course, you know, there’s been this link from AI to consumption, right? Just devouring and without, without any ethical boundaries, without any cultural protocol. And so you have to be in relationship, uh, in order to engage in, uh, respectful reciprocity. And, um, and that is really leaning into, as I talked about, natural law, but, um, some of those values. And, like, Wakutawin is, is a law. Um, and that’s in both Soto and Cree. Um, and that speaks, again, to the interconnectedness of humanity, of creation and the cosmos, right? So it’s, it’s, um, it’s, um, that is something we cannot, um, um, ignore. Like, what we do to the, um, what we do, Chief Seattle, you know, said in the 1800s, what we do to the web, we do to ourselves. And the elder quoted yesterday, we’re caught in a, in a mutual, interconnected, um, inescapable network of mutuality, right? So we cannot, um, we cannot, um, we cannot not care. Because if we don’t care, um, you know, we’re going to be engaging in protocol, uh, without, um, the proper mindset, without the proper heart. And whatever protocol we engage in is not going to result in good work. You know, doing things in a good way is very, very important. And, um, and, um, and so, you know, what’s, what’s the protocol? How are you preparing for that protocol in your whole being? Um, and we talked about, um, plant medicine at, at noon. And, um, of course, you lay down tobacco whenever you are going to, um, you know, take medicine. But that plant also is a spirit, right? And if you see, uh, if you’re not doing proper protocol and if you’re, you’re, yourself is not entirely respectful but still seeing, seeing that plant as consumption, then, uh, that plant is not going to work for you, right? So I always talk about research or I’ve talked about research where, you know, we have, uh, research ethics boards. And, um, many of them don’t understand indigenous knowledges, indigenous methodologies. So, you know, you go through the motion of filling out these research ethics forms and those processes. And, um, then, you know, you go into community without proper, um, proper protocols, proper permissions. You, when, um, you interview someone and, um, they know that you haven’t, that you don’t really care, that you haven’t engaged in proper protocols or processes. You’re just going to extract. You’re going to take the knowledge. You’re not going to give credit to the community. And, um, and, and I’ve heard these, uh, teenagers who were, uh, interviewed the day before and they were talking about being interviewed by a researcher. And they were laughing about it and, you know, saying, how did you answer that? You know, and, um, it was fun for them. It wasn’t real. Um, and so, you know, a lot of, if, if, if research is conducted that way, um, you have to consider the credibility of your research findings. Right? (..) And, um, and so, if there’s no respect, if there’s no mutual benefit, um, reciprocity, then, um, you know, the work is not going to be good. We’re not doing things in a good way. And the impact is not going to be there. So, there is a lot that’s contained in that, in, you know, that word reciprocity. And how are you leaning into natural laws like wakotuin, wachituin is about how we help each other and good relations. Manachituin is about respect. Um, nakate, nakate, this is a Cree word. Um, Maria Elder taught me, nakate chikewin, which is about responsibility. And she says, in Cree, there are multiple words for responsibility. This word is about fierceness and how you are going to respect. It’s like, she says, it’s a mother bear protecting her cups. That kind of fierceness. And so, you know, in this space that we’re, we’re being dragged into, um, where’s that fierceness of spirit in protecting what is valuable to indigenous peoples? So, um, and also, um, leaning into those natural laws, because those natural laws are timeless. (.) Um, and, you know, there was good tens of thousands of years ago, as they are today. So, reciprocity, again, there’s, you have to think about that term, deeply think about it, in a slow way, in order for you to step in and be, um, you know, guided by it in really, uh, significant and perhaps speedy ways. (.)

S10: Jonathan, how would you say reciprocity and respect look in practice, in your experience? (…)

S21: So, yeah, I’m going to be echoing a lot of what, uh, what Jacqueline has said. So, um, just some very practical examples for us, right? So, um, again, these are English words, um, and, uh, in terms of, like, so First Nations in research spaces, uh, we have, you know, we have come together to say reciprocity, the English word, is something that we agree, you know, we want to set as, uh, sort of like, uh, you know, if we had to have yet more principles, it would be respect and reciprocity, you know, uh, reconciliation, you know, uh, is another term that’s thrown around. That one’s a little stickier, um, and if I could extrapolate from there, I’d go to, like, Indigenous data sovereignty, uh, as pleased as I am to hear the ministers and others talk about Indigenous data sovereignty a lot, and they do talk about it a lot now, which is on the one hand a positive, uh, we often have to remind those ministers, and certainly the bureaucrats who, uh, support, support them, that, like, uh, unless we know what you mean, it, it is meaningless, right? And in a Canadian context, um, there’s no such thing as Indigenous data sovereignty, right? It’s First Nations data sovereignty, and then the distinctions within First Nations, and then the same could be applied, uh, for Inuit and for Métis, but I’d let, uh, those folks speak for themselves, but certainly in the communities of, of conversation that we’re in, we’re on the same page there for the most part, right? So, um, there is this need to always further problematize, uh, these ideas when they need to be further problematized, and that’s a, that’s a huge part of what our, what our role is as, as FNIGC. So if I go back to that idea of a system of accountability, so First Nations, to a degree, have built that, right? In choosing to say, we will lead our own, uh, uh, health information, uh, uh, uh, data collection work, um, now we have three national surveys, we started with one. In choosing to do that, First Nations made decisions, uh, from the political space, informed by the thought leadership, um, um, to create, you know, systems and structures. There’s, you know, I wish we were truly, like, an information governance regime like Canada has, a nation state, right? Where you have the laws and the policies and the institutions to do this work. Um, this is not a perfect analog, but I would say that that’s what First Nations are, are focused on doing, is realizing that what is the, what is the regime that we need for, like, when we come together as, uh, First Nations, like, the collective, like, the collective, at a national level, because there is work that has to be done at a national level. Like, there’s work that is best or necessarily done at a national level. Um, one of the reasons that’s the case is, um, there’s a federal government, it makes federal policy decisions, they’re always going to require, uh, um, that national level information. That does not mean it’s more important than what communities need and want on the ground. Absolutely the opposite. Um, but how can we ensure that we have that sort of full-spectrum approach to, um, to serving, uh, First Nations and citizens through this kind of work, um, where the grassroots drives where it’s meant to drive and drives up, um, you know, uh, could be at the tribal council levels, it could be to, to regional levels, and, and on up to the national. So, in that sense, um, this is thousands of years old, right? Like, uh, lodges are formal. Medicine societies are formal, right? Clan systems are formal. Uh, First Nations never made ad hoc decisions, right? Uh, you know, like, so, this idea that, um, responsible thought from the big G governance through the, uh, uh, you know, specialized areas like institutional governance and, and information governance within those institutions, uh, this is all just really good examples of, uh, thoughtfulness, making formal what needs to be made formal. Uh, it is a system of accountability deliberately, uh, and, and by, and by design. And I think, um, I know it’s boring. I know that’s really boring. Um, but it is an example of how we can be respectful, um, and how it, it is, is, is an example of the sort of reciprocal loops that exist, right? We only do this work because we are permitted, directed, but permitted to do this work. Um, and we have to do it in the way that it’s been set for us, right? And we have to always be demonstrating that. So it’s these feedback loops of respect and reciprocity. Um, and, uh, you know, I, I, we have had a lot of success despite the fact that the federal government, and I’ve said this to the ministers, so if they were here, I, I would not be afraid to say it again. Like, uh, Canada, uh, you know, is nickel and diming us on, on, on, on this work. On the one hand, in the, there is the language of reconciliation, right? Um, uh, Minister Chartrand yesterday referred to a major, uh, policy initiative, the transformational approach to indigenous data. Uh, she referenced it in the present tense, and, you know, that’s technically true. Uh, they are currently supporting First Nations, Inuit, and Métis, but only to the end of this fiscal year, right? So, um, something for us to really note. Um, this is not how Canada builds its systems and institutions, right? Um, I think Canada is far more accountable to Canadians in the decision-making it does to build new systems, or build within systems, build new institutions. Uh, we see a new Canadian institution, I don’t know, if not annually, then, you know, uh, pretty close to that, right? We have Digital Research Alliance Canada now. We have Genome Canada now. Like, we have, uh, you know, well, CIFAR is older, but, like, you know, we have a, a litany of these things. And so, Canada, Canada knows how to do that. Um, and, uh, Canada is supporting indigenous people. In realizing that type of work, um, but they do, they do not let us build the way they build. And so, that is a huge issue that we have to resolve. Now, that is for my friends on the political side of the equation, uh, to carry that message. Um, but, like, our best technical advice is always going to be hamstrung, um, by the inadequacies, inadequacies of systems and institutions. (.) Program funding to do certain pieces of work is not the same as institutional footing. And I wish I could say that we had the kind of institutional footing that, like, a CIFAR had, but we just don’t. I’m happy to be at the table with you, and we’re actually working together, I think, in really positive ways. Um, but there’s, there is a, uh, um, there is an inequity there that absolutely has to be addressed. Again, I haven’t touched AI at all, um, but the AI space is simply going to supercharge these issues.

S10: Well, let’s jump into the AI space, then I’m, I’m going to come back to you so that you can just drop, carry on the sentence, really, um, from how do you then move into the AI space? So, the inequity exists, the funding, um, you’re saying is not on par with some of the other, uh, initiatives. So, how do we then get to an artificial intelligence that is representative, an artificial intelligence that is accountable to the multi, multiple communities that are under the umbrella?

S21: Yeah. So, certainly don’t mistake me to say that, uh, please give us all of the money, uh, and all of the resources as F and IGC. Uh, I don’t want it. Um, you know, the AI piece is much bigger. Uh, there’s an entire ecosystem that needs to be fed, right? So, we’re the data sovereignty, information governance, uh, part of the equation. As I said, it overlaps with AI, uh, in important ways. But I’ll go back to that, that, that idea of the gray area. So, for us, we need to have, uh, practical ways of talking about these really, really complex theoretical, conceptual, uh, ideas and show that there’s, like, a practical way to think about it, or even a practicable way to think about it. So, what is First Nations data sovereignty? Well, ultimately, it is the idea of, like, so this is a gross oversimplification, and it works sort of works in the research space, but may not work in other spaces. But we often say something like, if a body of information identifies, or has the potential to identify, a rights-holding collective, a First Nation, then it is that rights-holding collective’s collective right to assert its collective rights over that information. (..) What’s the threshold? When does a body of information become First Nations information? (.) What identifiers, um, uh, you know, are attached to that information? Uh, you know, how does it exist? In what systems does it sit? (.) What is the answer to that question? When does something become First Nations information? We’re not always sure in the research space, or in the national survey work space. (.) We are certainly not sure when our colleagues who work in the language space talk about their work, um, and the potential or the dangers of AI, right? So, an individual speaking their language, um, a collective speaking their language, um, or maybe it’s artistic traditions or traditional knowledges, um, this idea of when something becomes a body of information for which there should be a collective assertion of a collective right, that is a huge gray area. It is a huge blind spot in Canadian law. I’m not saying that Canadian law should answer this, um, but Canadian law has to be able to support First Nations legal traditions, and we are a long way from that.

S10: Thank you. Alyssa, I’ll jump to you, and, and many, many of the aspects you’re covering are a capacity issue, in my view, because having a seat at the table, having members of the community who are able to speak to the legal issues, who are able to speak to the technical issues, is a big step towards actually addressing those issues. So, can we maybe, maybe talk about how CIFAR, um, serves the AI community from a capacity building perspective? Just maybe paint the picture for the audience. And then let’s talk about how do we do that, um, for communities. Yeah, absolutely.

S02: Um, so, yes, in order to be able to, uh, you know, pursue this technology, to use it, of course, uh, responsibly, effectively, and, you know, towards the right purposes, not just, uh, for the sake of, uh, games and, and gimmicks, um, you know, we actually need to, uh, have people with skills and expertise and, um, critical thinking, actually, most importantly these days in AI. And so, um, building capacity in AI actually has been, um, a key component of the AI strategy in Canada now for almost a decade. And a lot of that was focused on very advanced, uh, technical skills, uh, training graduate students in particular. And that’s, uh, a big component of what the work at the three national AI institutes is, is, is about building capacity on the most advanced technical side of AI. And so now, uh, as AI is becoming so much more pervasive, so much more accessible, but also having a greater impact, we think about building capacity in different ways. And so, uh, there’s a lot of, uh, language in the new AI strategy about AI literacy and public engagement. Those are components of building capacity. But, um, we talked yesterday, two days ago now, at our, uh, CIFAR and Mila’s, uh, AI, uh, indigenous advisory circle about, um, economic reconciliation and the idea of building capacity within and with indigenous communities so that, uh, communities can really benefit and be able to deploy this technology in ways that, that matter to them. And so that really will be, I think, the next step. We, uh, we have our wonderful advisory circle. Jonathan’s a member of that. Some panelists this afternoon are a member of that. You’ve seen many of them over the last couple of days, just an incredible group that is, um, helping us to think through how we as research organizations, uh, can be most effective, can be, uh, the greatest allies and support to indigenous communities in a way that, uh, tries to tackle this at some kind of scale. We won’t get everybody, um, but in a way that’s going to have, uh, uh, a greater impact than what we’ve been able to do sort of on our own just with a few different initiatives. Right. And so, uh, the capacity building will be a big part of our strategy at CIFAR and at Mila, uh, going forward in the next phase of the AI strategy.

S10: Yeah. And just to put you on the spot as well. So what does that look like? Um, does that look like funding more scholarships for indigenous communities?

S02: Yeah. So I, I think it’ll be a suite of, of ideas. Um, uh, our strategy at CIFAR so far has, uh, you know, tried to, uh, uh, support some K to 12 activities as well as undergraduate activities. Um, you know, one of the hardest things is, you know, thinking about how to do this at scale, how to, how to reach people that are very diverse, that are geographically diverse, have different, uh, levels of, uh, AI experience and interest. Um, and so I think it will be a suite of programs really focused though on, on young people, because I do think that that’s where we have, uh, an incredible opportunity to inspire and, uh, support them with what they need.

S10: Thank you. Um, I have to wrap up. Jackie, you’re going to get the last word, the final word on how our youth can be at the forefront of designing and building culturally grounded AI systems

S12: for indigenous communities. So I think, um, another part of, of this, before I get into that answer is it’s very important. Um, and this is within the seven sacred teachings to have humility, right? And so for, uh, in this space, you have to be, um, a, a continuous learner, right? That means you have to be open, um, and that requires humility. And, um, you also have to be curious, um, and open to creativity. Dr. Gregory Kejete, who is a Pueblo Kiwi scholar said, um, that creativity is the child of chaos and order. It’s an entity, right? So we have to welcome that entity in. Oftentimes, if you’re a creator, and I got two, um, two creatives, um, and, and, and when I write, sometimes you wonder afterwards, you think that flowed through me, right? And, and so that is, you know, the entity, the spirit that we’re looking for and, and, um, and how do we inspire and motivate that? And at First Nations University of Canada, (.) um, uh, 90% of our students are, are indigenous. 70% of our faculty and staff are indigenous. It’s a flip demographic. We are not advocating for indigenous knowledge systems, ways of knowing, being, and doing. We are accountable to it. And, um, we’re accountable to the, to the elders, to our community. We’re owned by 74 First Nations. So, um, that is, you know, the difference between some of the spaces that, that, that we’re in, right? Um, we have to say that indigenous knowledge systems are complex and sophisticated, um, uh, rather than simplistic. In our university, in our space, we know that, right? And we have people like, uh, Dr. Ed Doolittle, who, um, who got, you know, a PhD from Queens in pure mathematics, a Mohawk. And he just did a CBC interview to talk about, um, the parallel between, uh, creation story and mathematics, spirit and mathematics, (.) right? And he’s mentoring some other First Nation students in, in understanding that, right? We have the National Indigenous Economic Prosperity Unit, uh, within our university. And, we’ve got zero minutes left. So, um, basically, um, what we’re, uh, calls to action, I’ll go there, is to, um, you know, we’re trying to, um, build a new campus where STEM is, STEM is the, the primary focus. Um, and that’s in northern Saskatchewan because northern, uh, leaders want that. and, uh, the other thing is, um, this is what we determined at noon is to have an AI gathering with elders where, where people are observing those discussions. So, that will be, it’s important to include elders in this discussion. Thank you.

S10: And with that, thank you very much, everybody, for your time and for the panelists. Thank you for

S13: your, for your time as well. Amazing. So, we’ll take a 10 minute break till 20 after. Thanks so much. (9 minute[s] pause)

S14: And if you could please come back to your seat, we’re going to get started in two minutes. Thank you very much. Repeat, repeat. Please, if you could come back to your seat, come and get seated. We’re going

S13: to get started in two minutes. Thank you very much. Folks, I know the treats are great and the conversations are amazing, but we need you to come back so we can move the program along. Everyone, come back and take your seats. Next, we have Lightning Talks, Cyber Cloud, Cyber Cloud AI. We have Tina Starlight from Tsutsuna, knowledge keeper and an educator, co-founder of Cyber Cloud AI. Please welcome her. So excited. (…..)

S31: My English name is Dr. Tina Starlight. I’m from Tsutena Nation. Um, I wear a lot of hats. Um, I’m, uh, by trade an educator, um, a grandmother and mother first. Um, also work a lot with climate change, um, and also co-founder to Cyber Cloud AI. Um, I just wanted to explain first a little bit about my name. Uh, I, when I received my doctorate, I happened to be the first doctorate, earned doctorate in Tsutena. And when I received my doctorate, a lot of my work has been to have indigenous, um, knowledge, um, live and breathe and grow alongside Western knowledge systems and be accepted in the same spaces. And so that was my lifelong work. And when I sought out to get a indigenous name, I sat with my uncle Gerald and, um, um, he gifted me the name. So the English, the closest English translation that we can get to, uh, for my name is strives beyond, strives to achieve goals beyond all barriers, woman, which happens to sum up a lot of the work. Thank you. And with that name, he told me that I’m reviving an ancient word. And with that ancient word in that revitalization, it also means I have a responsibility to continue and to give this, this, uh, um, knowledge and space to other people, which is why I ended up in, up in this space today. So I wanted to start with that. Um, I was listening to people speak over the last couple of days and really inspired and about all the great work that people are doing and hearing all of the questions that, uh, um, uh, people have around AI and, and around data centers. So I’m going to go off my notes and I’m going to talk about what I’ve come to, um, gain from everybody’s, um, sharing over the last couple of days. First of all, I wanted to talk about cyber cloud AI, uh, we are the co-founders. This is my partner, Daniel Mistaken, chief here beside me. When we first started up our, um, our company, we again sat with elders. People were talking about protocols and how do you, how do you, um, um, how do you respect the people, stay in relation, um, and, and be reciprocal. So the first thing that we did was we sat with a knowledge keeper with the language and we talked to him about our vision. We did our protocols and, uh, we were gifted a Blackfoot name for our company. So in, in Blackfoot, it’s, uh, and, and forgive me if I say it wrong, uh, uh, but it seeks to go. Okay. So it, it, it, um, the way that it was translated or, or, or meant to me is again, these are concepts and ideas that already existed from time and memorial since the language was developed. And this is how we make creation or connection to, um, what we’re doing. So, um, (.) it, the, the interpretation again is like, uh, a dream. Um, it’s, it’s something that is there. We know it exists. Uh, we just can’t see it. Uh, and that’s exactly what AI is. And so anyways, we’re, we’re talking about the, um, uh, importance of being, uh, spiritually connected and let those ancestral connections, um, join us in this, in this, uh, in this journey by going through protocols, by including the language and building those connections as we go. Some of the challenges that I’ve heard though is, uh, what we’re really facing is energy sovereignty or power sovereignty. So, um, uh, like we have the provincial and federal governments still saying, well, that they’re your responsibility, you know, they’re your responsibility, just like Jordan’s principle. It’s the same thing with energy. You know, they, they continue to, as much as they say they’re not, they’re continuing to have put up roadblocks in order for indigenous people to own and, um, take the forefront of, of a new, a new, um, set of learning. Um, they continue to give free energy to big corporations that, again, are not indigenous, usually not from Canada either. And this is some of the things that we need to stop and, and work together towards. Um, we want to make sure that, uh, history, um, or that we have ownership. When we look, when we talk about our data centers, we’re also talking about how strongly we’re community driven, where indigenous people will be the designers, uh, the developers, and they will be governed by indigenous people. Um, so we’re not just consumers anymore, that we are the producers. And then, so to wrap all of this up, um, you can, you can learn about a lot of the data centers. You know, I had a t-shirt on with my, our AI logo on there. And again, Daniel and here are, are here to talk to you more about the data centers. We took in consideration the environmental impacts. Um, and with that, like a lot of these big corporations, they want to build one great big data center, which is very harmful to the environment. What we’re proposing is connecting all of our indigenous nations and having data centers that they own, that they run 51% own, and that they control for all of the data that has, that have people have been talking about today, that they own that. And if you again go back to Blackfoot concepts, Anadobisi is like that, that spider web that connects us. And we’re all still connected as indigenous people. But these are another way to, to, um, stay with those traditions and to keep us connected and to keep us moving. So with that, um, we’ve also created a coalition. That means again, bringing our indigenous people together to have a stronger voice. And, uh, we already have nine nations. Uh, we already have various sites, um, picked out already. We have seven, 17 academic, academic bodies and 15 companies that are signed up with our company. So if you’re interested in joining the coalition, please contact myself and Daniel. See you guys. (…)

S26: Okay. You’re starting to grow a stomach soup. I know we’ve run out of time, but I guess the biggest thing about our concept and our project is that it’s community-based, community-driven, community-owned. Everybody’s been talking about data sovereignty. If you own the data center, you own the data that’s inside of it so that you can control your languages, your stories, your histories. We’re all looking for these solutions, but I think we kind of forgot, where are we going to store this stuff? We’re here for you. So, contact, that’s it. Have a good evening. I’m happy to be here. (..)

S13: So I have some sad news. This is our last panel. Oh, but I have some great news because it’s led by the magnificent Taylor Sparkling Eyes. I’d like to welcome her up. This is the Seven Generations of the AI Governance Challenge. Taylor is the Cree Senior Data Sovereignty Technical Lead from the Good Fish Lake First Nation, based in Edmonton. And she’s welcoming

S04: our panel up. Come on up. Hi. Welcome. Thank you, Mick. (..) Hey, everyone. My name’s Taylor. I want to begin by… Right now. (.) Awesome. Thanks, everyone, for joining. So I want to begin by acknowledging that when we speak about governing artificial intelligence, we’re not only talking about technology, but we’re talking about relationships between people, lands, knowledge, and the systems we’re choosing to build, especially when it comes to AI. For many Indigenous communities, these conversations are not new. The idea that decisions made today honor those who came before us and protect those yet to come, the next seven generations. It’s a principle that has guided governance long before algorithms existed. So the question before us is not simply how do we regulate AI, but how do we shape it in a way that reflects responsibility, respect, and reciprocity? And with that, I’d like to hand it off to the panelists to introduce themselves. Start with you, Dana. (..)

S27: Thank you very much, all of my relations. I’m the former chief of the Vantukwichin First Nation. We declared the first climate change emergency in Canada, leading through Assembly of First Nations, the Indigenous People’s Secretariat of the Arctic Council, as well as the Parliament of Canada themselves. (.) But more importantly, my work, the voice that I speak with you today is not my own, but carried across our lands by my ancestors and the birthright of future generations. So using that voice today to make room for artificial intelligence adoption by Indigenous nations in a sovereign manner, and basically seeding what I’m calling the Indigenous Digital Confederacy.

S22: This is working. Good. Well, great to see everybody here. Elders, Sago. I’m George LaFond. (.) The only introduction is the fact that I’m a father of four children, three beautiful Indigenous girls and one boy, and learning on the go, being a father. He raised some of his babies, young women and young men. And I know nothing about being a father. Just every day, I kept learning something new and new. And so this whole issue of governance, in my view, is the same way. In the 1980s, I’ve been around for about 45 years in public service. We were dealing with constitutional rights. And what did constitutional rights mean to us? We knew what it meant. And I was an advisor to the federal government on the issue. We understand, for many of us in the room, would remember devolution, the Indian Affairs process of devolution. I used to call it, I had an uncle who served in Vietnam, and I called it the Saigon execute. They sort of just left, they left the shredding machines and the photocopying machines back into band office and said, control, you know, you got it now. And so there was no capacity. And so along the way, we sort of saw and created our own systems of governance. And I’ll talk about how, you know, governance has evolved from those 1980s to where we are today. And of course, my good friend is going to talk about AI. So I’ll pass it over. Pass it over. (13 seconds pause)

S28: Hi, everybody. My name is Jeff Ward. I am originally from Manitoba. I’m Ojibwe and Métis, a member of Sandy Bay, Ojibwe Nation, with Métis roots as well. And I currently live on Lekwungen territory, colonially known as Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, Bear Clan, and CEO at Animiki Indigenous Technology. I started the company in 2003. My background is software developer, developer, um, product designer. And, uh, so today, uh, we’re a team of about 30, um, focused on building our indigenous data sovereignty platform, um, called NIWIN. And we, we build all of our, uh, projects and custom data platforms for, uh, communities, indigenous focused organizations. Um, um, and yeah, I’ve been doing that for, for quite a while. And, uh, in the context of, of governance, um, our role as technologists and building data platforms is really to support the governance of

S04: the communities that we support. Miigwech. Thank you all for introducing yourselves. So as we begin this discussion, I invite us to think beyond imminent risks and benefits that AI has for our communities, but think about what kind of ancestors do we want to be through the choices we make today when it comes to AI. So what does meaningful governance of data look like in the context of the work you do? (….)

S27: I have, um, experienced a lot of hesitancy across nations and communities across Canada in holding formal discussions around artificial intelligence. But once those discussions do happen, you see a lot of the inherent genius of the inherent genius of communities and quickly asking for the next steps to get towards action. So I really want to dispel because artificial intelligence is a whirlpool that we can get lost in the intricacies in a different language. But it actually all starts with the community’s constitution, with their traditional constitution, the laws that they had learned from the land. And that’s what fundamentally changes the applications of technology. So inherent indigenous governance from the Haudenosaunee Cree systems, the pursuit of happiness coming from the six nations that helped birth one of the most transformative government systems in the world through the United States. But look at how they’ve been co-opted by capital. And now I tell people the United States isn’t a country. It’s five corporations in a trench coat. And look at the Chinese Communist Party. Thank you. If we’re not laughing, we’re crying, right? The Chinese Communist Party, they have capital as well. They have billionaires, but no one is more powerful than the CPP. And this shows us around the elements that govern us. And really quickly before handing it over, if you read the writings between Monroe and Thomas Jefferson (.) around the inception of the American government, Monroe was saying, we need to create central banks that back up the federal banks, that back up the state banks, so we can extend through credit more money and stimulate our entrepreneurs and economies. And this is key. Thomas Jefferson in a letter wrote, you are crazy. If you create these financial entities, they will gain so much power. They will punch political vacuums and usurp our sovereignty. And look at where we are today. So a community and indigenous nations and communities have to be respected by approaching this at a grassroots level, that this is nothing outside of your governance. This should not be outside the laws of your lands and your peoples. And you have this. And on that note, it should be indigenous peoples that are really innovating this because they’ve created the blueprints of sovereignty in the face of extraction. And the way that AI is being pushed on the world is nothing short of digital colonialism. And we have all seen this before and it will not end well. Let me go from this perspective.

S22: perspective. So I was a tribal chief for a number of years. And Jackie knows this. I was a tribal chief of the Saskatoon Tribal Council. And so what’s a tribal chief? Basically, it was what they call the first among equals. You had seven chiefs and they chose you to lead them through a number of issues. And I said, in terms of governance, and there was no models of governance that we could rely on. And I think in some ways, I think Jonathan, even the previous speaker, Jonathan, talked about this, that even among our own people, the diversity is there. And so I had four Cree, two Anishinaabe, and one Dakota. I had two that were Treaty 4. I had four that were Treaty 6. And I had the Dakota people who had the inherent right because they didn’t sign treaties. And so there I was as a tribal chief trying to govern a tribal council that had about 10,000 citizens in it. And probably half of them were urban, most of them were urban. And so, you know, I had to deal between the cultural issues. Anishinaabes were a little bit suspicious of the Cree. The Dakotas obviously were very strong and strident in their positions. And if you know Chief Darcy Bear, Jackie, you know Chief Darcy Bear. I mean, what Darcy Bear says, you stop and listen. I had large bands that were in population. I had small bands that were in population. Most of our funding was based on per capita. So there was always a suspicion that, you know, someone was getting more than the others. You’re always having to keep, you always had to keep your governance channels open. And you always had to keep the conversations open, building up what I call social capital. So that if anything ever slid off the, slid into the ditch, you could say, hey, we’ve been through this before. You know, we can, we can work together. The second thing that’s emerging, I think, over the time was, there’s not only themes. And I think this is another thing that Jonathan spoke about. The themes are changing dramatically. I mean, you take a look at what happened in Ottawa this week. You know, we’re arguing about denialism among the chiefs. And here we are in a city over, we’re talking about AI. All of this eventually comes to a funnel, which is our chiefs and councils. They have to deal with membership. They have to deal with housing. And all of a sudden, we have to say, oh, by the way, there’s something coming down the road called AI that you have to be familiar with, right? The other thing that’s coming along, of course, obviously, and I’ve seen this, and Mitch, I don’t know, you said you were at a Sundance. I was at a Sundance a couple of weeks ago also. And I’ve seen this evolving over time. The, the gender balance is changing dramatically. And so when I was seeing people make, make Sundance sacrifice, two thirds were women. It was one third men. I was at, Jack, and if it’s the same thing for you, but when I went to the Saskatchewan Institute of Technology’s graduation convocation, 300 graduates walked across the stage like this. two thirds, 200 were women, and one third were men. So there’s, there, so you’d have to sort of say, if you looked at those indicators of success, there is an imbalance happening in our community where the women are doing more, and that’s going to change how we govern ourselves. Because as you know, there’s a certain rule inside of group dynamics. If you have, if you have three and ten in the room, that will change the room. Their, their, the way they behave will change the culture of the room. We’re seeing that in the Canadian Army. It’s a very male dominated situation. We’re seeing what’s happening inside the, the army culture. If we had more women inside of positions of power, I can guarantee you we would change. We’re seeing that in First Nation communities. Now, it’s good in the sense that women are taking their leadership because they’ll change how we see the world as indigenous leaders, as indigenous men. I’m telling you, if we had more indigenous women planning our communities, you’d probably see more playgrounds. You’d probably see more safe spots, right? You’d probably see more preventative action. And so I think even as we, even as our demographics are changing, you’re seeing how we change, how we govern ourselves. The issues are dramatic. Now, so, and I think Jack, Jack, I’m relying on you. Uh, Jackie, Jackie and two other individuals in Saskatchewan have a significant burden of history on them. 150 years ago, we signed a treaty. It was called Treaty 6. One of the most significant treaties, uh, that was signed in Canada. It was one of the number treaties. 50 years ago, under the Indian Act, our leaders stood up and said, we have to create our own institutions. And we created three institutions. Federated Cooperative, which eventually became the First Nations University, the Saskatchewan Indian Institute of Technology, and the Cultural Center. They basically said, if we have a future, if we have a future, we have to create our own institutions. So they, they created our own institutions, but the governance systems were still based, in my view, kind of an Indian Act model. And over the last year, and Jackie, we know that there has been ups and downs. What is an appropriate, culturally appropriated, Indigenous-driven governance system that actually governs Indian institutions in the 21st century? Now, again, Jonathan raised the issue. These institutions get one-year funding, one-year cycle of funding. Most non-Indigenous group organizations, which you listed, probably get a five-year Treasury Board funding. So we basically, how can we have a strategy on anything, health care, dental care, on a one-year fund? You can’t even predict where your funding is going to be in four or five years, right? So we have, so we have tried to, we’ve taken a broken model. The Indian Act never worked, okay? And we’re trying to make the best out of it. And yet we still survive. 50 years later, we have kind of, through a lot of work and effort, we’ve governed three institutions into the 21st century. And now we have to deal with AI, because we know that AI is not going to escape. Student, I can guarantee you, Jackie, your students are using it, okay? And I can guarantee you, probably most your professors are on their back foot saying, what is this? What’s happening here? I think we’re seeing that in some of the other mainstream societies where they’re saying, my God, I think someone said, they captured some of their students and they said, we’re going to now give you an oral exam. But I think 40% dropped the class because they knew that, they knew that their exams were, were actually done by AI. So I think in some ways, again, the governance models that we’re facing today (..) have changed dramatically. It’s a messy job. Part of it’s science and part of it’s art. I think the art part is us, our cultural people. As I said, Anishinaabes, do you disagree? Anishinaabes see the world slightly different increase, even in ceremony. I had to be a tribal chief one time and we were doing a pipe ceremony and the Anishinaabe elders came to me and said, we don’t do it that way. You’re trying to be a tribal leader. You’re trying to say, okay, well, I’m not, I’m not a cultural person here, but how do I govern this? How do, there’s no protocols on this. I have to, I have to get you through the day here. And so even I, as an indigenous leader, have to sit down and learn from my elders as to what were the proper protocols with cultural ceremonies. Anishinaabe people tend not to be verbal. Free people, as you’ve learned from me, tend to be very verbal. As a Cree person, I would take non-verbal as an agreeance. Sometimes it wasn’t about agreeance. And we would run into these conflicts. And so I guess my point on, on governance, Madam Chair, is the fact that, and I think I wanted to build off what Jonathan had to say, that even among us of the 640 nations that are out here in Canada, we’re grappling with a lot of governance issues. I told you the delta, you know, denialism, fentanyl issues, homelessness. It all comes down to being a chief, right? Eventually, you’re seen as the leader, and you have to make decisions. And all of a sudden, the 21st century is throwing you AI. And that AI is, and I said this before, whether you like it or not, AI is capitalism on speed. It’s, it’s, it’s about quickness. The cycle, the cycle, the cycle is moving fast. So that’s where I think governance is. Ken, over to you. (……..)

S28: Governance, right. That’s the panel. Okay, very good. I’m just enthralled listening to Anishinaabe, listening to the creed, just being all quiet. (…..) So my, my role in supporting governance, data governance, AI governance is, is not as a former chief. I don’t have that experience. But I don’t want it, he says. But it’s, it’s as a technologist building, uh, tech, uh, for, for communities for the past, uh, 20 plus years. And, um, you know, when it comes to terminology, like people would, would come and ask me, hey, we want to build a platform or, uh, an app or some software. Um, you know, we want something custom because, uh, (..) software that are available, um, off the shelf, when software was in boxes and you could buy it off of a shelf. That’s when I started the business. I started my company before the iPhone, iPad, social media, long time ago. So I’ve seen a lot of technology waves, right? Come and go. Um, and so when people show up at, at, at my door asking for, uh, something custom, we didn’t always have the word data sovereignty. Um, and, uh, you know, but it was, it was all about how how do we design, uh, data structures that are unique to our, to their use cases as a community or, or, or as an organization. Um, and, and creating something that supported their, their governance and how they wanted to govern themselves. And in sitting in, in circle talking about tech, uh, before we write a line of code, we, we, we learned over time, um, with, uh, you know, as an Anishinaabe person, one of our values being humility, you know, in, in tech and in big tech, there’s not a lot of humility. There’s a lot of top down techno solution ism. We have all of the (.) solutions. Uh, you have all of the problems and, and here, here’s, here’s our solution. Here’s, here’s your technological solution. And, and, uh, again, it’s, it’s been happening through all of the waves of technology that, that I’ve seen in my career. And it’s also happening now with, AI. We’re being handed solutions. Hey, you need this, this will solve everything. This will make you more efficient. This will make you, you know, and, and, um, and so we’re still, um, (.) sitting in circle with community before we build, um, uh, data platforms. And like, (..) so we, our process, we call it pathfinding. And, and we spend so much time asking with humility, what is your governance values and principles? And what are your systems of how you make decisions? And how might we encode that into the software that we are building together? And how might we encode that governance in the structures of how the data is designed? Um, because so many times we’ve had as indigenous peoples to put our data and other colonial buckets, um, that were designed, uh, by the colonizer. culture. And so now we have the opportunity, um, as we always have, and we’ve had the sovereign right to define what information is important to the community to be stored, how it should be stored. Um, should it be even be stored? You know, how is it shared? What times of the year can certain information be, be shared? And, and my role and our role as a company at Animiki is to, um, create something that is flexible enough and that is not one size fits all. Cause again, this is with, you know, big technology. It’s like, here’s our product. Do you want this? And maybe you have a couple of settings you can tweak, but it may not fit their, their use case. So that’s sort of how I, I, I, I come to, uh, this notion of governance and, you know, AI governance. And, and Jonathan said something earlier, um, you know, no conversation about AI doesn’t start with, uh, data sovereignty, uh, in, in, in data governance. And so, um, I think we’re seeing it, a lot of people in this room, uh, this bottom up approach, right? This sort of like community centered, community driven approach, rather than what we see in, in big technology is like this top down approach. And, and honestly, like frankly, with a top down Canadian AI sovereignty, you know, for all approach, right? And so how, how, how do we, how can we think of bottom up as well as top down? And where can we, we meet in the middle and, um, collaborate? Thank you. Over the past day and a half,

S04: we’ve heard a lot around accountability of AI systems and what that looks like. So where do we see tensions existing between AI governance and indigenous governance? (…)

S27: Masi, I, I appreciate this question. Um, in my own personal work in artificial intelligence, infrastructure and implementation over the past three years, I have faced a lot of criticism and constructive criticism, even within my own family. Um, which has been very interesting because recently I’ve had a breakthrough that I’ve been trying to assimilate so much feedback, being so cautious that I lost my voice. And I was speaking to the fears that were out there when that’s not what I see. my people have shown me strength and what leadership looks like and how to approach issues of tension and leaving everybody more empowered for being a part of that discussion. So the real tension lies in the language because no matter how technical this can get, and even though there are technical solutions, zero trust, peer-to-peer networks with military grades encryption bounced off of private satellites satellites to military grade modular data centers, what people through the supersymmetry of their own inherent wisdoms, they’re not so much interested in the technicalities, they acutely understand the power dynamics and that imbalance, which is why I think we’re talking about artificial intelligence as the zenith of colonialism in a neoliberal capitalist society in the sixth extinction age. Some of the tensions for me are very well established through Silicon Valley. And I’m so astounded at how terribly they’re introducing this technology and pushing it on to people. You know, when I was in leadership, my sister once told me, be very careful about the things and the endeavors and what you choose to pursue. She said, the more things that you push outside of your community, the more things that you will be responsible for. And that’s how you get nailed. It should be coming from the community. It should be their aspirations. And look at Silicon Valley. They have nothing for community, nothing for citizens. And I’ll give you a very easy example. We have the technology where every municipality, every region, we could have an app where minutes from the legislation, legislative assembly, from municipalities, from chief and councils, we could have all verified and authenticated data, how our government works, permitting process, zoning bylaws, all of this centralized in one app that empowers citizens. But what do we get? Facebook, which drives our communities apart. I can’t believe people still aren’t talking about Cambridge Analytica. I mean, these CEOs should be in jail. And the major tension comes is these machinations and the empowerment of capital, going back to what I had said about the central banks and governance. What people don’t understand is people who are protesting these major hyperscale data centers in these communities, you’re baked into the share price. Think about that for a moment. you’re already baked in. And this overt displacement, it shows us something more profound. And this is where I believe the tension really sits at a subconscious level. And what I tell people is that the elders in my community, because I wasn’t elected a chief, I was made one by the women in my community, by the men who established our agreements. And they gave me something that Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates will never have. And that’s enough. Where is that line? (..) Because to me, there’s nothing more profane than our children being treated as a commodity and raw material for prediction and analysis. Children, that is a straight violation. So to address those tensions, we need to approach our communities and our people in respecting youth and respecting the elders. others. And that’s what engages us in the middle. And the reason why I’ve dedicated my work towards indigenous peoples, because you already have the next step of society. When in your communities, you’re figuring out how to apply technology through microgrids in sustainable manners, where you’re looking at how to control the modern world under ancient pretexts. And that’s not happening to the same degree in Vancouver, where they put up Musqueam words when the Olympics shows up. Or in Toronto, where they have a series of Inuksuks at Toronto Pearson International that actually denote a graveyard. Now, I don’t know who set that up. But they didn’t know what they were doing. And so the real difference becomes, are we human beings in a job, racing a market, creating shareholder values? Or are we humans being? Because if we don’t remember who we are, our tools will continue to wield us. And we will no longer wield them. That’s where the tension lies. And that’s where aboriginals, indigenous, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit have already created the blueprint of sovereignty in the face of extraction. And each one of you and your communities are going to lay the blueprints for every other community in the world. Because more powerful than any military, than any government, than any technology, technology is an idea that’s time has come. (11 seconds pause)

S22: Let’s follow up on that. You know, AI is not real. It’s not real. You know, I, you know, at a very young age, I, you know, I wanted to be a coach and a teacher. I was very successful in being able to do that. And I got to know that you can look like an athlete, but unless you can put the puck in the net or put the ball in the, you’re not, you’re not the athlete. You can look like an athlete. In some ways, that’s what AI has done to us. It makes us look like we’re intelligent. It makes us look like we’re smart. It makes us look like we’re doing something great. It makes us look like we’re, we’re selling a product that the world needs and wants. But in fact, it’s kind of a facsimile, right? I take a look at, you know, AI. I, the first, the first, uh, Pathfinders, they presented something on language. And I thought, that’s fantastic. And we’re going to get to this question about where we, where you think we’re going to be in seven generations. Let me jump to that. I would like to think, because again, I grew up, I grew up on a common experience for most people in my generation. I grew up on an Indian reserve, grew up around my Indian, uh, grandparents, cook them and mushrooms on both sides, uh, lived in their houses. Uh, the houses were run by women. My mother, my mother was one of the first women chiefs in 1960. So trust me, I know something about governance from a women perspective. Uh, she was a tribal chief in the sixties. Uh, they thought in Cree. I can speak Cree, but I don’t think in Cree, all right? I think in a very colonized, uh, kind of, uh, way of doing things, I think in seven generations, if AI can get us to learn our language, but it can’t get us to think like indigenous people. We’re losing that because it’s a part of being on the land. It’s a part of kinship. And I think in some ways, if we’re kidding ourselves, if we can just simply learn a language and say, there, you know, I’ve got my culture. And I’m kind of saying, and I’m telling you, man, we’re a long ways away from where we were 40 and 50 and 60 years ago, like how our grandparents thought. I mean, just, just the concept of love, uh, we’ll quote to win. Just, just, we can say we’ll quote to win all we want to our grandchildren, but we have to show them what love is. I mean, just the way in which my, my mother would greet her sisters. It was just, you just knew they loved each other. It was just, and, and we were dirt poor. You don’t need money to love. You don’t need money to respect. And so in some ways, you know, what AI has done to us is that we, it seems to me that’s kind of like, it’s made us believe that we’re great. And we’re, we’re a first world country and look at all, we’ve got computers, we’ve got an iPad, we got a phone. But in my view though, we got to be very careful. We got, there has to be demarcation of how far AI can take us. So going back to being a coach, I have a daughter who’s in law school and she’s writing her articles and, uh, you know, she was stressed out. And I said, look, first of all, going to law school, go and she’s doing graduate studies. And, uh, I said, trust the process, trust it. If it’s a good, if it’s a good professor and it’s a good school, trust the process. That’s their job. Kind of like AI between the blue lines. AI is between the blue lines. It’ll set you up to play. It’ll get you out of the defensive zone or get you into the offensive zone. But from the blue line in, it’s up to you. You have to trust yourself. Do I pass or do I shoot or do I deke or what do I do with it? Okay. In some ways that makes you an athlete. That makes you a coach. AI can’t take the shot. AI can’t make you, can’t take the pass. So in some ways, when you ask the question, what is AI and the conflict? I think that’s just it. We, we have to control AI and know what it means. And it can’t make us phonies because let me tell you, my elders know phonies. They knew exactly who was the bullshitters in the crew. All right. And, uh, we got to get back to that. (…)

S04: Anything to add, Jeff? Yeah. So where do we see tensions existing between AI governance

S28: and indigenous governance systems? So tensions between AI governance and indigenous governance. So if AI is, you know, so-called moving at the speed of light, uh, and being driven by quarterly results, quarterly financials, stock prices, daily stock prices. How does that tension live within our communities when we are thinking seven generations from quarterly results to seven generations? That to me is the tension. This move fast and break things ethos of Silicon Valley. (..) At Animiki, we say, how do we move slow and empower people? Because empowered people can move fast. And when we think about our communities, um, in support of each other and lifting up the, the brilliance that our communities have today, we have the answers. We have the people, we have the talent. We see it. We see it in this room. We see it in our communities. We see it in the, the richness of our culture and in our languages. In the AI context, our languages are called low resource languages. They’re the most rich language, our most rich, uh, resource that we have. And that is where our worldview is encoded. And that is, is not, and can’t be represented in (.) just the fundamentals of how large language models are currently being, uh, coded if our languages and our worldview is, is not there. And so if you’re trying to govern, uh, I guess we’ve always had this, this tension of, of how do we work in a, a colonial context and still govern ourselves within indigenous in traditional context. And, and then you layer on the Indian act and you layer that we have to govern with, within those systems. And, and so they’re like, like, (.) what are the things that aren’t going to change? Let’s focus on, on that. And like, as indigenous peoples, we’ve always had to like work within these colonial systems and like create our own space and like decolonize, decolonize or like hack as a software developer. Sometimes we’ve got to hack systems and, and work within them and, and bust out of them and create our own, our own, uh, systems. So what I love the conversations here over the past couple of days is, is, is people, uh, you know, technologists looking to create net new, uh, ideas, technologies, and, uh, that are potentially even AI optional. One of the pitches yesterday, there was an option of like the community could like not turn on the AI features. Right. And, uh, is, is, uh, we have, uh, you know, use Google, uh, and we’ve tried to shut off all the, the Gemini stuff in our workspace because I have like 20 years and you think it shut off and then a new icon just pops up and it keeps getting added, even though you’re saying, no, no, no, no, we don’t want that. Um, and so it’s just, yeah, that, that tension be between, um, this sort of, again, top down techno solutionism, capitalism, you know, quarterly results when over here, which we’re just trying to continue to thrive as, as people and, and, and

S04: within this colonial context. Great. Thank you all. Five minutes. Okay. Then let’s focus on what would success look like to you in seven years or seven generations from now, if indigenous communities were fully governing and participating in the AI landscape? Oh, uh, I’d love to take 10 minutes

S27: on this answer alone and share some funny stories with you all, but out of respect, I’ll be concise with this. Throughout my own life, my father being born in a bombed out building in Lubeck in 1945 five to a Jewish mother, my mother entering residential school at four years old in the Yukon. And my life journey throughout this, it’s actually been a major epistemological journey into information and having to translate that to people in Congress, Senate and ministers. And what I say is that indigenous peoples ideology of nature is not an arbitrary ideation. Indigenous peoples have recognized that nature is the ultimate technology, that nothing that has ever left the hand of man has been as renewable, self-sustaining and knowledge building, um, writ large. And I believe the creation of artificial intelligence is the colonial pursuit of what they left behind, the true AI, ancestral intelligence. by, like Chief Seattle said, you bury your dead and leave them. You go across the oceans. They’ve, in that connection, has authorized all of this. So AI’s job, it will never replace our elders sitting around a fire with our youth. AI’s job is to make that happen and to serve people. And I look forward to a day when my government does not force us to colonize ourselves by trying to implement an agreement with a treaty partner who doesn’t even know who they are. That we can spend most of our time on the land with the truest technology. That every newborn has the opportunity to struggle and rediscover for themselves. Because you can lay a mind before AI and the land. And if you let it all go, the mind with the land will continue to develop the same while the one with AI will change. We have to stay with what’s permanent. And that’s where our future should be going. (..)

S22: I guess, thank you very much for that. Uh, I guess, I guess for me, you know, the, I look at these pathfinders. I mean, I was telling, uh, I was telling Lindsay, were we ever this young? (..) And I was trying to figure out what was, when I first met him over here on the first day, I said, geez, you know, uh, I was trying to figure out what was going on in their minds. Because, you know, here we are in Montreal, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Canada. A very beautiful city in the summertime. Uh, one of the, what is it? It’s the number one research center of AI in, in the world. Uh, I mean, it’s fantastic. You’re here. And I’m kind of going, my God, how do you feel? How do you think? You know, for me, uh, going to university, I said this, you know, going to university, maybe about 30 of us on campus in the late seventies. Uh, you guys are unique. I think you got a great opportunity. Don’t look for the big hits. Uh, I think for me, seeing success for you is don’t look for the big hits. Uh, ball games are won by single hits, getting on base, uh, and trying to make it home. Uh, you know, when I went for my first sweat in 1977, uh, they bought in the pipe stone, the pipe stem that signed the treaty in 1876. And I, I never thought anything of it. You know, I thought, geez, I’m touching a pipe stem that, uh, our leaders smoked and signed with the crown. Uh, you know, 40 years later, I’m a, I’m a treaty commissioner. Uh, a moment that happened almost 40 years ago has come around. I think for you pathfinders, uh, you’re going to have moments in your life that you think you probably store away and may come back on you as a very positive thing. So absorb as much as you can about AI, learn from each other, uh, try and keep in touch with each other. And who knows in 40 years, you might meet again on this very spot and you’re going to be the leaders of AI in our communities. So that to me is what success would be. And I think, uh, uh, from the people I’ve met from the pathfinders I’ve met, you got a great possibility of, uh, making around the basis and I wish you all the best and I’ll see

S28: you at home. Um, so earlier Elaine, uh, mentioned that language is how we speak to our ancestors and, you know, how is governance linking us to our ancestors. Um, Peter Lucas was talking about, uh, uh, AI won’t save our language. We will. Um, these are some, some things I wrote down. Dana was just talking about ancestral intelligence and, and, and the language as well. So the seven year, seven generation timeline. Okay. Seven years, uh, so many amazing people, uh, also including here in this room are working on language technologies. Um, and so seven years from now, um, maybe we have our kids learning languages from AI models that were built by and for us, nothing about us without us. Um, you know, and, and we have the, have these tools, you know, if we’re successful in seven years, uh, you know, we can leverage those seven generations though, from now, uh, you know, watching the, the, um, the, uh, you know, the Avengers when the scene, when they get to Wakanda and I see this on the big screen, I’m like, this is indigenous tech at scale. So I want seven generations, whatever the Anishinaabe version is of like that, that Wakanda, I want the Anishinaabe Wakanda. Um, and, and like seriously, like, uh, in intergenerational, uh, like language fluency, I would want to see, you know, seven generations where we don’t need to rely on AI to teach language. Um, and, um, and, and thinking of, of AI from, from here to there more is, is, uh, what I learned from my friend Merrick, like an escapios or a helper, right? Uh, in ceremony. And, and how do you, uh, bring that, uh, into, to where we’re headed? But, you know, hopefully, uh, you know, you know, we will save our languages, you know, what, let’s focus on the things that aren’t going to change. And the things that are not going to change are time in circle, time with elders, time learning, uh, the language and, and creating, um, that worldview and encoding that in our technologies, in our communities, in, in our ceremonies and everything.

S04: No, no time, George. We’re, we’re, we’re, we’re at time.

S22: We’re like, we’re like, we’re like, we’re like FIFA. We got extra time.

S04: We got no extra time. I want to give it up to everyone on the panel for their time and expertise.

S13: Wonderful. Thanks so much. All right. Now I’d like to welcome Benjamin Prudhomme to this, to say some remarks. He’s the vice president of policy, safety, and global affairs here at Mila. He’s also appointed, uh, the expert of the OECD AI network, the United Nations consultative network of AI experts and UNESCO’s AI ethics experts without, of, without borders. Oh my goodness. He also co-leads the global partnership on AI project creating diversity and substantive equity in AI ecosystems and is involved with the international scientific report on the safety of advanced AI. Welcome. Good to see you again. (…..)

S15: This one or this one? This one? There you go. Thank you. (.) Good afternoon, everyone. It’s a, it’s a pleasure to be here. Um, and as we come to the end of those incredible two days, um, I’m really deeply, deeply grateful and humbled for the conversations, um, that you chose to have here with us at Mila. Um, in my role here, um, I have the privilege of working with outstanding people and participating in many global conversations around the development and the governance of AI. This includes leading some of our work, um, as was just said on the international AI safety report with 30 countries in the UN, as well as with the report on the United Nations. (..) And the reason I mentioned that is that both of those global reports conclude something that sign that sounds, uh, trivial, but that really isn’t, which is that quote, AI doesn’t happen to us. And too often the current conversation on AI feels like it does, like there isn’t another path. There isn’t another way of building this technology. There isn’t a way to build this technology that serves, that is by the communities that serves the communities. And I mentioned that because I think that’s what you’ve proven wrong in the last two days. Um, as you create different spaces and different conversation, it became, at least to me in the room, so obvious that there’s a different way to do that. And that when you create the spaces and you invite the people and the indigenous communities in those spaces, the conversation becomes profoundly different. And the trajectories that we can imagine together about the development of AI are equally different. And so over the last two days, and I’m not going to do justice to everything we’ve heard, but three things I wanted to highlight that stick, that, that stayed with me. Uh, the first one is about how relational AI is when you start shifting this perspective. Um, it’s the reminder that yes, we can talk about efficiency and optimization, uh, but we could probably talk far more about the impact the technology will have on the way we relate to each other, on the way we relate to land and on the, and the way we relate to future generations. (.) The other piece is data and sovereignty. So to really, the need to accelerate the conversations around how we can ensure communities retain ownership, control and agency over their knowledges, their stories. Um, and I think something that’s certainly stick with me is that includes infrastructure. So as Canada rolls out what they call sovereign infrastructure, what that, what does that mean? I’m sorry for indigenous communities. And would there be an opportunity to locate those on indigenous lands? And the last one is around language, culture, and community. And just, it’s something that we’ve had the chance of being involved here at Mila for the last few years, but how we can leverage AI not to replace, but to protect and to revitalize, that’s such a hard word in English, revitalize indigenous languages, cultures, and community. And so, while I’m not indigenous myself, um, it’s really been an honor to stand with you, to listen, and to support this crucial work in any way I can, in any way Mila can. Um, we firmly believe that as non-indigenous people, um, we have, and I think, um, some, certainly someone said that yesterday, and I couldn’t agree more. We have a responsibility, if we want to honor the past, to use the, the amazing institution we’ve built here at Mila, to walk this path and in hand, and to enable opportunities, conversations, and just ultimately a different way of thinking about the technology. And so, before I, um, pass it to Elder Debbie Delil to close our day, there’s obviously a round of thank yous, um, that I have, and I will ask you to be patient. Perhaps I will ask you not to applaud after every single one, and to keep it till the end, until I, I give you the sign. And, um, I want to do it meaningfully. Uh, I really mean it when everybody that, everybody or every organization that I’m going to talk about has had a crucial role in making this possible today. So, first to our co-host and partner, Abundant Intelligences. Thank you for your, for your partnership and for our shared vision. Um, this has been instrumental, of course, in bringing, uh, this gathering to life. To our MC Mick, and I’m, here you are. Um, huge thank you for guiding us through those two days. It’s a, it’s always a very difficult role, and you’ve done it with warmth, energy, grace. You’ve really, I think, um, held a space for those conversations to happen. They’re hard conversations, so it’s not easy. Thank you. To the elders, uh, thank you for your grounding presence, your wisdom, and for keeping us anchored in tradition, respect, and community throughout our time here. To the Pathfinders participants, and you’re kind of gathered across the room. Thank you for choosing to come to Mila. Um, when we started this work two or three years ago, it wasn’t obvious and that we, we would extend, we would open our doors and that people would want to do this work with us. And you’ve showed up so incredibly over the past three years. and, and so as you do that, you bring with you curiosity, energy, vision, and you really chart new trails in the space. Um, so thank you for that. To our speakers and artists, uh, thank you for sharing your insights, your vulnerability, your creativity. You have challenged us and given us a vision of what AI can look like when it’s guided by indigenous epistemologies and values. And I, I just want to say it’s obviously, as you can imagine, not something we do all the time, opening, uh, gatherings like this with music, with singing, with drumming. Um, and I, I’m looking at my CEO yesterday. We were having the conversation about how that creates just a completely different space and energy. Uh, so thanks for making that possible. Then to our sponsors, as you can imagine, Evans like this, um, they require a lot of people, but they also require resources and commitment. Um, so I want to extend our gratitude to TELIS, ICTC, BDC, CBC, Heritage Lab, Connected Mind, Magnet, and Native Montreal. And then behind the scenes, that’s the other thing. So it just really takes an army to create those events. And so I want to make sure that we honor that too. To our indigenous initiatives team, a massive heartfelt thank you to Lindsay Chartrand, Margaret Mackenzie, Jake Seguin, and Leticia Vu. Your leadership, leadership dedication and tireless work made this possible. And as you can imagine, these were two days, but they’ve been working on this for months and months. to our teams across Miele, our events and ecosystem team, communications, legal, finance, executive office, and AV team. Cal, Pablo, Ludovic, Miriam, Emily, Jessica. Thank you so much. It’s a very invisible role, but it’s not less important. Thank you. (.) Our volunteers. So for this to go smoothly, we had lots of volunteers for the different organizations that I just named. So thanks for giving your time and your energy. (.) Last but not least, the participants. So all of you chose to really bring your energy for two days here. You could have chosen to go elsewhere. I certainly agree that this gathering was deserving of our presence. But I want to honor that you chose to spend your time and bring your wisdom here. Those conversations are not possible if people don’t show up and don’t feed with them and don’t listen to them. So as we pack up and head back to our respective corners of the world, I hope we and you can carry that energy, the connections, and the ideas we generated in this room forward with us. Miele will continue to be committed to supporting, to listening, and to championing these vital spaces. And I’m really, really grateful that you chose to share those with us for two days. Thank you. And now I’m going to just invite us to applaud everybody of just name for their contribution. You and I’ll now invite Elder Debbie Dill to set off our day in a good way. (31 seconds pause)

S23: I hadn’t really planned to bring that, but it’s so relevant on the past two days. I’ll make reference to it in a bit. I was going to start by, I have a notebook there, maybe 10 pages full of notes and reflections. And I also have a list. But I think my closing will, you’ll hear all that in my closing, which I had prepared before. So somebody and some people are guiding me through this. I just wanted to give you a little bit of background, more about me, and how my family influenced my growing up in these two worlds. When I was young, my father was a chief. Well, they used to call them mayor, mayors in those days. So I don’t know how old I am, but anyway. (..) And I came home one day from school and I said, Dad, how come we’re the last ones to get water and sewer? (.) And we’re the last ones to get the roads paved in front of our house or the gravel, whatever. And he goes, because as leaders, Debbie, our people come first. That was the first lesson. (.) Second, I was about 10 years old, and my grandmother, my grandfather was on his deathbed, and he wanted to see me and my cousin. And he asked us what we learned in school. (.) And we said, look, Dad, we’re shy. And I was sharing this with my elder here. And I said, reading, writing, and arithmetic. Well, it wasn’t math in those days. It was arithmetic. (.) And he said, did you learn French? Living in Quebec, right? Because we had French class. And I was shy. We looked at each other, and yeah. And he says, well, what did you learn? (.) And we didn’t know what to say. So we sang him Frédéric Jacques. And his tears comes down. And as a 10-year-old, I didn’t really understand what was going on, you know, what was happening. And he said to us, you go, and you learn that. He said, so nobody will be able to talk to you behind your back. Now, as a 10-year-old, you’re growing up, and it’s your friends, and you’re saying, don’t talk about me. They’re gossiping. But when you grow up, you understand what that message was. So growing up, and then here comes, I’m 14-year-old, years old. Oh, shoot. I’m sorry. In 1967. And here comes Expo 67, Man in His World. (..) So my father is the Commissioner General of the Indians of Canada Pavilion. I’m 14 years old. I’m listening. We’re sitting around the supper table, and we’re, because we always, that was a rule in my house. We all had to be there for supper, and share, and listen. And so it was about the realities of our people right across Canada. And there was a lot of leadership across Canada that didn’t want that to be shown. And one of the leaders here, it was the mayor of Montreal, Jean Drapeau, supported it. So that was quite, and I shared that with doing the opening for the swearing-in ceremony of the new mayor of Montreal. And I had a picture. So it was very relevant at the time. So that kind of prepared me for, without realizing at the time, for how I was going to live in this balance of the two worlds, right? So the painting reflects that, and I’ll get to that in a second. I just wanted to share that with you. So the past two days, they have again been most memorable for me, an experience of learning together and working together. And the pitches from the Pathfinder students have demonstrated that, and the power of their own intelligence. And we are seeing, as was mentioned in one of the panels, we will be forever guided by the wisdom of our ancestors. What we can’t forget though, is in our, what’s happening, really, the realities of what’s happening in our own communities. And the healing that needs to take place and is taking place. We’re bringing in all these new systems, AI, what have you, but we still have a lot of support and we still need a lot of support and healing to work in our communities because of our history and our traumas. So there have been many reflections on all of that these past two days. But I want to begin with this image and caption representation representing the Pathways to Indigenous AI, right here. This logo, I haven’t seen it anywhere, unfortunately, but I’m here promoting it. And it was entitled, Tantanka leads the way with honor and respect by Lakota artist Sim Su Gukrak. In it, I was drawn to the footprints of the footprints of Tantanka. That was the first year you brought it out, right? For me, they symbolize what is left behind as he moves forward. They are, they do not disappear. They are forever present and follow him as he moves forward. They represent the honor and respect he carries with him as teachings from the ancestors. At the last gathering session last year, a question was presented, What could AI look like if it was created by us, for us, with us? Since then, much has been done to answer that question. And much is continuing and is moving faster than I could have imagined. We have seen this in the sharing of the past two days. We are doing the creating by us, for us. The value is human creativity. The words of my father come to mind. For those of you who may not know, um, my father, um, is one of the founding fathers of the National Indian Brotherhood, which, and then became the Indians of Quebec Association. And now it’s the AFN and, and negotiating with the, the Crees and the, all over. And, um, so he, he’s, his, his, his buddies are Sol Sanderson from Saskatchewan. And, and, um, uh, um, um, I just got lost. Anyway, from, from, uh, from Kujwak, Charlie Watt. And I had the privilege of meeting these people and, and discuss, learning from them. And it’s, it’s, it’s amazing. So that’s where my, my, my background comes from. And my human, human, human creativity comes from learning from them. (.) And this is, and this is, and so my father passed in 2019. So I was left with this big, huge trunk of papers, of information you wouldn’t believe. Not, not only the information that I, that he taught me, but the information that he left me for my community. So I’m going through those papers and I’m getting, uh, um, uh, asked to, to look through them by our own present leadership. But this is one that I, I’m going through them and I found this and it resonated with me and I’ve been carrying it with me. And it has, it’s so relevant to what we’ve been talking for the past two days. In order to have a peaceful, trusting, and long-lasting relationship, the parties must seek a formula which is not encumbered by established rules of conduct, but must seek out new and old, untried formulas for existence, for co-existence. We must not always refer to the rule book. It might be out of date. We must use our vision and imagination to co-exist in peace and harmony. So from a traditional way of thinking, we as Indigenous peoples operate from, and we were talking about that, Jackie, a holistic perspective. What does that look like? And because the systems we adopt, adapt, or incorporate do not, we’re always challenged with figuring out ways to not incorporate, but to come from a place of our culture and language as a foundation and incorporate the outside systems as tools to express that. We talked about AI being a tool. I’ve also added a new meaning for AI in reference to us, by us, for us. We talked about ancestral intelligence. And now I have learned Arctic intelligence, because that’s a people and a place that I don’t know too much about. And I’m determined to learn more about that culture. And I think that that could help us learn about each other’s culture across this nation. And in respect to that, there was a dream that was shared with me by an individual during our midwinter ceremony. And I don’t know him, but he had a feeling that he needed to tell me this dream. So at break time, he shared it with me. And it was about a feast on the mountain here in Montreal. So he had, he, he met with an elder and a medicine woman. They prepared it and they had this feast for his family on the mountain because he felt that the spirit of the mountain was escaping or was not even there. So he shared that with me. And I said, okay, you know, thank you. It’s, it’s, it really, that it started to resonate with me over the days and the weeks. And, and then I’m invited to do an opening for racism week. And I started to think about that. And I said, well, first of all, I was thinking about racism is such a negative word. And I said, it should be unity building. So I started to think, and I thought about this dream. So I did my research and just in Montreal, Montreal, and I said, originally came over from United Kingdom, France, Spain, and Italy. And then we have the immigrant, maybe 15 plus, I, the list goes on. And I said to myself, imagine if we had a feast, all the nations that exist here in the city of Montreal, with our nations, who were originally from the Jojage, from the Great Mountain. And we had a feast, a unity feast. Imagine, would that be the, the model for the world, cities of the world? So there was a, there was a, a, one of the counselors from, from one of the boroughs there. And she said, after I was finished, and she said to me, are you serious? And I said, excuse me, you’re damn right I am. And so, um, just about three weeks ago or so, we met in her borough, which is Côte d’Ange. And Côte d’Ange happens to, Uchama is in Côte d’Ange, which is the place of the big fire, the original big fire. Coincidence or not? I don’t believe in coincidences. So we met and how, so there’s, there’s, we’re on a journey of how this can happen within just the borough. And possibly something, you know, uh, trans, uh, transmitting as over into the other boroughs and slowly building a unity in the city. So I asked her, I says, well, what do you know about each other? You want to learn about me and my, and, and they did as people that occupied this territory. But what about you who are here now? Where do you come from? Who are your ancestors? Where are you indigenous from? Are you learning from each other? Are you bringing that here? Whoops, you know? So there, there is, uh, that needs, can AI, AI help that situation in terms of learning about each other instead of protesting and fighting against each other here when it’s over there? Just something to, to kind of think about. So we talked a lot about, about that. So in her cultural center, we’ll be starting to see and develop a plan on how that could evolve and happen there. So I just needed to share that with you. Minister Solomon made a reference to Canada’s position regarding AI. There was a question last year and I, it reminded me of it. And it was at the, in a talking circle, we had talking circles about if Canada could be at the forefront with AI. we talked about in the circle. There was about maybe, oh, seven of us, six, seven of us. This is my, my answer. My response was, well, sure. If it was founded and led by and with indigenous knowledge and wisdom, and if indigenous means the people of the land from where their feet meet the land, the land from which we, we, they originate, then aren’t we not all indigenous, original peoples from the lands of our ancestors? If Canada understood and accepted this about each and every one of its members, then could Canada be at the forefront? If our connection to AI is inescapable, then there is still much, much to be discussed. Of particular importance to me, and it came up here today, is our spirituality. If spirituality is our interconnectedness and responsibility to nature and all of creation, and that we as spiritual beings are having this human experience, how can anything such as artificial intelligence make reference to this? How do we keep the sacred out of AI? So allow me to share this painting with you as it represents for me all that we have shared here in this gathering space? This is a painting, the last painting of my brother, two weeks before he began his journey back to the spirit realm, and I hadn’t, I got it after he passed. You see, my brother was gifted the knowledge of our traditional teachings from the ancestors in a most amazing way. It wasn’t taught to him in a book. It wasn’t taught to him and it just came to him. (.) His responsibility was to share that knowledge. I supported him and urged him to do that. Unfortunately, it was a time when many of our people rejected or were reluctant to return to the old ways. He was afraid of being scorned and criticized and told me the people are not ready. So he shared his gift through his paintings. This is one of them. I have about 50 of them. He’s interpreted about maybe 20 of them. So he comes to me in a dream. And well, this painting took me, because we didn’t talk about it and I didn’t know what he meant by it, it took me about maybe 10, almost two weeks to kind of figure it out. And all of a sudden I got this oh-ha moment. And here it does, it describes, if you look, if you look at it deep enough, it reflects the importance of protecting our ways as we walk on our journey’s path, protected by nature on both sides and all around us. At the same time, it recognizes the concept of the two-eyed seeing, being aware of the sensitivity and understanding the integration of indigenous and western world views. So it’s so representative. And I was just telling my friend last night, I said, I had a dream the night before, two nights ago, I guess. And it was my brother. And he made me go with him to buy a suit jacket. I don’t know what, but that was the dream, I don’t know. But I, I think he was coming here. You know? So it was, it was just, it was a strange, but that’s what happened. So I said, I think I need to bring this and share it with you. (.) So, um, he comes to me in a dream at another time and I have, he asks me to interpret his paintings. (.) And I said, I can’t, we’re sitting at my kitchen table and he’s talking to me about this. And I said, Andrew, I said, I can’t, I can’t do that. What do you ask? And he goes, I’ll help you. So I said, well, if you help me, then okay. So I’ve started to, um, put his paintings, uh, in front and I sit there and I just kind of reflect on them to see what is the message. And it’s all the teachings. So maybe you’ll get one next year, you’ll see. I don’t know. So if we’re gonna, if we are going to continue to develop a relationship with artificial intelligence, then we must not forget our teachings. It is those teachings that we have kept and carried forward that contribute to our survival. So AI needs to be grounded in indigenous wisdom and intelligence. Perhaps as we explore the intra and interdisciplinary opportunities, pressures, and challenges, some of which we shared at this gathering, we can continue our discovery of new and or recover ways of moving forward for the well-being of our collective in relation to AI. So I would like to just close this gathering with the words that come before all else, which I opened within my language, with the hope that we’ll continue to be guided by our ancestors and that we remain grounded as we all move forward, sharing, learning, teaching, hearing, listening, and caring for each other as we move towards a future with or without AI. Every day is a day of gratitude, thanksgiving, and honor. We send greetings and thanks with our gathered one mind for our ongoing peace to all of humankind, to our mother, the earth, to the waters that flow, to corn, beans, and squash, the sisters we grow, to the plants that are fruit, to the medicines too, to the four-legged animals for all that you do, to the sweet water maple and all of the trees, to the birds that we hear, to the winds and the breeze, to grandfather thunders, to eldest brother the sun, to grandmother moon, our minds are now one, to the stars in the sky, to the teachers who share our ancestors’ wisdom and teach us to care. To all of creation, these words are now done, but our thanks continues and our minds are now one. Nya wa. Miigwetch. Thank you.

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