CSQ 48-1: Indigenizing Emerging Technologies

Cultural Survival

INDIGENIZING EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

MARCH 2024

VOLUME 48, ISSUE 1

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

PRESIDENT

Kaimana Barcarse (Kanaka Hawai’i)

VICE PRESIDENT

John King

TREASURER

Steven Heim

CLER K

Nicole Friederichs

Kate R. Finn (Osage)

Laura Graham

Richard A. Grounds (Yuchi/Seminole)

Stephen Marks

Mrinalini Rai (Rai)

Jannie Staffansson (Saami)

Stella Tamang (Tamang)

FOUNDERS

David & Pia Maybury-Lewis

Cultural Survival Headquarters

2067 Massachusetts Ave.

Cambridge, MA 02140

t 617.441.5400 f 617.441.5417

www.cs.org

Cultural Survival Quarterly

Managing Editor: Agnes Portalewska

Contributing Arts Editor: Phoebe Farris (Powhatan-Pamunkey)

Copy Editor: Jenn Goodman

Designer: NonprofitDesign.com

Copyright 2024 by Cultural Survival, Inc.

Cultural Survival Quarterly (ISSN 0740-3291) is published quarterly by Cultural Survival, Inc. at PO Box 381569, Cambridge, MA 02238. Periodical postage paid at Boston, MA 02205 and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to Cultural Survival, PO Box 381569, Cambridge, MA 02238. Printed on recycled paper in the U.S.A. Please note that the views in this magazine are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Cultural Survival.

Writers’ Guidelines

View writers’ guidelines at our website (www.cs.org) or send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to: Cultural Survival, Writer’s Guidelines, PO Box 381569, Cambridge, MA 02238.

FEATURES

www.cs.org

Donors like you make our work around the world possible. Thanks so much for being part of Cultural Survival!

DEPARTMENTS

8 Artificial Intelligence and Indigenous Peoples’ Realities

Nina Sangma (Garo)

For Indigenous Peoples, the dawning age of AI threatens to exacerbate existing inequalities and violence.

12 The Antecedent Future

Cristina Verán

Amelia Winger-Bearskin (Seneca-Cayuga) discusses the use of emerging technologies to carry forth Traditional Knowledge.

14 Protecting the Salmon Population with Artificial Intelligence

William Housty (Heiltsuk) talks about an AI-based tool that tracks salmon migration to help steward fisheries in British Columbia.

16 Indigenous Representation in Video Games

Chad Valdez (Diné)

Native kids today are increasingly able to see themselves on screen represented by Indigenous game characters.

18 Nana, wintsookxa ijk ja maaytïk? How Does That Story Go?

Marco Antonio Martínez Pérez (Ayöök/Mixe)

A new app aspires to revitalize a storytelling tradition and the Ayöök language.

20 Indigenizing Spaces Through Virtual Reality in South Africa

Wisaal Abrahams (Cape Malay)

The ManVrou Collective is uplifting Indigenous identities previously destroyed by colonization.

22 Naapu Ntomonok: Supporting Samburu Women in Kenya Through an App Shaldon Ferris (Khoisan)

Lilian Nguracha Balanga (Samburu) is developing an app to help identify locations of clean water, wildlife, and markets.

24 The StoryWeaver Origin Story

Verónica Aguilar (Mixtec)

An online platform aspires to get a book into every child’s hand in their native language.

1 Executive Director’s Message

2 In the News

4 Indigenous Arts

Natalie Ball (Modoc/Klamath)

6 Indigenous Languages

CREE#: Coding in Cree

26 Keepers of the Earth Fund

Grant Partner Spotlight

Las Delicias Botanical Garden (Misak)

28 Staff Spotlight

Georges Dougnon (Dogon)

29 Bazaar Artists

Philbert Begay (Diné)

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR’S MESSAGE

It’s not a goodbye but a “see you later.”

Dear Cultural Survival Community,

After nearly four and a half years as the Executive Director of Cultural Survival, I have decided to step down to take on leadership at the Securing Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in the Green Economy (SIRGE) Coalition to meet the challenges posed by the green energy transition.

I feel called to focus my full attention to address the growing pressure Indigenous Peoples face from the extractive industry through the work of the Coalition, of which Cultural Survival is a founding member and has played a major role in stewarding the Coalition in its growth. With a more focused leadership role at the SIRGE Coalition and with the support of Cultural Survival, we will work together to address the pressing threats facing Indigenous Peoples and the planet we all share.

many remote communities via radio with over 800 life-saving radio programs and materials in over 150 Indigenous languages and redistributed financial resources for emergency support to 60 communities in 19 countries.

Parallel to our COVID-19 response, we started dreaming and drafting a new strategic plan that encompasses a holistic, thematic approach focusing on Indigenous climate solutions, lands and livelihoods, languages and cultures, and community media. A focus on Indigenous women and youth is at the heart of all these themes.

To each of you, Cultural Survival’s supporters, donors, and magazine readers, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude and deep appreciation for your dedication to uplifting the rights of Indigenous Peoples worldwide and for the support and trust you have given to Cultural Survival and to me to fulfill our mission to advocate for Indigenous Peoples’ rights and support Indigenous communities’ self-determination, cultures, and political resilience.

When I stepped into this role, the COVID pandemic forced the world into a lockdown. Right away, we mobilized building on our key organizational strengths: an extensive network of community radio stations with an estimated listenership of up to 50 million people; the ability to create radio content in-house; and most importantly, our relationships with over 500 communities around the world. We deployed volunteers from these communities to translate radio public service announcements into Indigenous languages to reach marginalized communities who lacked access to information about COVID-19. We provided much-needed financial support to community radio stations and as a result, we reached

Our new strategic framework became the catalyst for profound change, bringing the necessary tools and resources that allowed us to build our internal capacity by doubling our staff size from 20 to 42, increasing our budget from $2.5 million in 2019 to $9 million in 2024, and deepening our impact on the ground. Since 2019, we have funded 257 Indigenous community projects in 30 countries totaling $1,363,010, as well as 251 media projects in 29 countries totaling $1,424,561; supported more than 200 youth fellows; won a precedentsetting case at the Inter-American Court on Human Rights; advocated at the European Union for inclusion of Indigenous rights in corporate due diligence and raw materials legislation; and so much more.

Our Deputy Executive Director, Mark Camp, has graciously agreed to lead Cultural Survival as the Board of Directors conducts the search for my successor. I am excited about the path ahead, and I look forward to continuing the work alongside you and Cultural Survival in this movement. I leave Cultural Survival in the hands of dedicated, talented, and capable staff members in a solid financial position. I hope you continue to bring your interest, energy, and financial support to Cultural Survival, and I wish the best to the incoming leadership of the organization.

CULTURAL SURVIVAL STAFF

Mark Camp, Deputy Executive Director

Avexnim Cojtí (Maya K’iche’), Director of Programs

Verónica Aguilar (Mixtec), Program Assistant, Keepers of the Earth Fund

Cliver Ccahuanihancco Arque (Quechua), Keepers of the Earth Program Assistant

Bryan Bixcul (Maya Tz’utujil), Advocacy Coordinator

Miguel Cuc Bixcul (Maya Kaqchikel), Accounting Associate

Jess Cherofsky, Advocacy Program Manager

Michelle de León, Executive Assistant

Roberto De La Cruz Martínez (Binnizá), Information Technology Associate

Danielle DeLuca, Senior Development Manager

Georges Theodore Dougnon (Dogon), Capacity Building Program Assistant

Shaldon Ferris (Khoisan), Indigenous Radio Program Coordinator

Sofia Flynn, Accounting & Office Manager

Nati Garcia (Maya Mam), Capacity Building Manager

Byron Tenesaca Guaman (Kañari Kichwa), Fellowships Coordinator

Alison Guzman, Donor Relations Coordinator

Emma Hahn, Development Associate

Natalia Jones, Advocacy Associate

Mariana Kiimi (Na Ñuu Sàvi/Mixtec), Advocacy Assistant

Dev Kumar Sunuwar (Koĩts-Sunuwar), Community Media Program Coordinator

Rosy Sul González (Kaqchikel), Indigenous Rights Radio Program Manager

Marco Lara, Social and Digital Media Coordinator

Kevin Alexander Larrea, Information Technology Associate

Maya Chipana Lazzaro (Quechua), Bazaar Vendor Coordinator

Jamie Malcolm-Brown, Communications & Information Technology Manager

Candela Macarena Palacios, Executive Assistant

Cesar Gomez Moscut (Pocomam), Community Media Program Coordinator

Edson Krenak Naknanuk (Krenak), Lead on Brazil

Diana Pastor (Maya K’iche’), Media Coordinator

Guadalupe Pastrana (Nahua), Indigenous Rights Radio Producer

Agnes Portalewska, Senior Communications Manager

Tia-Alexi Roberts (Narragansett), Editorial & Communications Associate

Mariana Rodriguez Osorio, Executive Assistant

Carlos Sopprani, Human Resources Associate

Thaís Soares Pellosi, Executive Assistant

Candyce Testa (Pequot), Bazaar Events Manager

Sócrates Vásquez (Ayuujk), Program Manager, Community Media

Miranda Vitello, Development Coordinator

Candy Williams, Human Resources Manager

Bayarlaa (With gratitude),

Galina Angarova (Buryat) Executive Director

Raquel Xiloj (Maya K’iche’), Community Media Grants Coordinator

Pablo Xol (Maya Qʼeqchiʼ), Design and Marketing Associate

INTERNS

Miriam Abel, Ibu Holludu, Avilinia Reyes, Diego Padilla

U.S. | 30,000 Acres of Land to Return to Penobscot in Maine

NOVEMBER

The Trust for Public Land announced a proposal to return 30,000 acres located in proximity to the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument in Maine to the Penobscot Tribe. The territory was seized in the 1800s and holds cultural and communal significance for the community.

Norway | Norway to Pay Millions to Sami Reindeer Herders

DECEMBER

Norway and Sami reindeer herders reached a compromise over the Fosen Wind Farm, resolving a 20-year conflict over the wind turbines. State-owned Statskraft will pay approximately $675,000 annually for 25 years.

U.S. | Judge Orders Removal of Wind Farm on Osage Lands

DECEMBER

The U.S. Court of International Trade has ordered the removal of a wind farm in Osage County in a victory for Osage Nation. Both the federal government and Osage Nation opposed the project.

Guatemala | Property Rights Granted to Q’eqchi’ Community

DECEMBER

On December 15, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found the State of Guatemala in violation of the property and consultation rights of Q’eqchi’

Peoples for allowing mining on land inhabited by the community since the 1800s, mandating the government to acknowledge the property rights of the Agua Caliente community.

U.S. | Land Agreement Affirms Tribal Rights Over Ancestral Sites

DECEMBER

Tribal leaders from the Pueblo Okhay Owingeh in New Mexico have agreed to a co-stewardship agreement with the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management that will give them a role in protecting sacred and ancestral land sites.

U.S. | Tonkawa Reclaim Sacred Site

DECEMBER

Nearly 140 years after the expulsion of the Tonkawa Tribe from what is now the state of Texas, the Tribe has reacquired Naton Samox/Red Mountain, a sacred site integral to their creation story. The land purchase is part of a broader movement among Texas tribes expelled or nearly exterminated during the 19th century to reclaim their traditional lands and legacies.

U.S. | Hoopa Valley Tribe Reacquires 10,000 Acres in Pine Creek Watershed

DECEMBER

The Hoopa Valley Tribe reacquired 10,395 acres of land, expanding their landholdings to over 102,000 acres. The addition of the Hupa Mountain property, which had been lost during the creation of the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation,

involves a $14.1 million purchase aimed at restoring rightful management, conservation, and use of the land to the Hupa Peoples.

U.S. | Lily Gladstone Achieves Historic Win for Indigenous Representation

JANUARY

Lily Gladstone (Kainai/Blood, Amskapi/ Blackfeet, Niimiipuu/Nez Perce) became the first Native American to receive a major acting prize when she won the Golden Globe Award for Best Female Actor. Honored for her lead role in the film “Killers of the Flower Moon,’’ Gladstone gave part of her acceptance speech in the Blackfeet language.

U.S. | Acadia National Park to Authorize Sweet Grass Harvesting

JANUARY

The National Park Service will allow Tribes in Maine to harvest sweetgrass in Acadia National Park for the first time since the park’s establishment. Native Tribes utilize the plant for ceremonial purposes and in tools and crafts.

Ecuador | Siekopai Peoples Obtain Land Title

JANUARY

In a landmark legal victory, the Siekopai Peoples have secured rightful ownership of their land within a protected area, marking the end of an 80-year struggle since their forced displacement. The ruling grants the Siekopai legal rights to the location of their ancestors’ burial grounds, allowing them to sustainably manage local natural resources independently.

U.S. | First Indigenous Marine Stewardship Area Declared in California

JANUARY

The Tolowa Dee-ni’ Nation, Resighini Rancheria, and Cher-Ae Heights Indian Community designated the first-ever Indigenous Marine Stewardship Area in the U.S. on northern California coast. The Tribes will steward close to 700 mi2 of ancestral ocean and coastal territories.

Reindeer are strongly affected by large-scale wind turbines and avoid areas where they stand. Photo by Statkraft.

ADVOCACY UPDATES

Brazil: Report Spotlights 13 Indigenous Land Defenders Killed in Brazil from 2019–2022 (NOVEMBER)

The University of California Network for Human Rights and Cultural Survival collaborated on the publication of a StoryMap interactive digital map of 13 Indigenous land defenders who were killed in Brazil between 2019 and 2022. This is only a small glimpse of the total of hundreds of murders that happened during President Bolsonaro’s administration. The report also includes additional information on the seven Brazilian states in which the defenders were killed: Amapá, Amazonas, Bahia, Maranhão, Mato Grosso, and Mato Grosso do Sul. Many were active in their pursuit of defending their lands and com munities, reflecting the deep physical, spiritual, cultural, and historical links of the Indigenous land defenders to their territories. Access the StoryMap at tinyurl.com/storymapbrazil.

Global: COP28 UNFCCC Fails to Commit to Real Changes to Phase Out Fossil Fuels (DECEMBER)

violations suffered by the Quechua communities. Traditional authorities from the communities participated in a meeting with Committee experts to discuss what was happening in their lands. On December 8, 2023, the Committee published the concluding observations of Bolivia’s review session, including 29 recommendations related to Indigenous Peoples and a specific mention of Cultural Survival’s partners and the issues they are facing.

Costa Rica: Court Rules Dismisses Case in Murder of Indigenous Leader Sergio Rojas Ortíz (JANUARY)

On January 8, 2024, the Court of Buenos Aires, Costa Rica, ruled for the dismissal of the case of the murder of the Bribri leader and land defender Sergio Rojas Ortíz (Bribri), who was murdered on March 18, 2019. In September 2020, the Public Prosecutor’s Office requested that the case be closed, but the petition was rejected by the Court, and the investigation continued until now. Ortíz’s family will appeal to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

A delegation from Cultural Survival attended the United Nations Frame work Convention on Climate Change 28th Conference of Parties (UNFCCC COP28) held in Dubai from November 30 to December 12, 2023. Approximately 300 Indigenous leaders participated in meetings to advocate for their rights alongside States, industry representatives, and other activists. The largest delegation were coal, oil, and gas industry lobbyists, who had a powerful influence on the first Global Stocktake. This new agreement proposes to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems in an orderly and equitable manner. However, it was evident that oil companies continue to influence States and markets globally, and COP28 failed to agree on a meaningful commitment to limit climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions or establishing real solutions that respect Indigenous Peoples’ rights.

Bolivia: Committee Raises Concerns About Indigenous Rights Violations of Ayllu Acre Antequera Communities (DECEMBER)

In October 2023, Cultural Survival and Qhana Pukara Kurmi, an association of Ayllus and Indigenous communities of the department of Oruro, Bolivia, submitted an alternative report to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination highlighting the rights

Guatemala: Reparations Paid to Three Indigenous Community Radio Stations

More than two years after the InterAmerican Court of Human Rights Maya Kaqchikel Peoples of Sumpango vs. Guatemala that the State of Guatemala must pay reparations to Indigenous community radio stations, the State is finally set to comply. The ruling, issued on October 6, 2021, and published on December 17, 2021, found the State of Guatemala responsible for violating the freedom of expression of Indigenous Peoples based on Article 13.2 of the American Convention on Human Rights and ordered reparation measures to compensate communities for the damage caused by raids on community radio stations and the unlawful criminalization of journalists. In a formal ceremony held on December 19, 2023, at the Presidential Commission for Peace and Human Rights, Executive Director Ramiro Alejandro Contreras Escobar reiterated his commitment to fulfill his mandate and comply with the law.

Read more news at www.cs.org/latest.

Cultural Survival’s Advocacy Program launches international campaigns in support of grassroots Indigenous movements as they put pressure on governments and corporations to respect, protect, and fulfill the rights of their communities.

Natalie Ball’s “BILWI NAATS GA’NIIPCI”

Phoebe Farris (POWHATAN-PAMUNKEY)

From November 17, 2023, to February 19, 2024, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City featured a solo exhibition by interdisciplinary artist Natalie Ball (Modoc/ Klamath). Ball’s exhibit, titled “bilwi naats Ga’niipci,” translates in maqlaqsyals (the traditional language of the Klamath and Modoc Peoples) to “we smell like the outside,” a saying the artist associates with childhood family memories of Indigenous and Black cultural spaces. The word “naats,” translated as “we,” references her multiple identities as a Klamath, Modoc, and Black artist. Ball is based in Chiloquin, Oregon, on her ancestral homelands in what is now southern Oregon and Northern California. She is also a newly elected official of the Klamath Tribe’s Tribal Council and a proud mother of three. She credits her children with inspiring her to get into politics to ensure a good future for them.

Ball’s creative process involves gathering a variety of materials such as hides, quilts, newspaper, and plywood, which she shapes and stitches together into layered sculptural assemblages. She has previously stated that the materials she uses “bring with them their histories and hopes for the future,” and calls it “a privilege to have a relationship to materials in this way.” Her studio spaces include her home, garage, yard, and the ya-ah-gah goo’ geh (Williamson River).

Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1980, Ball is enrolled in the Klamath Tribes and also of Modoc, Anglo-American, and African-American descent. She is a proud descendant of Kientpaush, a.k.a. Captain Jack (1837-1873), the chief who led the Modoc to fight the U.S. in the 1872 Modoc War. Her painter grandfather and quiltmaker aunt inspired her creativity. Her family moved from Klamath land to Portland, Oregon, after the 1954 Klamath Termination Act, when Klamath Tribes were terminated from federal recognition by an act of the United States Congress. In 1986, the Klamath Tribes regained federal recognition.

Ball earned a bachelor’s degree in Art and Ethnic Studies from the University of Oregon, a master’s degree in Māori Visual Arts from Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, and a Masters in Fine Arts from Yale University School of Art in 2018. Installation art, performance art, mixedmedia, sculpture, painting, and printmaking are among her artforms. In addition to her Whitney exhibition, Ball’s work has been shown in Hungary, New Zealand, the Seattle Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, and the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe. She has received

Baby Board, 2023. Cotton, elk rawhide, wood, synthetic fabric, leather, artificial hair, safety pins, metal clamps, glass beads, plastic beads, metal, shells, rope, makeup, and graphite.

numerous awards and fellowships, including Native Arts and Cultures Foundation’s Oregon Native Arts Fellowship (2021), the Ford Family Foundation’s Hallie Ford Foundation Fellow (2020), the Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant (2020), Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2019), and the Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Award (2018).

Many of Ball’s sculptures, like her 2023 piece, “ribbon skirt There’s Indian and then there’s Indian,” deal with the body and concepts associated with belonging. Constructed of wood, elk, rawhide, satin, ribbons, metal, artificial hair, plastic and glass beads, shell, aluminum foil, metal clamps, and graphite, a rope attached to the ceiling suspends vertical poles that connect to the rest of the sculpture that is anchored on the floor.

For Ball, as for many Indigenous people, belonging is often questioned, and its meaning changes in varying spaces. Her curator’s statement at the Whitney reads, “She strives at once to channel those who lived before her, reflect on her own experiences, and hold close the awareness that she is also a future ancestor with responsibilities to generations yet to come.”

In her artist statement for the National Gallery of Art, Ball expounds, “Through auto-ethnography, I attempt to move ‘Indian’ outside of governing discourses to offer a visual genealogy that refuses to line up with the many constructed existences of Native Americans. I map personal and historical landscapes, allowing them to travel through generations, engaging the history of violence, dispossession, and survivance while filling in gaps and forging stories to hold space for new complex narratives to exist. To disrupt mainstream definitions of Indian with personal, community, and U.S. histories that reflect the complexity of Native American lives, like my own, is to better understand ourselves, the nation, and necessarily our shared experiences and histories.”

Phoebe Mills Farris, Ph.D. (Powhatan-Pamunkey) is a Purdue University Professor Emerita, photographer, and freelance art critic.

Learn more about Natalie Ball’s work: www.natalieball.com.

Burden Basket, 2023. Elk rawhide,

newspaper, wood, leather, plastic beads, willow branches, artificial hair, aluminum foil, chalk, metal clamps, rope, makeup, and graphite. Center: ribbon skirt There’s Indian and then there’s Indian., 2023. Wood, elk rawhide, satin ribbon metal, artificial hair, plastic beads, glass beads, shell, aluminum foil, pencil erasers, cotton, satin, rayon, metal clamps, rope, makeup, and graphite. Right: Dance Me Outside, 2009/2023. Plywood, polyester, satin ribbon, cotton, newspaper, leather, wool, burlap, yarn, sequins, paper, acrylic, oil stick, and felt-tip pen. Below: . . . with a hat to match!, 2023. Elk rawhide, wood, cotton, satin, artificial hair, sheep hair, framed poster, metal, tattoo ink, pastel, makeup, oil, leather, metal clamps, yarn, plastic beads, glass beads, felt, plastic, rope, and graphite.

Left:

cotton,

CREE#: CODING IN CREE

An example of the acimow/ CREE# “river” conditional code block. The first line of code (in blue) is a call to the smudging

Jon Corbett (CREE)

Indigenous Peoples have long experienced the effects of colonialism, including displacement, loss of land and resources, and the suppression of their languages, cultural practices, and knowledge. When we think about those effects in the context of the development of computing and other technologies, the current impact becomes clear. Colonial constructions—which include programming languages like Javascript, Python, and HTML—continue to prioritize the interests of western cultures while disregarding the perspectives and experiences of Indigenous Peoples. Programming requires a critical examination of the impacts of this behavior and possible solutions, one of which could be Indigenization and decolonization.

The acts of Indigenization and decolonization aim to address this legacy of colonialism in two ways. Firstly, by elevating the cultural, economic, and political status of Indigenous and marginalized Peoples, and secondly, by dismantling the dominant political, economic, and colonial power structures in contemporary society.

In developing my own programming language for nehiyawewin (the Plains Cree language), I found that it is more than just the hegemony of English in programming that is an obstacle. One roadblock is the way computers are meant to reward speed. Computers follow instructions in a sequential fashion, where efficient code means the actions are performed faster. However, speed and efficiency do not necessarily fit in with Indigenous worldviews of time and order, nor do they reflect the importance of

the relationships between the user and the system. Additionally, I have always seen coding as a way of telling a story that a computer can understand. To tell a story, the storyteller not only has to use the correct language but they must also understand the unique meanings and structure of that language. Attempting to replace computing logic with literal nehiyawewin terminology would be a form of cultural appropriation. Therefore, to create an Indigenously informed programming language, we must fundamentally change how we think of programming. Human languages contain a culture’s meaning and knowledge and programming languages can work the same way. Many Indigenous Peoples speak of the sacredness and importance of their languages, often stating, “Our language is medicine.” Therefore, it follows that if we wish to use an Indigenous language for coding, we need to treat the coding space as sacred and the act of coding as medicinal. Promoting culture can be used as a way to add representation into coding and programming languages. However, this requires a shift in computing philosophy. Currently, programming works on a system focused on inputs and functions. In this case, cultural metaphors, knowledge, and traditions could stand in as programmatic inputs and functions. For example, in my acimow/CREE# language, I introduced smudging, the act of burning herbs to purify and protect bodies and spirits, as a computational function. Programmatically, this digital smudging clears the physical and cached memories, initializes peripherals, and clears the screen. Essentially, it prepares the system to execute a program in an environment free of latent data that could negatively impact it.

function.

Additionally, many languages used for computer programming use typical syntactic constructions, which can be described as a set of best practices the code must adhere to. Two such constructions are the conditional statement, sometimes called an “if … then” function, and the loop statement, sometimes called a “do while” or a “for . . . next” function. A conditional function evaluates whether a statement is true or false and the answer determines the next action—or inaction—executed by the code. Loop constructions are used to execute a sequence of instructions a specified number of times or until some specific condition is met.

The challenge with translating these programming constructions into Indigenous languages is that many First Nations languages in the Americas are polysynthetic, meaning their word constructions may create very long words by stringing together multiple short words (morphemes). Therefore, logical language statements in English, such as “if a = b then c,” may not be logically or syntactically valid in a First Nations language. My remedy for this problem with language representation has been to use culturally relevant metaphors that incorporate Indigenous knowledge into the world of programming.

For many Indigenous cultures, water is life giving and sacred. Running water sources like rivers and streams symbolize the continuity of life. In programming with acimow/ CREE#, the word sîpiy, the nehiyaw word for “river,” is used instead of the English “if . . . then” statement. In this context, the code is presented as a river of instructions allowing the programmer to flow the story in the code along a digital waterway that can branch into sîpîsisa (smaller rivers or creeks) as needed. I use a similar analogical process for representing loops in the code.

In the harsh winter climate of northern Alberta, where I am from, nehiyaw people count winters to determine age. For example, “niyânanomitanaw nîsosâp nititahtopiponân” translates as “I am 52 winters old.” Age, in my culture, is a way of declaring one’s resilience and strength in surviving the harsh climate and extreme cold of the season. Additionally, winter is a season that is cyclical and progressive. We do not endure the same winter every year; each winter is new and different each year. This cultural model is very similar to programming loops in the computer. In a program loop, each iteration typically advances the elements within the loop in some way, similar to the way each winter symbolizes aging in nehiyaw culture. For programming in acimow/CREE#, the nehiyaw word pipon, and some of its conjugated forms, which means “winter,” is used as the looping mechanism for programming. So instead of saying “for x = 1 to 10,” a programmer would type “mitâtaht pipona,” or “for 10 winters,” and the code that follows this instruction would repeat 10 times.

Ultimately, Indigenously-informed computer programming is not just about giving instructions to the computer. The human-computer interaction (HCI) model must be

reframed as a kinship-computer interaction (KCI) model. All programming involves a relationship between the coder and the machine but should be especially present at the heart of an Indigenous computing philosophy to respect the values of that culture. There is a common understanding that programming languages—our way of communicating with computers—act as vehicles for cultural knowledge, which is encoded in the machine through coding. The result is a digital reflection of Indigenous life and knowledge. Using this perspective, we transform the computer from a binary of opposing ones and zeros to a holistic, unary system of animacy whose digital inner workings continuously reflect animate and inanimate worldviews of the culture with which it is communicating. In doing so, we create computing technologies infused with cultural representations of the creators behind them and the users in front of them.

The original version of this article was originally posted on pinnguaq.com.

Jon Corbett (Cree) is an Assistant Professor with Lived Indigenous Experience in the School of Interactive Art & Technology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. His research focuses on Indigenous forms of expression through “Indigitalization,” which he describes as a computational creative practice that braids together Indigenous and decolonial computing practices facilitated through traditional and computer-based expressive media art forms.

Top: Cree syllabics.

Bottom: The nehiyaw syllabics for the programming act of smudging in acimow/CREE#, a programming language created by the author.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ REALITIES

Nina Sangma (GARO)

Where are we, the world’s Indigenous Peoples, going to be in the age of Artificial Intelligence? What will be our situation as Artificial Intelligence becomes an everyday reality for those of us, the “othered,” who have been left out of rooms and histories and memories? Historically oppressed and politically disenfranchised, Indigenous Peoples have served as test subjects for centuries of systemic silencing and dehumanization.

The human condition today is centered on and propelled by data in an endless continuum of consuming it, harvesting it, living it, and generating it through loop after loop of digital footprints on platforms meant to compete with sleep. For Indigenous Peoples, our identities are predestined and politicized, defined by our resistance as our existence through the ages and stages of colonization and imperialism to the present, the “age of AI,” which will exacerbate existing inequalities and violence.

Many of us have begun to unravel the extent to which AI will determine the human condition and have arrived at the inconvenient truth that AI is a bridge to unspeakable horrors if its governance does not prioritize the lived realities of those on the margins. Development per se has always been a dirty phrase to us, the Indigenous, who have borne the burdens of colonizer States’ so-called “developments” on our ancestral lands. Given their records, we can hardly expect States and corporations

to regulate AI through governance that is aimed at being truly ethical and centered on the guiding principles of business and human rights.

The stark truth is that the core values that protect human rights are counterintuitive to the values of corporations for whom it is “business as usual.” If democracy were profitable, human rights lawyers and defenders wouldn’t be sitting around multi-stakeholder engagement tables demanding accountability from Big Tech and creators of AI. The cognitive dissonance is tangible in spaces where the presence of a few of us who come from the Global South and represent Indigenous perspectives often leave these spaces feeling like we’ve been patted on the head, roundly patronized by the captains of industry.

A statement released last year on the existential threats posed by AI that was signed by hundreds of AI experts, policy advisers, climate activists, and scholars underlines their well founded fears that we are hurtling towards a future that may no longer need humans and humanity, and that collective interventions and accountability frameworks are needed from diverse groups from civil society to ensure strong government regulation and a global regulatory framework.

AI cannot, and should not, be viewed in isolation. Preceding technologies have been the bridge to AI and will continue the prejudices and biases embedded in existing technology. One of the biggest concerns is the use of surveillance tech like Pegasus, which is being used to subvert democratic rights of citizens and free speech, including the targeting of journalists to curb freedom of

Left and center:

Nina Sangma (far left) at the Internet Governance Forum 2024 in Kyoto, Japan.

Right: Eloisa Mesina, SecretaryGeneral of Katribu Youth, and Nina Sangma at the Asia-Pacific Conference on Internet Freedom in Bangkok, Thailand.

All photos by Nina Sangma

the Press and citizens’ right to information under the guise of national security. This, coupled with draconian laws like India’s Armed Forces Special Powers Act, gives unbridled powers to the Army in so-called “disturbed areas” to maintain the status quo. These areas coincide with Indigenous lands where there is an Indigenous population, such as in Northeast India.

Historically, the heavy-handedness of the State has served as a fertile learning ground for testing adoption strategies to exercise control over other areas in India, always with the sinister goal that coincides with and aims at the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples from resourcerich lands to create value for a few corporations and their beneficiaries. The use and justification of surveillance tech are pinned on creating the need for protection from “antinationals” or “terrorists,” terms commonly used to label and libel anyone critical of the government. Both the Duterte and Marcos Jr. governments have continued to put Indigenous activists at risk through the practice of “red tagging” to suggest links to communists in the Philippines.

Online violence often precedes offline tactics, which led to deadly attacks on nine Indigenous leaders who were gunned down in December 2020 for protesting against the Philippines government’s dam projects. Almost a decade ago, in a similarly chilling encounter in June 2012, 17 Adivasis falsely accused of being “Maoists” were killed in extrajudicial killings in the state of Chattisgarh, India, a mineral-rich zone that has attracted mining companies and led to the forced eviction of thousands of Adivasis. Most recently, the use of facial recognition and drone technology is being adopted in the northeastern Indian state of Manipur to quell the ongoing civil unrest in the state.

The question of whom and how the government identifies as a person of interest will depend on who technologies mark as suspicious. What existing databases will it tap into, and how are these databases equipped to correctly profile citizens, given the inherent flaws in pattern recognition and algorithmic biases in its training sets? Are there not some identities more likely to be marked suspicious based on their political histories, religions, and records of resistance to State oppression? And in whose favor will

these technologies be deployed to justify occupation and win wars and elections? In digitized political economies, the incentives to use technology for good to prioritize the welfare of citizens are low when compared to wealth creation for a few that rely on maintaining the status quo through ongoing systems of oppression.

The role of disinformation campaigns in winning elections is an outcome all governments are aware of on both the ruling and opposition sides. We are in a war of narratives where the battleground is online, on social media and messaging apps, in the daily propaganda of corporate media and the hate speech targeting minorities, scholars, and critics, and the subversion of history with nationalistic texts and takeover of public institutions. AI will certainly prove to be a cost-effective way to spread hate speech and disinformation in terms of not just efficacy, but relying on existing quantities of hate speech and distortion of facts to churn out vast amounts of unverified information.

What that means is that we, the users, are forever doomed to be stuck in a content verification and content recommendation loop based on what we consume online, leading to more polarization than ever before. An especially gruesome thought is the industrial levels of technologyfacilitated, gender-based violence that will be unleashed. Think revenge porn using AI-generated deep fakes, the building blocks of which lie in existing disinformation campaigns targeted against women to undermine their professional credibility and reputations. Online hate towards women is almost always of a sexually violent nature. Simply expressing an opinion as a woman is enough to warrant harassment and a slew of vile abuses from rape threats to calls for murder and deep fakes, the articulation of which will be gut-wrenchingly innovative with generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Dall E.

In the UNESCO report “The Chilling: Global Trends in Online Violence against Women Journalists,” a staggering 86 percent of Indigenous women journalists reported experiencing online violence. The storm of technologyfacilitated, gender-based violence spikes during conflict and for women journalists reporting from conflict areas.

Left: Nina Sangma (far left) with Pyrou Chung, Director of Open Development Initiative, East West Management Institute and independent Adivasi journalist and poet Jacinta Kerketta at RightsCon 2023 in Costa Rica.

Right: Independent Indigenous journalist and Fulbright scholar Makepeace Sitlhou reporting from the buffer zone in Manipur, India.

Photo courtesy of Makepeace Sitlhou.

A gruesome mirror of ground realities where women’s bodies become a battleground and rape is a political tool is being witnessed in the ongoing ethnic violence in Manipur. The trend of heightened attacks by trolls is something Indigenous journalist Makepeace Sitlhou (Kuki) has experienced firsthand on Twitter as a result of her awardwinning ground reportage from volatile regions. Unfazed by these online attacks, things took a troubling turn when Sitlhou was named in a First Information Report for allegedly “. . . misleading statements and to destabilize a democratically elected government, disturb communal harmony by creating enmity amongst communities, and to defame the state government and one particular community.”

When asked if the probability of online attacks paving the way for offline violence was high and whether deep fakes could be used as an online tactic, Sithlou agreed, saying, “The concerted trolling led up to an actual police case filed against me over my tweets.” When asked if this could mean that the use of AI-generated deep fakes was a possibility, she responded, “The way it’s happening to other journalists, it’s more likely an inevitability.”

In a remarkable turn of events, the Supreme Court held criminal proceedings against Sithlou after Kapil Sibal, a high-profile advocate, appeared for her. Her situation underlines the need for access to legal help, a privilege not many Indigenous journalists have. Sitlhou commented, “I was lucky to have easy access to good Supreme Court lawyers because I’m well connected to folks in Delhi. But for more grassroots journalists, they must be regularly in contact with their editors and journalists’ unions and keep them posted on the threats that they are receiving.”

Another story of personal triumph over systemic injustice and the importance of pursuing litigation is of Indigenous journalist and fact-checker Mia Magadelna Fokno (Kankanaey), who won a cyber misogyny case against a troll in the Philippines. She underscored the need for building safe spaces online and access to legal aid, saying, “Access to safe spaces and legal services is crucial for Indigenous women, especially female journal-

ists, who face online attacks. The court victory against gender-based online sexual harassment is a significant triumph for women’s rights. This ruling sends a strong message against the use of technology to terrorize and intimidate victims through threats, unwanted sexual comments, and the invasion of privacy. This landmark case . . . underscores the importance of legal recourse in combating online harassment. This victory is a step towards creating safer online and physical environments for all, particularly for Indigenous women and female journalists, who are often targeted. Let this case inspire those who have suffered sexual harassment to seek justice and support each other in fostering safe spaces for everyone.”

Testimonies and firsthand accounts from Indigenous reporters are critical for challenging mainstream discourse and its dehumanizing narrative slants against Indigenous Peoples, which has set the stage for cultural and material genocides—something Indigenous Peoples are all too privy to, having been reduced to tropes to suit insidious propaganda for centuries. Technology in the hands of overly represented communities disseminates these harmful narratives and metaphors at alarming scale and speed, particularly in Indigenous territories, which are often heavily militarized zones.

“As a fact-checker based in Baguio City, Philippines, I recognize the evolving landscape of journalism in the age of AI,” Fokno said. The emergence of sophisticated AI tools has amplified the spread of disinformation, presenting unique challenges that require specialized skills to address. Journalists, especially those engaged with Indigenous communities and human rights issues, need targeted training to discern and combat AI-generated misinformation effectively. This training is vital to uphold the integrity of information, a cornerstone of our democracy and cultural preservation, particularly in areas like northern Luzon where local narratives and Indigenous voices are pivotal. The need for fact-checkers to adapt and evolve with these technological advancements is more crucial than ever.”

A deeper dive into large language models reveals the fallacy of Big Tech and AI. Large language models (machine learning models that can comprehend and generate human language text) are designed not only to respond to lingua franca, but also the most mainstreamed beliefs, biases, and cultures, leaving out anyone who is not adequately represented in these data sets, and will therefore be representative only of those who have access to social, economic, cultural capital, and digital literacy and presence.

An image I posted on Facebook recently of Taylor Swift standing next to someone wearing a Nazi swastika symbol on his t-shirt was taken down because it went against

Left: Mia Magdalena Fokno after filing a case against her troll, Renan Padawi.

Right: Mia Magdalena Fokno at BENECO protest in the Philippines. Photos courtesy of Mia Magdalena Fokno.

community standards and resulted in profile restrictions. On requesting a review of the image, Facebook sent me a notification stating that I could appeal its decision to the Oversight Board—a group of experts enlisted to build transparency in how content is moderated. But how feasible is that, given the sheer volume of cases generated daily? And more importantly, which kinds of cases among the thousands, if not millions, that are flagged make it to the final review table? If the bots cannot differentiate the problem at the source level or read the intent behind sharing a problematic image, can it be expected to think critically as so many believe AI will be able to do?

Given this existing lack of nuance, AI will, in a nutshell, perpetuate western or neocolonial standards of beauty and bias with limited localized context. Missing data means missing people. With ChatGPT, for example, there is a real possibility of loss in translation between what is prompted by the user and what is understood by machine learning and the results it generates. Intellectual theft of Indigenous art, motifs, and techniques to the appropriation of Indigenous culture and identity by mainstream communities means that e-commerce websites and high fashion stores will be replete with stolen Indigenous knowledge.

With the advent of Dall E, which can create art from text prompts, Indigenous artists like Tufan Chakma are even more vulnerable to copyright infringement, something he is no stranger to. “I faced it too many times,” he said. “The action I took against it was to write a Facebook post. I also reached out to those who had used my artwork without my permission.” The only protection he gets is in the form of his online followers flagging misuse of his artwork. He added that plagiarism happens with digital artwork because it is a lucrative business to convert into commercial products like t-shirts and other merchandise.

Apart from the loss in potential revenue, the deeper impact of plagiarism on the artist, according to Chakma, is that “Plagiarism can demotivate anyone who is creating art to engage with society critically.” Chakma’s artwork is

political and raises awareness through artistic expression of the plight of Bangladesh’s Indigenous communities. Can AI generate art that speaks truth to power in the manner of an artist who, like Chakma, seeks to change the world for the better? Will AI be able to understand power dynamics and generate art that sees historical injustice and prejudice?

Indigenous identity is encoded in our clothing woven with motifs rife with meaning, intrinsic to our moral codes, core values, and our relationship with nature and the cosmos, a tangible link to our ancestries. Initiatives like the IKDS framework and the Indigenous Navigator recognize the need for Indigenous Peoples to own and manage the data we collect and reinforce us as its rightful owners to govern ourselves, our lands, territories, and resources. Rojieka Mahin, PACOS Trust’s Coordinator for the Local and International Relations Unit, said “Recognizing the impact of [Indigenous Knowledge Data Sovereignty] on all Indigenous Peoples, particularly Indigenous women and youth, is essential. IKDS embodies a commitment to learning, inclusivity, and improved governance of Indigenous knowledge and data sovereignty. This approach will not only keep our community informed but also empower them to share their experiences with others, underlining the importance of establishing community protocols within their villages. Furthermore, it will enhance the community’s appreciation for their Indigenous knowledge, especially when it comes to passing it down to the younger generation.”

Ultimately, Big Tech is colonization in fancy code. Smartphones, smart homes, smart cities—the focus is on efficiency and productivity. But in the rush to do more, we are in danger of losing our humanity. The reality is, that we will soon be outsmarted out of existence by AI if we are not vigilant.

Sangma (Garo) is an Indigenous rights advocate and Communications Program Coordinator at the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact.

Nina

Left: Art by Tufan Chakma. Courtesy of Tufan Chakma.

Right: Tufan Chakma with his art and family. Courtesy of Tufan Chakma.

THE ANTECEDENT FUTURE

Using Emerging Technologies to Carry Forth Wisdom of the Ancestors

From the SKYWORLD/ CLOUDWORLD series 2022 by Amelia WingerBearskin. Digital image and landscape photography. Inset: Amelia Winger-Bearskin. Photo

Cristina Verán

In our time of great technological leaps, Artificial Intelligence can seem at once fearsome and aweinspiring—no less so for Indigenous Peoples seeking to protect their communities from potential dangers yet also have access to the benefits of such advancements on their own terms. Professor Amelia WingerBearskin (Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma), Banks Family Chair of AI and the Arts at the University of Florida Digital Worlds Institute, is a foremost expert in the field. She is an artist, educator, and advocate leading the way toward a hopeful future in which Indigenous Peoples are not only included but for which ancestral knowledge, which she refers to as “antecedent technologies,” is a core component. Cristina Verán spoke with Winger-Bearskin following a panel discussion on the subject during the ImagineNative Film & Media Arts Festival in Toronto.

Cristina Verán: What first sparked your joint interest in technology and the arts?

Amelia Winger-Bearskin: My mom worked for Ganondagan, the New York State historical site for the Haudenosaunee People, and was a founding Board Member of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. My father worked for Kodak and was part of a team that

developed the first digital camera. He taught me a lot about computers. Professionally speaking, I started out as an opera singer and eventually began making theater pieces that combined opera and technology, presenting them in places like the Kennedy Center and Lincoln Center. I was getting invitations from museums as well, and decided to also make art that was interactive to engage new audiences.

How did your parallel journey in academia, which opened spaces for expanding conversations between technology and art even further, develop?

AWB: My first academic job was as a tenure-track professor at Vanderbilt University. I worked with Professor Pratim Sengupta for the Mind Matter Media Lab at the Peabody School of Education focused on Artificial Intelligence in Teaching and Learning—not only how machines learn, but how we, as human beings, learn. As part of the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Mathematics) initiative for the Obama Administration and the National Science Foundation, we built projects, programs, hardware, and software to help teachers get students ready for the computational future. I wanted to focus more on being a maker and a builder, though, and went back to school to ITP (the Interactive Telecommunications Program) at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where, as a student, I created an EdTech startup.

courtesy of Amelia Winger-Bearskin.

How does your culture influence your storytelling via tech-driven experiences?

AWB: I’ve been called a “net,” “transmedia,” and “interactive media” artist. Now, I’m known as an XR Artist in AI. These are all just new ways to describe how I use emerging technologies to carry forth the wisdom and stories of our ancestors to make them relevant for the next generation.

In our Seneca-Cayuga tradition, a storyteller is one part politician, one part writer, one part performer, one part actor. You have to be a person that Elders will trust to give their stories to and then also transform them. My mom always encouraged me, saying, “Don’t tell them like I do; find your own way to tell our stories, even using computers or video games.” I approach things from what I think is a really Haudenosaunee way, grounded in an ethical framework for software development I call “wampum codes.”

Wampum is commonly thought of as a form of currency. You’re talking about something more complex here?

AWB: Exactly. It is really more like a consensus mechanism, like a paper on which you’d write the protocols of a contract—a kind of pre-Columbian blockchain, you could say. Western culture is finally “discovering” consensus-based economies, and I love that, but they didn’t invent them. Indigenous Peoples all over the world have worked with these concepts and structures for hundreds, even thousands of years. “Wampum Codes” is also the name of my podcast, by the way; a fun series for which I interview Indigenous guests—comedians, directors, writers, app developers, language experts, etcetera—who use new technologies to positively impact their communities.

You led discussions around how AI is impacting Indigenous professionals in the film industries, at ImagineNative (for which you’re a new Board Member) and at the Sundance Film Festival. What should they be concerned about?

AWB: There are so many ethical questions, which the recent strikes in Hollywood sought to address. The labor of writers, for example, can be taken and put into some AI model to generate a season’s worth of scripts based on their work, yet get them no further compensation. An actor coming to a set for just one day’s work may be scanned— their face, their voice, their body—and not get much money at all, but then the studio could use it all in perpetuity. Actors doing this at 25 could conceivably, at age 35, lose jobs to [AI recreations of] their 25-year-old selves. Meanwhile, an avatar can be made to do whatever a studio wants, unlike an actual Indigenous actor, who, in real life, can reject a script or a character if it’s in some way offensive to them or to their people; they can quit.

What about for visual artists—how should they navigate this emerging technology?

AWB: It’s important to have your values implied and

explicit. We’re seeing, in the speculative market now, what happens when you don’t. A lot of artists got burned in the “NFT Winter” a few years ago, for example, they were expendable. Indigenous Peoples have been victims of implied systems, so we hear that doublespeak.

Another concern about emerging technology relates to who can access the tools, education, and networks needed to make use of it in all of the potentially positive ways. Describe the current state of things.

AWB: Access, equity, and inclusion have stalled as priorities for North America toward the Global South and for people here in Indian Country. Groups such as Natives in Tech, Indigenous AI, and many Indigenous academics are working on these issues. A barrier can be something as fundamental as what language is used, and so, as an example of how we can counter such things, a member of my podcast crew [Jon Corbett (Cree)] created a programming language called CREE# (a play on C++) using Cree concepts of streams and loops relating to water.

How does an impetus to decolonize and Indigenize one’s field in terms of values, expectations, and structures figure into your own practice?

AWB: I like to think in terms of what we would call “antecedent technologies.” In AI, having more data helps you to develop the type of model that is best fitted for the type of predictive assistance that you’re excited about. But [the commercial tech sector] is colonizing our future while imagining that we never had [advanced technologies] in the past. Thousands of years of data show us how not only did these concepts already exist for Indigenous Peoples, but what that was like. Why throw away all that data? We actually have a foundation on the exact place where we’re standing today.

Cristina Verán is a United Nations-accredited Indigenous Peoples-focused researcher, advocacy strategist, curator, and media-maker. As Adjunct Faculty at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, she is part of the Native Studies Forum.

Amelia WingerBearskin, MIDNIGHT & TO BODY, part of Realtime “Lilypads: Mediating Exponential Systems” at Nxt Museum, The Netherlands.

PROTECTING THE SALMON POPULATION WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The Heiltsuk Nation in Bella Bella, British Columbia, Canada, is integrating Traditional Knowledge into an AI-based tool to track salmon migration to help them assert their land rights and steward fishery resources in their territories. Indigenous Rights Radio Program Coordinator, Shaldon Ferris (Khoisan), recently spoke with William Housty (Heiltsuk), Associate Director of the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department, about the project.

CS: Tell us about the importance of salmon in your culture.

William Housty: Salmon is a cornerstone of our culture; that relationship makes up our identity. We’ve been known in the past to describe ourselves as Salmon People, and I honestly believe that we wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for salmon. Salmon being available and abundant to our ancestors and through the present day helped [our People] survive some very difficult times through the years. Our first-generation stories that talk about how we came into existence involve the salmon and the creation of the salmon. We’re very intertwined with them culturally.

CS: What threats do the salmon populations face today?

WH: Climate change is a huge one. Different weather patterns are contributing to different conditions in the ocean that are affecting the survival of salmon. We also have an overabundance of some of the predators of salmon, like seals and sea lions. Over the years, our Heiltsuk people

relied on salmon, seals, and sea lions as a part of our diet. That part of our diet has shifted, and as a result, we haven’t been harvesting as many seals and sea lions. Their population has gone through the roof, and that has a big impact on the salmon, both as juveniles and as adults. We try to strike a balance on overfishing and mismanagement. The management of salmon was taken over by the government years ago and was grossly mismanaged to the point where there’s next to nothing left.

CS: How has the management of the salmon shifted over time?

WH: Prior to western colonization, our people lived all throughout the territory and were managing things on a river-to-river scale—place-based management. Everybody lived next to a river, because that’s where the main source of food came from. When we all amalgamated together into the present day, the management shifted to the government because they manage on a larger regional scale. We’ve seen a huge failure in the colonial management of salmon. Over time, as commercial fisheries took more and more and more, they didn’t understand (or care) about how many fish were actually needed to be in a river to keep the population of salmon sustainable. They just continued to harvest until there was no more. It was that mentality where you just take and take until there’s nothing left. It’s a very backwards approach to the traditional way of harvesting. We understand what’s there and that we need to have a certain amount of salmon in the river before we start to even think about harvesting for ourselves. We’re at the point where we’re restoring and trying to repopulate a lot of the previous salmon systems that have been devastated by that [colonial] management approach.

Monitoring salmon in river.

Photo by Howard Humchitt.

Inset: William Housty.

Photo by Mark Godfrey.

CS: How did the project of using Artificial Intelligence to track salmon migration come about?

WH: The whole use of AI, we kind of just stumbled upon it. In 2012, we established a traditional salmon weir in one of our key watersheds. At that time, we were catching both live adult salmon and juvenile smolt salmon. One was coming into spawn, and one was going out into the open ocean. We were tagging them with pit tags that sent a little sensor up to a satellite. As these salmon passed certain checkpoints in the river, they would send a notification that they had made it up to the spawning ground. That’s kind of where it started; we piloted that project coupling with our weir. We were seeing some pretty good results, and then we had an opportunity to pilot a camera project with AI at our weir. It is a traditional weir that concentrates the salmon to one portion of a fence that’s blocking off the river; when they go through the trap door, the AI would take a photo of the salmon. We were able to establish a very accurate count of every salmon that was passing through our weir. The first year was piloting that and getting to know the technology, training our people who are on the ground to use and maintain the technology. It’s very effective.

CS: How has the Heiltsuk Nation benefited from combining AI tools with Traditional Knowledge?

WH: The AI gives very accurate, real time results. When we’re making management decisions about certain salmon populations, we can have some certainty behind those decisions because we know that the AI is giving us a concrete number. If you were to go and stand on the side of a river that’s 30 feet wide, the chances of you counting all the salmon that pass would be very low, with a very high chance for error. When we utilize the AI we’re looking at specific numbers, and those are allowing us to make in-season management decisions. If we’re in the middle of salmon season and the AI is telling us that the numbers are low, we can shut any food or commercial fishery down on the outside for conservation concerns. On the other hand, if we’re having a great year, we might be able to open it for a little bit longer and still do it in a sustainable way. It’s giving us certainty when making decisions about sustainability within particular salmon populations.

We’ve really strived to dovetail western science and Traditional Knowledge. Being able to use the knowledge of Elders in the community to help concentrate efforts on particular systems or particular places within watersheds and being able to use some of the techniques, such as AI, to help us revert back to our traditional management systems, is really beneficial for us because we’re getting the best of both worlds. We’re in the process of publishing a paper right now that’s taking all the different approaches that exist and putting them all together into one so that we can get the best possible outcome. When you bring those two worlds together, you can tell a really powerful story and have some powerful results that bring you back to traditional management systems.

CS: What do you hope to see in the future with the advancement of technology and AI for salmon?

WH: There are thousands of creeks and rivers in the territory; this is just one of those thousands of creeks that are being studied like this. Having AI do some of the work on our behalf allows us to go to other places to establish [systems like] this, to reach out to other systems that need restoration, and be able to focus efforts there. If we’re able to utilize this technology on a broader scale while still being able to work on a watershed-to-watershed basis, we can go a long way in making better management decisions for salmon. What’s been lacking with the salmon for many, many decades is that decisions about them have been made by people in three-piece suits in Ottawa, not by the people who are here living with them and who understand them and are utilizing both science and local knowledge to make decisions about them. This technology, if we can utilize it and start to grow it more and more, it’s only going to produce more results and make us better managers and stewards of the salmon.

CS: What does the ethical use of AI look like for Indigenous Peoples?

WH: We’ve had this question before: is AI ethical? To us it is, because we’re not just taking AI and using it any old way. We’re utilizing our own Traditional Knowledge to inform AI. AI is turning around and helping us to gather information, and we’re making decisions based on that information. We’re not having some auto-generated decision made for us. We’re utilizing the technology of AI to help us make a management decision. That in itself is ethical, in that we’re not relying on the technology to make a decision for us. We’re relying on the technology to help us make an informed decision.

Group of salmon jumping upstream.

Photo by sirtravelalot.

INDIGENOUS REPRESENTATION IN VIDEO GAMES

L–R: Cover image of “Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna);” Image depicting Ratonhnhaké:ton/ Connor from “Assassins Creed 3;” Image depicting Tommy from “Prey.”

Chad Valdez (DINÉ)

It’s 2010, late into the night, and my best friend and I load up a multiplayer game of “Gears of War 2” to play deathmatches into the next morning. While it was just the two of us, we were never alone—Tai Kaliso was always there as well. With his mohawk, facial tattoos, heavy accent, and dark brown skin, there was another Indigenous person in the room, shining bright through the pixelated screen of the television. We never really considered why we chose Tai as our character most nights, aside from thinking he was the coolest, most badass character in the game. In hindsight, I’m sure the real reason was because he reminded us of ourselves. We saw someone that sort of looked like us, or at least had skin like us, and talked with an accent we may have heard from family members, sharing wisdom in a story or through some strange humor. With him, we had representation.

Representation for Indigenous Peoples in video games and media has a sordid history. We were the enemies for the cowboys, the shamans for the heroes, the burial grounds for the ghosts, the savage Indian to be saved. When video games were first being developed, the roles of those cowboys and heroes shifted into the hands of anyone with access to an arcade or gaming system. But for Indigenous Peoples, we were still the enemies. Over the years, video games evolved and grew into a wide array of stories, characters, and entertainment that anybody could pick up and play. And of course, the whitewashed history of America and the colonization of the West would claw its way into the new medium. Again, we were the enemies to shoot, but this time it wasn’t an actor doing the shooting; it was anybody who walked into an arcade with some change or any kid with a gaming system at home. Stereotypes of Indigenous Peoples ran rampant. Some of these games were even considered educational, such as “The Oregon Trail.”

The original version of “The Oregon Trail” was created in 1971, but was truly popularized in 1985 when it came

preloaded on certain computer systems. In the game, players take on the role of a wagon leader guiding settlers to Oregon in 1848. While traveling, players must make decisions that ensure the survival of the group. Players decide what supplies to bring along, the route to travel, and actions during random events that can occur such as storms or disease. One event that can happen during gameplay is an attack by “Indians” that kills members of your traveling party. Portrayals of Native Americans in the game relied on tropes and stereotypes, common to what people were used to seeing in older arcade games. War paint, feathers, bows and arrows, and large noses were the prevalent features of Native Americans in the media. Because of the popularity of the game and the assumed historical accuracy of European settlement, “The Oregon Trail” was soon considered an educational tool that could be played in classrooms.

The legacy of that game, and evolving viewpoints of Indigenous Peoples, is marked by its most recent remake, released in 2021. This version was developed with Native American historians who lent their perspectives and insight into the improvement of the game. Players begin this updated version with an image of an authentic, animated depiction of an Indigenous woman and a recognition that westward expansion was not an adventure for Indigenous Peoples, but an invasion. Playable characters now include Native Americans that are not pan-Indian designs. This updated version of “The Oregon Trail” reflects not only an evolved game but shows how far the industry has come in including Indigenous Peoples in the making of these games.

After all the stereotypes and harmful, inaccurate depictions of Indigenous Peoples through the late 20th century, developers began to realize the error of their ways. Enter “Prey,” released in 2006. This first-person shooter game focuses on the Cherokee character, Domasi “Tommy” Tawodi, who, with his girlfriend and grandfather, is abducted by aliens on their reservation in Oklahoma. The character

is voiced by acclaimed actor Michael Greyeyes (Muskeg Lake First Nation). While still featuring some common tropes, such as Tommy entering the spirit world and having special abilities, the creators did not want to do a panIndian stereotype, instead wanting to show contemporary life for Tommy on the reservation. They welcomed feedback and input from Greyeyes, who gave extensive notes on the character on how he should best be portrayed.

“Assassins Creed 3,” released in 2012, continues in the evolution of respectful representation. The third entry from a popular action-adventure series that features large landscapes filled with hundreds of characters with each game emphasizing the accuracy of its historical settings, “Assassins Creed 3” focuses on 18th-century Colonial America with a protagonist named Ratonhnhaké:ton/Connor, a Mohawk man who becomes an assassin to protect his people. Featuring Indigenous actors for the Indigenous characters and the engagement of Mohawk consultants in the making of the game, Thomas Deer from the Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center was brought in to help give Ratonhnhaké:ton a fully fleshed-out backstory. The development team also worked with the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk community to ensure the accuracy of the character, even hiring some of the residents to translate, voice act, and sing in the game, making “Assassins Creed 3” an example of how to create Indigenous characters with respect and with Indigenous people involved.

For an educational and entertaining game worth playing with cultural aspects done completely right, “Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna)” shines. It is a puzzle platform game produced, written, voice acted, and featuring the Iñupiaq People in Alaska. Creatively driven by the Cook Inlet Tribal Council, it is the story of a traditional Iñupiaq tale narrated by their people in their language. Players take control of an Iñupiaq girl and her arctic fox, playing through the traditional story to help her people. Along the way, players collect ‘cultural insights’ that consist of documentary videos of Iñupiak people telling stories and sharing their culture’s wisdom. The game has millions of downloads, has won multiple awards, is discussed in university classrooms, and is played in public elementary

schools around the world with teaching guidelines. “Never Alone” shows what is possible when video games are not simply about Indigenous Peoples, but are made by them.

Elizabeth LaPensée (Anishinaabe and Métis) is an award-winning designer, writer, and artist who uses her knowledge to create video games for Indigenous Peoples, such as “When Rivers Were Trails,” a stunning adventure game where players journey through the past and learn about the land and the effects of colonization from Indigenous wisdom and insight. In her game, “Thunderbird Strike,” players control a thunderbird that is protecting Turtle Island from the oil industry. LaPensée now works as Narrative Director for Twin Suns, a global video game studio.

Ashlee Bird (Western Abenaki) is an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame and a game designer. Her work in Native American studies and gaming theory aims to shift the nature of video games and decolonize them. Her games, “One Small Step” and “Full of Birds,” do not focus on collecting money or fighting enemies like other games do. Instead, they are full of messages of what decolonization can look like and the beauty in Indigenous art.

There are many more game developers and creators sharing cultural wisdom, portraying Indigenous characters with respect, and fostering representation. These are only some of the games worth playing, alone and with friends. Video games invite people to experience new and diverse stories and have interactive experiences where they can be in control of something new. Representation is not the end goal, however. Indigenous Peoples can and should be involved in the creation of the game.

I still play games with my childhood friend. Nowadays we can’t stay up as late as we used to, but we still do our best to find time to play a quick match together. Lately, it’s been “Call of Duty,” and Talon, a First Nations character, remains one of our favorite choices. We’re transported back to 2010 and can see ourselves up on the screen again, an Indigenous character being controlled by two chi’zhii kids.

Chad Valdez (Diné) is a 2023–2024 Cultural Survival Indigenous Writer in Residence.

Image of gameplay from “Oregon Trail.”

NANA, WINTSOOKXA IJK JA MAAYTÏK?

HOW DOES THAT STORY GO?

Maaxïnkojm/Santa María Ocotepec is the name of my town. Located in the Sierra Mixe in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, it is a community on the slopes of the sacred Cempoaltepetl Mountain with a population of approximately 300 people. Maaxïnkojm is situated among banana groves and citrus trees; it is a town with a lot of vegetation because it rains almost all year round. The language we speak is Ayöök and belongs to the Mixe-Zoque linguistic family. Our language variant is spoken in at least 14 communities in the area. Like many other Indigenous languages, it faces displacement to Spanish, though there is interest and effort on the part of many people to transmit the language through reading and writing. The only school in the community goes to the primary level, so I left at the age of 12 to continue my studies. I now live in the city of Oaxaca and return to my town whenever possible.

My mother and father worked outside the community, so I grew up with my grandparents and older sister. I enjoyed living in Maaxïnkojm, perhaps partly because I didn’t know anywhere else. It was my place. Accompanying my late grandfather Zacarías, I learned some field activities

such as cutting coffee, weeding the cornfield, and picking corn. More than helping him with the work, I think what he liked was my company. Our day in the field was spent planting trees, cutting bananas, or setting traps for the gophers that ate our yuccas. At noon, we ate xekmët (stuffed tortillas) that my grandmother had sent us and drank coffee.

With my grandmother, Juana, I learned other skills, such as tying a load of firewood and how to scream to scare away the hawks that were carrying away the chicks, or how to scare away the parakeets during times of rain. She taught me how to grind on her metate (mealing stone); she said I should learn to make my own tortillas. She would review my schoolwork, and when she made tamales, she gave me one of her platanillo leaves and told me to use it as a flag and march around the house. She was also the one who warned me about how risky it could be to swim deep in the river or climb a tree to try to cut some fruit.

My grandmother has a strong character and would scold us when we didn’t do our homework or spent too much time playing. “You must study because that’s why your parents work hard,” she told us. She reviewed our assignments with us and said that we should be prepared for what the teacher would ask in class. “It is very embarrassing if the teacher asks something and you don’t know the answer,” I remember her saying. She remembers perfectly what one of the first pages of her second-year book said, and even though she doesn’t know the meaning of

Screenshots from Kumoontun App. Photos courtesy of Kumoontun social media.

Marco Antonio Martínez Pérez (AYÖÖK/MIXE)

Marco Antonio Martínez Pérez showcasing his app, Kumoontun.

Photo by Zitlali Martíne for kumoontun.org.

many of those words in Spanish, she can still recite it from beginning to end.

I am very impressed by my grandmother’s memory. When telling stories, she shares details that transport us to that time and place and we can imagine the scenes. Sometimes she seems to wander off topic, but it actually gives us greater context of what was happening. “Jämïkxawe’e tö’k jayï tsyëë’n…” (“There a person came out”), my grandmother suddenly begins while we are cutting coffee at her ranch. Then she shares about some people who were going to cut pöptsï’ïp (a type of herb) from the mountain, but they did not offer anything to the Earth for the cutting, and then the Poj (a being that inhabits and protects the mountain) would appear, and the people had to manage to free it. She concludes her story with the lesson, “That is why they say that when someone cuts that quelite (wild greens), you must offer something to the Earth.”

What are the Maaytïk?

Maaytïk are stories that narrate an event from the past and are almost always accompanied by advice or a lesson. The stories have no authorship and may have multiple versions, such as stories about the origin of the town or some character in the community. Many of us can tell stories, but not all of us have the ability to delve into the details of places, smells, and sensations. Oy maajtykpata, we say to refer to those people who are good at telling these stories. Maaytïk have been passed down from generation to generation; what my grandmother tells was told to her by her mother or grandmother. There are also many Maaytïk that she says she does not remember who she heard them from. As linguist Yásnaya Aguilar (Mixe) says, the support of oral tradition is in memory.

In a quest to document the language of our community, in 2018, we designed the mobile application, Kumoontun. In addition to creating an app that would use our language, we wanted to be able to transmit our experiences and the stories that are part of our oral tradition. So, we decided to integrate videos with recordings of community members sharing some of their stories to be preserved within the app. This presented many challenges—selecting the people and stories to include, recording and editing the materials, and, most complicated, storing the information. The solution we came to was to include six audio stories, three from the oral tradition that were stories that we knew in the family from the Maaytïk, and three we hadn’t heard before, which were produced by Engracia Pérez and Zitlali Martínez.

In 2019, one year after the launch of the Kumoontun app, we transcribed the audio and published “Ayöök Stories” as a PDF that brought together the six stories with links to the audio. This was possible with the support of the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples. The audio recordings and the book serve as support materials during Ayöök literacy workshops aimed at strengthening our language.

From the first version of Kumoontun in 2018 to now, it has been a time of much learning and reflection on our work and using digital tools to spread our language. We have identified areas of improvement, successes, and challenges for subsequent projects.

Today, I observe with great enthusiasm initiatives in different languages in different places supported by digital tools that document and disseminate the knowledge from oral traditions. Speakers of Indigenous languages are posting videos on TikTok and uploading content to their YouTube channels, using Zoom to teach online classes, and making films in their communities, among other ventures. At the same time that these projects are becoming more visible in an increasingly digital world, I think it is also important to reinforce the Maaytïk from the spaces in which they were originally told and transmitted to us. When I think about my grandmother wanting to tell me again a story that I have heard since childhood, I think about her memory and her ability to tell things and about the pleasure it gives her that someone is interested in listening. That’s why I often ask her followup questions: “And then what happened?” “Where did that happen?” “What were those people like?” Sometimes I approach her and start the conversation: “Nana, wintsookxa ijk ja maaytïk?” Nana, how does that story go?

Marco Antonio Martinez Perez (Ayöök) is from Santa Maria Ocotepec, Oaxaca, Mexico. He is a speaker of Ayöök and co-founder of Kumoontun A.C., which seeks to generate spaces and didactic materials that enable the strengthening and dissemination of the Ayöök language. He is also a collaborator at Rising Voices and a member of the Network of Indigenous Language Digital Activists in Latin America.

Children learning Ayöök on the Kumoontun App.

Photo courtesy of Kumoontun social media.

INDIGENIZING SPACES THROUGH VIRTUAL REALITY IN SOUTH AFRICA

Wisaal Abrahams (CAPE MALAY)

The age of the merging of the human experience with technology is upon us; that inevitable slope of what is produced by the mind intertwined with a soul vs. the mind of a machine taught by a soul. As a 32-year-old visual artist/activist from Cape Town, I feel the century’s urge to create at the speed of light and an urgent shift in the way we pursue our collective healing, made more pressing following the devastating impact that 300 years of colonization and 46 years of Apartheid has had on the people of South Africa. Many people, however, are wary of the latest advancements in the tech space, of who controls the data and the profits, and what the long term impact will be on us as a global society—a society that is already struggling to save our planet from greed and warring destruction. This is a fair and valid fear to be upheld by the cautionary naysayers. I, however, hold a different opinion of where this age of tech can lead us to. And when I say “us,” I am referring to the Indigenous Peoples of the world, the people of soil and sky whose blood and realities have been scattered around the wasteland of colonial conquest and imperial sport. I refer to our people who work tirelessly to uplift and safeguard our identities, and like any child born from genocidedrenched land, who desperately desire the connection and creative economy to be able to live these hard-won identities into a safe and secure future.

For the Alter, For the Alchemists

Wisaal Abrahams

It’s all us. We—the nobodies and somebodies of this world, the lions and eagles, Gods and Goddesses, tribes and mystics, the tears and claws, the blood and beauty. It’s all us.

I find my way to the temple.  You crawled. We are together, but we pray alone.  We pray for the ones who have been here and for the ones on their way. This temple is for us.  We made this a temple. We sit on the steps and laugh Because it is all us. Then we leave to know, to begin we must end. To the world we are both, a stranger, and a friend.

So, where do we truly begin? Our humble collective called ManVrou (an Indigenous word to Cape Town meaning a masculine woman, used to derogatively describe a butchpresenting womxn), has embarked on a journey to uplift the Indigenous identities that have been destroyed and birthed by the colonial hand in Afrasia. The goal of all our projects, or rather, the golden thread weaving through everything we produce, is the creation of self-esteem for the user and audience. After many years of research into my own identity as a Queer Cape Malay artist and activist, I have come to realize that the production of self-esteem is crucial to navigating the layout of one’s internal and external worlds; that the presence of this elusive selfesteem could be the life preserving factor when struggling to survive the chaos of post-colonial realities in the midst of corrupt governments, and even more concerning, the local male psyche regarding safety and the disabling economic factors that carry all of this in the balance. Where is the time and space to develop one’s inner character and relationship to something bigger than our world? How do we transcend the limitations of our world? How do we envision a world where we are culturally represented, economically equal, creatively free, and where we can design structures that cater to the Indigenous gaze and counter the gentrification of our land? Enter the age of

Photos courtesy of Wisaal Abrahams.

Launch of “The Thrall Dialogues,” a biannual dialogue series hosted by ManVrou at the Castle of Goodhope.

virtual reality, or, as I argue, a welcomed strategy to our losing battle with cultural and land erasure across the globe.

What is the safeguarding and revitalization of Indigenous Traditional Knowledge through technology? My team utilizes the art of filmmaking and world-building applications to realize and create virtual spaces that can be used to educate people on the realities of the forgotten people. We began by taking an interest in our local museums, navigating what it feels like to be within a flagship heritage space such as The Castle of Goodhope, the educationally supportive Iziko Museums of South Africa, the elegantly entrepreneurial spirit of the Koena Institute, or the purposefully cluttered brilliance of the Cape Heritage Museum. Next, we began speaking to academics about the important work they are doing in the fields of emancipatory research, museology, and sociology, and held dialogues with these experts on the topics of genocide, legacy, economics, and bloodlines. Realizing that it takes a collective effort to understand and navigate a complex issue took us a step further in attaining clarity in the realm of worldbuilding and served as an imperfect way to gather the truth. Our third step, which I believe should be an ongoing pursuit of every social entrepreneur, is to maintain the relationships of our contemporaries in the arts; to participate in community affairs, attend the birthdays of fellow activists, to consistently network for other like-minded individuals, to break the barriers of ageism, sexism, and homophobia, to, dare I say, evolve. To reimagine a world requires the risk of inclusivity at every cost: “Nothing for us without us.”

If not for the honorable bonds of my colleagues, much of this attempt to run at the pace of tech would be impossible. Between Nabilah Khan, who is our project manager/ producer, and Kyle Donald Marais, our immersive technology collaborator, the ideation process gets held and cared for till the walls go up. Coproducing across the racial line in South Africa possesses its own challenges, but none that our collective has not been able to face and triumph over. Our generation sits perfectly in the balance of enjoying the surf of a late July swell at Muizenberg Beach and managing the rational fear of sharks potentially gliding beneath us. We are here to create something new and we have prioritized our mental health and our ability to dream, thus creating a foundation of care and consideration when collaborating on different economic footings.

Our millennial generation has been firm on implementing the notion that it will take the radical inclusion of a truly intersectional team to envision the world of our futures. The crucial question regarding tech in the Indigenous space is whether we will ever have economic access and support to produce in this field. When trying to promote

the importance of this form of technology to the various museum spaces, our biggest challenge was emphasizing how it could make these ethnographic spaces more relevant to the youth. We need to speak to the next generation and there is too much to cover. There is too much to read about, too much to imagine, too much to mourn, too much to see, too much to unsee. If we truly want to educate the next generation on anything about the past in the hopes that we can better design a future for ourselves, we should be considering world-building applications and the advancements in immersive technologies like 360-degree sound. With so much on our plate already, what is another avenue of the unknown? And as I always try to remind myself, if we are indeed standing at the precipice of creating at the speed of light, this alarmingly large backlog of progress doesn’t seem so overwhelming after all.

The ManVrou Mantra

Wisaal Abrahams

Create a beautiful world with me, One, where every psyche is free. Adorn yourself and feel safe, at last. Tell the truth, and don’t fear the past. Welcome new and healthy relationships, Find and close every tap that drips. Know, that ugly is a state of mind. Do not leave your soul behind. You are whole.

Wisaal Abrahams (Cape Malay) is a creative producer, visual artist, and coach.

ManVrou Collective’s reorientation of Afrasia and its colonial outposts that led to Cape Town’s mixed heritage.

NAAPU NTOMONOK

Supporting Samburu Women in Kenya Through an App

Lilian Nguracha Balanga (Samburu) is from the traditionally pastoralist community of Samburu in the North Rift in north-central Kenya. The community moves from place to place in search of pasture and water but now also does some small-scale organic farming. In Samburu culture, wildlife stewardship is entrusted to women, who share with their community where wildlife and other resources are most prominent. Four years ago, Nguracha founded Women Conserve, a grassroots organization based in Samburu that works to elevate women’s leadership and voices in environmental conservation through providing access to education and tools to protect their animals and local environments. She continues that work through

the development of the Naapu Ntomonok (Uplifting Women) App.

Only about 60 percent of people in Kenya have access to safe drinking water; this percentage is significantly lower in rural areas. Women are primarily responsible for collecting the water and often have to travel significant distances to access water sources, which are stressed and unevenly distributed due to Kenya’s arid and semiarid climate. Nguracha identified an opportunity to harness the power of technology to turn the burdensome chore of collecting water into an empowering experience for Indigenous women.

Samburu women have always used their Traditional Knowledge to identify water resources, but climate change has brought prolonged droughts to the North Rift region, making clean water harder to find and intensifying water conflicts. The poor quality of the water used for drinking also causes many diseases affecting people and animals. The Naapu Ntomonok App contains satellite maps that help the women mark the boundaries of their territories and identify areas where clean water is available. The app will also help users locate mobile markets to sell and purchase livestock, and contains maps for hospitals and local medical clinics, wildlife migration routes, water sources, and other critical resources. Most importantly, the app seeks to promote a sense of ownership over Traditional Knowledge and the Samburu language, as it will only be accessible to community members. Cultural Survival’s Indigenous Rights Radio Coordinator, Shaldon Ferris (Khoisan), recently spoke with Nguracha.

CS: Please tell us about Women Conserve.

Lilian Nguracha Balanga: Women Conserve is championing women to be great leaders and conservationists. As we know, the people here in Samburu are pastoralists. Women’s voices are very limited in anything that they are doing, in any decision-making, in any enforcement. I came up with

Lilian Nguracha Balanga. Photo courtesy of Lilian Nguracha Balanga.

that small, grassroots organization to champion the voices of women about the issues affecting them. They are speaking out by using their traditional ways on the issues affecting them, especially gender-based violence, the violation of animals [and] of their natural resources, and also in protecting the environment.

CS: How did you get into tech?

LNB: Last year I went to Canada, and I also joined the Indigenous Hackathon. One of my friends, Diana Mastracci Sanchez, from the GEO Indigenous Alliance, introduced me to the group, and I joined the training. I wanted the people, the Samburu women, the Samburu youth, to share their stories, their skills, and their knowledge in the Samburu language, to use that technology to map out the dispensaries where the women go to access medicine and give birth, the fertile lands they can cultivate, and the markets. Water is life. I wanted more easy access to water by all community members and their animals, but most importantly, for women to walk fewer kilometers in search of water.

CS: Please tell us about the Naapu Ntomonok Samburu App.

LNB: We are still developing the app. The Samburu people move from one place to another. I wanted them to use that app to share their traditional stories, to map the fertile areas, the farming areas. [As] they move from one place to another, the markets also move. Women in the community learn through word of mouth where the markets are opening and sometimes travel for days to reach them, only to find that the market has already closed or moved to a new location. This leaves them losing both time and potential income.

Traditionally, they’ve been using donkeys to track where people live. But in the Naapu Ntomonok App, they will use their traditional language to map the places they want to go, to map the medicine dispensaries where the women go to seek medical attention and also give birth. They can use that app to map fertile lands. They can use that app to map water points. They can use that app to map the hills where they can go pray. They can go see the sacred trees. They can also use that app to know where the animals are, the animal corridors, and where the wildlife corridor passes. The presence or disappearance of particular insects and birds and their songs indicate weather changes. The flowering or shading of leaves from trees are signs of short rains on the way. Changes in wind intensity and directions tell us about the coming rains or droughts and indicate possible directions to migrate to for pastures.

CS: How did the idea for this app come about?

LNB: I wanted to bring the science part of it and the Traditional Knowledge part of it together. In science and technology, Indigenous people are left out. When I went to Canada last year, I was given a chance to present and I

told the audience how Indigenous Peoples are being left out and exploited by technology. Investments need to be made in tech projects that incorporate Indigenous Traditional Knowledge. Technology impacts many lives and these platforms have to be very simple, accessible, and usable to the people because, at the end of the day, the people will benefit from them.

Women are the ones who are left at home. When my husband goes to water the cows, I stay at home. We wanted to make this app a tool for women. First, we wanted to [pilot test it]. It’s a new thing, it’s not being used yet. We first wanted to see the impact of it. Then, slowly, we will make it accessible to more women, men, and youth. We are still developing it. I am also not doing it alone; I have people who are also supporting me. I’m not good at technology, actually. I am a development person, but I am also learning so much. I just really appreciate that aspect of life. We are around 45 percent done, and we really need a lot of support.

When I went to Canada, I really learned a lot of things. I learned how people are using space to enhance agriculture. The women here are doing a lot of agriculture. We are trying to use space observation to enhance agriculture by checking the rain, working with the meteorological department, and working with the agriculture department to obtain very good seeds.

CS: What is the role of Indigenous Peoples in shaping Earth observation applications such as this one?

LNB: Indigenous Peoples are very important, and their role is critical in any space. Their traditional logistics are still intact, and if we can tap them and use them in the best way with them, not just taking the idea from them and running away, but strengthening them so that they can still own their process . . . our participation and our knowledge [can] play a critical role.

The Naapu Ntomonok App contains satellite maps that will help Samburu women mark the boundaries of their territories and identify where clean water, wildlife, and markets are located.

THE STORYWEAVER ORIGIN STORY

An Online Platform Designed to Get a Book Into Every Child’s Hand in Their Mother Tongue

Verónica Aguilar (MIXTEC, CS STAFF)

Many Indigenous languages do not have a large canon of written literature, and because of that, they are often and wrongly referred to as oral languages. Every Indigenous culture has its own form of literature and means of conveying knowledge through its language; most Indigenous languages have had a written form, often with a non-alphabetical system that was eradicated by colonization. In recent decades, many Indigenous Peoples have resumed their written tradition, either through recovering their ancient writing systems or by adapting to the alphabet of the colonial language dominant in their region. For modern Indigenous people, having a body of literature in our Indigenous language has become a central focus in the process of strengthening our languages and defending our right to transmit them to future generations. One of the newer efforts to support the growth of written works in Indigenous languages is StoryWeaver, an open source platform from nonprofit publisher Pratham Books. Aiming at underrepresented languages, StoryWeaver offers a free online platform where users from any part of the world can

read, create, and translate stories to the compendium of written literature in their languages.

Purvi Shah and Amna Singh are Senior Director and Senior Manager, respectively, of the StoryWeaver platform. Shah says that StoryWeaver was born out of a desire to get a book into every child’s hands. “Most of the children’s books that were available at that time were very expensive and beyond the means of children who studied in public libraries. That was the reason we set up Pratham Books, so that we could make the storybooks affordable,” Shah explains. Pratham Books was established in 2004 in India, a country where more than 370 languages are spoken, so the challenge of reaching such a goal was significant. After publishing high quality, affordable books in different languages, an important conversation started among the staff: What would it truly take to get a book in every child’s hand in every language? Eventually, the publishers learned about Creative Commons licenses. “We were doing little things here and there to see what would happen if we freed the books from the chains of copyright. What could that really do for our readers? What could that mean for access? What would that mean for the child? And what would that mean for the community that was working with the child?” Shah recalls.

StoryWeavers’ homepage.

The public response was promising. "There were people who found a handful of our storybooks published on an open source platform called Scribd, and took it upon themselves to translate, and re-upload them on the platform. This showed us that there was a community that would be willing to stand by us if we wanted to make this dream of a book in every child's hand come true," Shah says. Now, in the open source platform, an editorial team works with freelance authors, illustrators, and translators to make these high quality books come together. The content “is inherently diverse because we work with illustrators and authors across the country. So their design styles and their own ethnic identities are reflected in those storybooks. That content would come to us in one or five languages, and then it gets amplified on the platform,” Singh says.

There are several ways of participating in StoryWeaver. A user can read a book online or save it to read offline later without losing the experience flipping the page. A teacher can download a PDF version to print and share in the classroom. People can translate a story to get a new book reusing the original design and images, either online or offline. Authors are welcome to create original stories and upload original images for free usage under the Creative Common licenses so others can read, translate, or reuse them. The Creative Common licenses open a wide range of possibilities for parents, authors, educators, translators, students, illustrators, and literacy programs.

People working with Indigenous languages have found StoryWeaver to be an invaluable source of solutions and ideas and have created new ways of taking advantage of the platform. Shah talks excitedly about a visit to the Triqui Peoples in Oaxaca, Mexico, with whom StoryWeaver partnered via the Endless Oaxaca Multilingüe project of the Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú. The Triqui “went beyond,” Shah says. “They actually took all assets from the platform— an image, text, a storybook—and then they created a whole literacy program around that one storybook. Until we visited and saw it in the classroom, we had no idea that this is how all the assets from the platform were being used so creatively by the teachers. There is no one, two, or three ways of using StoryWeaver. It is what you make of it.”

Other publishers outside of India, notably BookDash, the African Storybook Project, and Sub-Saharan Publishers, have added some of their best-selling books to StoryWeaver, which have now been translated into Indigenous Indian languages. India’s Gondi-speaking community has also managed to get books in their language through StoryWeaver. “They hadn’t ever seen their own identity reflected in a storybook. It was a moment of pride,” Singh says. Speakers of the Toto language, a critically endangered language in India, used the platform as a repository to archive their wisdom and language, which is down to its last 200 speakers.

StoryWeaver’s close attention to the user experience

has helped the platform to grow and reach more people. With teachers in mind, the team designed a virtual bookshelf to collect storybooks and have them readily available for the classroom. They also enabled translation on mobile devices. “Many of our [translating] partners didn’t have access to laptops, so we created that [for them],” Shah says. StoryWeaver also has phrase-level dictionaries available for a few Indigenous languages and even input tools that convert Latin characters into other scripts. “Digitizing a language or having an input tool is probably a very first step to make the language sustainable in the digital world,” Singh says. Currently, 225 of the 350 languages on the StoryWeaver platform—64 percent—are Indigenous.

Given the open nature of the platform, the team has made available a tool to red flag a story if users find anything inappropriate in the story or the images. Readers can also rate stories to showcase the best content. “We want to make sure that they come in, that they have a good experience reading and translating the story, and then they can take it to the child,” says Singh. “We do have representation in 300-plus languages, but we need more collaborations around high quality translation, more of those local tales from across geographies and across communities, and a better representation of that on the platform. We need philanthropic funding. That’s always the need. More partnerships are required so that high quality translation for children’s literature happens,” Shah says.

DECOLONIZING BIODIVERSITY STEWARDSHIP THROUGH INDIGENOUS COSMOLOGY

Lessons from the Misak Jardín Botánico Las Delicias in Colombia

and

Smoke rises and blends with wispy clouds in the Nuyapalø valley in the Guambía Reserve outside of Silvia, Cauca, Colombia. Within the circular Tulpa, or Casa de Pensamiento (Thinking House), corn and dream catchers hang over perpetually smoldering logs. The Misak Peoples are just over one percent of Colombia’s Indigenous population, and the vast majority live in the Guambía Indigenous Reserve. Within the reserve lies the Las Delicias Botanical Garden Association, a nonprofit founded in 1999 by Misak people, neighboring farmers, and allies interested in safeguarding biodiversity.

What started as an environmental effort has expanded in line with the Misak community’s focus on life as a tejido (weaving) to recuperate their culture by adapting conocimiento propio (Traditional Knowledge) of their systems of spirituality, food, medicine, education, and the economy, to the present. Edier Muelas Calambás, the grandson of the project’s co-founder, explains, “The Botanical Garden| is a living nature school that helps us move toward el buen

vivir (good living), which means to be in harmony with each person, the territory, and all of the spirits.”

The Misak people are Children of the Water. They have been in this region of what is now Cauca, Colombia long before it was known as such, born from the four lagoons that spring from the Páramo Las Delicias alpine tundra ecosystem. Misak cosmology is rooted in a profound connection with their ancestral territory; their higher power is the Piishímisak Kallim, the spirit of nature. The Misak community is well regarded across Latin America for their focus on transferring ancestral wisdom to the younger generations. Las Delicias Botanical Garden is pioneering this effort by recovering the practices that were nearly lost as a result of the region’s tragic history, beginning in 1535 with the Spanish conquest. Enduring centuries of oppression from colonial landholders, the community was forced into slavery within a feudalistic system through the 1960s. Sabedora propia (traditional healer) Mamá Luz says, “the colonizers arrived, they treated my grandparents poorly; they called them Indios, they destroyed native plants and created a slavery system. My grandfather had to spend four days working for the patrón (landholder), and only had one day to work his land.”

The ability to reside on and steward the biodiversity of ancestral land is fundamental to the Misak people’s ability to connect with their cosmology. Lorenzo Tumiña Calambás, coordinator of Las Delicias Botanical Garden, explains, “there was a war on this land against colonizers. Many people died, and we were able to recuperate the territory through our organizational power.” Calambás’ grandfather, Javier Calambás, repurchased their farm in San Fernando in 1963, creating a model for the recuperation of Indigenous territories across all of Colombia. “As a result of their efforts,” Edier explains, “we have generations focused on protecting our territories and taking care of the Traditional Knowledge of Indigenous communities.”

Between 1990 and 2005, much of the Guambía territory became embroiled with opium poppy cultivation, leading to armed conflict in the region. As a result of aerial spraying, Edier recalls that “the community faced a food crisis because glyphosate killed many plants and seeds and tainted our water supply.” Former Misak governor, Floro Tunubalá, transitioned the regional economy from opium poppy cultivation to pisciculture. Today there are approximately

Alex Reep

Edier Muelas Calambás (MISAK)

Misak women from San Fernando preparing potatoes to feed a communal construction crew.

550 rainbow trout stations in the Guambía Reserve, which have other environmental consequences, including the loss of native river fish species and water contamination.

Along with transforming the land, the colonizers forced their religion, health system, education, and economy on the Misak people. According to the grandson of the Botanical Garden’s co-founder, Edgar Muelas Calambás, “Our biggest issue locally is how western influence has changed the dynamics within our community—to our health, education, and economy. This changes our way of life and way of thinking to be more individualistic, which debilitates our connection with our territory. That causes harm to our forests, because some people treat nature like it doesn’t matter. In medicine, more and more pills are arriving and people take trips to the hospital, which decreases our use of our knowledge of medicinal plants. In our educational system, religious influence has changed our way of thought. We are fighting to maintain our knowledge through educación propia (traditional education) as a means of strengthening all other practices of our society.”

The Las Delicias Botanical Garden Project

The Las Delicias Botanical Garden project began in 1999 with the purchase of a 70-hectare land parcel in the cloud forest of Riosucio. Between 2000 and 2004, the project was abandoned due to armed conflict in the area. The Colombian military bombed the forest, creating craters the size of city blocks. The founders of the Botanical Garden project were displaced from the territory and received threats that forced them to focus on individual survival, rather than communal development.

The violence nearly ended the Las Delicias Botanical Garden project as forest restoration activities became too dangerous. Years later, the younger generation took over and shifted the project’s focus. Edier says, “Originally, in 1999, the project was only focused on ecological conservation. But when we reactivated in 2016, we wanted to incorporate the cultural values of the cosmology of the Misak people. We started organizing meetings with shures and shuras (Elders) around the fire in our Tulpa to consider the problems we’re facing, like the contamination of our territory and the loss of our knowledge system. This pushed us to reflect on what we can learn from the old ways of life. We started to reconsider our Misak culture and to strengthen it through the Botanical Garden project.”

Indigenous communities’ role as stewards of global biodiversity has been under-acknowledged and undervalued for centuries. Colombia’s national legal system, developed by colonizers using a western legislative model, challenges the Misak community’s ability to gain formal recognition of their efforts. Being listed as an “environmentalist territory” or included in the national Network of Botanical Gardens could protect their land from industrial resource extraction and provide a stable income. However, the technical requirements to enroll are cost prohibitive.

Organizers of the Yell Ya communal seed house, supported by the Keepers of the Earth Fund, want to commercialize their seeds to expand native seed varieties, preserve genetic diversity, and earn additional income for the community. However, Edier explains, “in order to have the ability to commercialize our seeds, we would need a very technical registry. [This legal barrier] ignores the communal wisdom we were taught by our ancestors about how to care for native, clean seeds.”

The Misak community’s conocimiento propio is oriented around protecting nature while incorporating western science to bolster their efforts. Edier says, “science and conocimiento propio form a tejido that considers the life of all the plants, animals, nature, and humans without separation. Indigenous Peoples’ fight to be recognized for having their own science used for societal development is political. Our knowledge isn’t far from western science. We need space in government, ministries, and territorial administration without a barrier against our knowledge.”

Resistance against colonial oppression can take many forms. As a result of the Las Delicias, students study their native language, Namuy Wam. The local school teaches a curriculum based on the Misak Cosmovision, and native seed conservation is revitalizing the traditional food system and use of herbal medicine. The Las Delicias Botanical Garden has superseded the boundaries of a conventional “garden” project. The community members have created an alchemy of knowledge systems that use Misak cosmology to face the modern challenges of nutritional insecurity, economic instability, language extinction, biodiversity loss, and climate change. “We’re trying to take the Traditional Knowledge of our grandparents and put it in the present while evolving and replicating it. We are focused on keeping the essence of being Indigenous alive,” Lorenzo says.

In 2020 and 2023, Las Delicias Botanical Garden received a Keepers of the Earth Fund (KOEF) grant to support their work.

Harvest of greens from Las Delicias Botanical Garden in Colombia.

Keeping Culture Alive in Mali

GEORGES DOUGNON

Diana Pastor (MAYA KI’CHE’, CS STAFF)

Mali is a diverse country where Indigenous Peoples have successfully managed to maintain cultural cohesion, but also face a number of major challenges—most pressingly, the destruction of their cultural heritage and the environment. Many of Mali’s Indigenous languages and traditional cultural practices like the Songhoi Holo horè (dance of the possessed) or the Touareg Tinafig script are little known or appreciated. The presence of Griots (guardians of the word and knowledge within Malian communities) keeps some activities alive, but many other cultural practices and touchstones, like traditional musical instruments, are disappearing.

Mali is also a mineral rich country, and mining is threatening the health and territories of many Indigenous Peoples. In the face of such challenges, there are people who are working to raise awareness to the value and beauty of the country. One of them is Georges Dougnon (Dogon), Cultural Survival’s new Capacity Building Program Assistant, who was raised in an environment where the culture and values of his People, the Dogon, were important. “I learned that every individual and every family contributes to the education of their children. Your child is my child, your friend’s father is your father, his mother is your mother,” he says.

For the Dogon, the right of the ancestors is sacred, and so is the Ginna (the lineage where the Elder is the wiseman). Georges’ parents were farmers and the relationship with the land was important. “I went to school, but I also went to the school of life, because that’s part of every child’s culture in Dogon Country,” he says. Georges’ childhood experiences inspired him to pursue a career in education. He taught for over six years in Mali and Italy, where he also completed his master’s degree in Governance, Intercultural Relations and the Peace Management Process at the University of Siena in Italy. “Education was very

important to me because it allowed me to discover more than my small village, to discover the world and to learn from it,” he says.

After returning from Italy, Georges created Educ4peace, an organization that enables children and young people in his community to go to school. He also went to the United Nations to lobby for better education in Mali. He has worked in Kenya and Zambia in community engagement projects, and just before joining Cultural Survival, Georges worked in Abidjan, Ivory Coast as a consultant.

Georges connects his passion for education with his pride in being Indigenous. “It’s a source of pride for me to identify myself as Dogon and to show this by wearing my traditional clothes. This same pride has driven me to work to safeguard my culture, its crafts, its art, and above all, its cultural heritage. It’s not always easy to see your people facing such difficulties as terrorism or climate change. Hundreds of families have had to move and leave their land and homes to the big cities. Villages have been destroyed. But that won’t stop my commitment to showcasing the richness of my community and contributing to the resilience of my culture.”

Georges says he joined Cultural Survival because “it means living, learning, and contributing to the rights of Indigenous Peoples. I would like to learn more about Indigenous Peoples and their cultural wealth, but also from my colleagues, who are wonderful people. I want to bring my knowledge as a Dogon and receive [knowledge] from every person and every meeting.” Georges names Nelson Mandela and Amadou Hampaté Ba as two of his greatest sources of inspiration. “It was from [Hampaté] that I learned that the greatest and best school is the school of life, that each person is an inexhaustible source of knowledge. That’s why we say that an old man dying is like a burning library.” He adds, “I cannot forget Ablo Ba, my first teacher and my father, who taught me that in order to know where to go, you need to know where you’re from.”

UNVEILING THE ARTISTRY OF HOZHO

A JOURNEY INTO DINÉ SILVERSMITHING WITH PHILBERT BEGAY

Tia-Alexi Roberts (NARRAGANSETT, CS STAFF)

Philbert Begay (Diné/Navajo) learned the century-old art of Navajo silversmithing from his father, Richard Begay, who learned from his own grandfathers. Over time and through much experience, Begay emulated his father and evolved to become meticulous at creating hand-cut, overlaid, hand-stamped, and inlaid designs. The elder Begay imparted his knowledge to his son, beginning with tasks like polishing, buffing, and grinding, and cleanup, instilling in him the essential foundations of silversmithing. Begay explains, “I learned young to create using buffing polishing machines that modern silversmiths and goldsmiths use and that raised me up to that level where people see my work and say, ‘Wow, it’s so polished!’ [Yet], the foundation is still very traditional.”

The significance of traditional Navajo symbols and motifs are reflected in Begay’s silverwork, which showcases how certain elements connect to Navajo culture and history. “The symbols and creations are based on animals and places. The wind, the rain, the skies, the stars . . . something that is all harmonious, and together in the world. Everything is connected; that is the way it is and the way that we live,” he says.

Begay says that his process of creation relies on a word lived by his community: “Hozho,” meaning balance, harmony, and everything part of life. “When I design something, I think about that because my grandparents always told me to make it beautiful. That is what Hozho means. They always told me to carry my life that way. So when I create, I always try to put the word Hozho— harmony, balance—[into] everything that I create. That’s the basis of how I create my jewelry.”

He continues, “We are told to make things beautiful and harmonious. It’s that same word, Hozho, and that’s my philosophy on making artwork and creating. I see my work all over the world and I see people happy, I see them telling stories. It’s that connection that matters, and I believe that word makes things beautiful,

like I was told by my grandparents.” The sense of harmony and connection extends to collaboration with fellow artists. Begay recalls one such experience: “We created a silverpurse one time. Several silversmiths from different Native Tribes incorporated their own designs into a purse and it was auctioned off to charity. It was a really beautiful design that we created, so I do enjoy collaborating,” he says.

Begay says he can see the future of Navajo silversmithing evolving, both in terms of artistic expression and adapting to contemporary tastes and trends: “A lot of Native silversmiths are moving into modern techniques but the foundation is always traditional. Everything about it—creating, our histories, our stories—is always connected to tradition, but creating modern designs is not bad either. It helps connect people who see modern art because we are modern too, and we are still using our traditional techniques.”

One of the challenges facing Begay is the scarcity of opportunities for Indigenous artists. “I think the outlets for Indigenous artists are very limited where I am, in the Western part of the United States. Doing this event [the Cultural Survival Bazaar] and being able to share my work in Boston with Cultural Survival is another outlet and I appreciate that. Cultural Survival is another opening for Indigenous Peoples to show their work and explain their culture to people. It’s the connection that shows people that this is what we do and how we live, and this is the beauty we create, and that’s something that I love about it,” he says.

“Indigenous people sometimes just want to stay safe, but you have to get out there,” Begay continues. “I always tell my nephew, niece, and kids, go out there and go to school, go see the world. Some of them are very limited and want to stay where they’re at. [We need to remember that] we are beautiful, good people, and we have great cultural foundations that we live by. So I try to push them to go and do that.”

Visit the Cultural Survival Bazaar, July 20–21 in Newburyport, MA and July 27–28 in Tiverton, RI. bazaar.cs.org.

All photos courtesy of Philbert Begay.

Philbert Begay on his traditional homelands in Arizona.

THANK YOU FOR LEADING US FOR THE PAST FOUR-PLUS YEARS, GALINA!

With deep gratitude and endless appreciation for your love and dedication.