AI and Indigenous Knowledge Systems

How Indigenous Communities Are Engaging with AI

By: Richard Murch

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The work of building a just relationship between artificial intelligence and Indigenous peoples is not a problem that can be solved and set aside.
It is an ongoing practice — a commitment to maintaining accountability, honoring relationships, data, attending to consequences across generations, and adjusting course when circumstances and communities require it.

It is, in this sense, the same work that Indigenous peoples have always done: the patient, determined work of ensuring that their communities survive and flourish in changing conditions, maintaining the connections to knowledge, land, and each other that make life worth living.

Those of us who are not Indigenous but who have benefited from the technological and economic systems that have extracted from Indigenous communities bear specific responsibilities in this work. Not the responsibility to lead — Indigenous communities will lead, and must lead, the transformation of the AI landscape into something that serves their flourishing.

But the responsibility to follow well: to use our technical skills, our political access, our economic resources, and our voices in service of Indigenous self-determination rather than our own comfort or advancement.

The Seven Generations Principle asks us to consider what kind of world we are building for those who will come after us. The answer we give, in the choices we make about AI development in the years immediately ahead, will echo forward into a future we cannot see but which will be shaped in part by what we do now.

The Indigenous communities who have preserved knowledge and culture across centuries of colonial disruption offer, in their survival and their insistence on self-determination, a form of wisdom that the world urgently needs.