Anyone interested in the Digital Humanities will sooner or later come across AI. Perhaps you’ve already played around and asked an AI program to compose a Valentine’s poem for you, or a painting of John Oliver marrying a cabbage. But have you ever thought about how Indigenous methodologies can inform our practices with AI?

UO’s Professor Ashley Cordes (Coquille; affiliated with Indigenous Studies; English; DH; Environmental Studies) has! In “Gifts of Dentalium and Fire: Entwining Trust and Care with AI,” Professor Cordes outlines potential uses a combination of blockchain and AI might offer for indigenous communities and help them manage their businesses, boost Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. Cordes starts with the Coquille focus on ‘trust and care’ to assess the responsible implementation of these technologies. Her paper also delves into the implications of considering AS as non-human kin.

Interested in this kind of research? Good news, there is more! Professor Cordes’ paper was a contribution to the Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Working Group. This group has put forth the position paper “The Indigenous Protocol and AI” and investigates AI using Indigenous methodologies, asking questions such as how Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies can enrich international concerns of AI in society; how we envision our future with AI being used to the benefit of all beings – human and more-than-human; how Indigenous perspectives can inform what out relationship with AI ought to be.

The paper presents a large array of voices engaging with these and similar questions, taking care not to conflate the various tribal affiliations, ways of knowing, and cultural specificities into one constructed homogenous Indigeneity. The position paper uses an Indigenous understanding of protocol as a collection of guidelines for opening, maintaining and evolving relationships, whether that is with other humans, other more-than-human beings or assumed-to-be-inanimate entities.

The organizers of the Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Working Group are:

Jason Edward Lewis (Hawaiian and Samoan), Professor at the University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary, at Concordia University (Canada); Angie Abdilla (Trawlwoolway), the founder & CEO of Old Ways, New; Dr. ʻŌiwi Parker Jones (Kanaka Maoli), a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford working on biological and artificial intelligence in the departments of Neuroscience and Engineering; Researcher, Writer, Historian and Dr. Noelani Arista (Kanaka Maoli), Professor at the Hawaiian and American History at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa; Suzanne Kite (Oglala Lakota), an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, composer and PhD student at Concordia University and Research Assistant for the Initiative for Indigenous Futures; and Michelle Lee Brown (Euskaldun, Lapurdi – Miarrtiz), Professor at Washington State University of Indigenous Knowledge, Data Sovereignty, and Decolonization in the Digital Technology and Culture Program

This list does not include participants. See their website for a full list of the people involved.