AI and Indigenous Wisdom: A Powerful Collaboration
▼ Summary
– Suzanne Kite’s AI art installations use a Lakota framework of data sovereignty, requiring viewer consent and reciprocal interaction rather than passive data extraction.
– Kite emphasizes creating small, intimate AI models with full transparency, rejecting the pursuit of technological advancement for its own sake.
– Native artists challenge Western tech binaries, proposing intelligence systems based on relationships and refusal rather than extraction and surveillance.
– Kite’s installations, like *Wičhíŋčala Šakówiŋ* and *Ínyan Iyé*, integrate Lakota traditions and more-than-human intelligence through embodied, interactive experiences.
– Other artists, like Raven Chacon and Nicholas Galanin, explore consent-based technology and cultural memory through sound, performance, and mechanical installations.
The intersection of artificial intelligence and Indigenous knowledge systems is reshaping how we understand technology, consent, and cultural preservation. Artists like Suzanne Kite are pioneering installations that challenge Western assumptions about data ownership and machine learning, creating intimate, reciprocal systems rooted in Lakota principles.
Kite’s work rejects the notion of passive data collection, instead designing kinetic sculptures that demand physical engagement. “My models are small and personal, not about technological dominance but layered meaning,” she explains. Her installations, such as Wičhíŋčala Šakówiŋ (Seven Little Girls), embed sensors in a four-meter braid that translates movement into sound, grounding the performance in Lakota cosmology through star-aligned stones.
This approach contrasts sharply with mainstream AI, which often operates on extraction rather than relationship. Indigenous technologies have always existed, the question isn’t whether Native cultures contribute to innovation, but why they were ever excluded from the narrative. Artists like Kite, Raven Chacon, and Nicholas Galanin aren’t seeking inclusion in existing systems; they’re redefining what technology should be.
Chacon’s Voiceless Mass transforms architectural acoustics into a haunting dialogue between space and history, while Galanin’s Aáni yéi xat duwasáakw (I am called Land) interrogates automation’s collision with cultural memory. His deconstructed totem poles in I think it goes like this (pick yourself up) further expose how settler colonialism disrupted Indigenous data systems, carved not in binary code but in wood.
These works collectively ask: What if intelligence required consent? What if refusal, not extraction, was the default? By centering reciprocity and embodied knowledge, Indigenous artists are crafting a future where technology serves relationships, not the other way around.
(Source: Technology Review)
