Boozhoo News River Readers,

It’s a short work week for many folks due to the Canadian statutory holiday this past Monday. It’s also a season of adjusting our thermostats and pulling on our sweaters as the 🌡️ temperatures and the 🍂 leaves drop.

A friendly reminder our annual Indigenous youth scholarship application is open for the month of October.

PS: Did you know Animikii’s founder is also a musician? His latest track has cracked the top 10 on the Indigenous Music Countdown this week. Click to listen and up vote Binesi’s new track: Courage

Indigenous Data Sovereignty & Artificial Intelligence

The Big Picture: Global Indigenous Data Alliance asserts Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDSov) and Indigenous Data Governance (IDGov) with respect to Indigenous Peoples’ data, and applies these rights and protections to AI Technologies. This latest brief/communique from  GIDA, specifically addresses growing concerns over proliferation and prevalence of artificial intelligence, machine learning, across all sectors and impacting on Indigenous peoples wellbeing, lands, and communities. It aims to articulate the urgency and needs around IDSov/IDGov and AI development and deployment; foreground existing IDSov/IDGov frameworks, principles, and standards; and call for implementation of IDSov/IDGov within AI systems.

Why we think it matters: For Indigenous Peoples, the unbridled application of AI systems without regard for IDSov and IDGov threaten the wellbeing of Indigenous Peoples, lands (including seas, waters, and skies), and communities. Asserting Indigenous data rights within AI systems provides one avenue to mitigate at least some of these risks.

What it means: Global, regional, and community-specific IDSov and IDGov standards, including the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, apply to AI development and use. These concepts and principles are crucial to ensuring that Indigenous communities determine how the benefits of AI are realised and the harms mitigated. GIDA affirms the growing opportunities for Indigenous Peoples to lead the design, development, and governance of AI technologies. Further, GIDA calls on governments, organizations, and corporations to resource and support Indigenous-led AI initiatives grounded in community frameworks and self-determination. 

Read the full communique: GIDA Brief on IDSOV and AI

More curated reads

Indigenous innovators in the US and Canada - building upon traditional knowledge and technology to meet the social, environmental, and economic goals of their communities
The Indigenous Communities Fellowship at MIT Solve is officially open for submission! Solve is looking for tech innovators like you who are making a positive impact in Indigenous communities across the United States and Canada. You can submit a solution to the Fellowship for a chance to be selected as a Solver and access over $1.4 in available prize funding. Past solutions have included a video game in the Ojibwe language, an Indigenous tele-behavioral health app, and modern agricultural systems with ancestral roots. Solve interprets technology very broadly, understanding how essential traditional knowledge and technologies are, and is open to all business models: for-profit, for-purpose, and everything in between. Deadline to submit: November 2, 2026. 

What AI Cannot See - Indigenous Legal Knowledge and the Future of Legal Scholarship

When we say that Artificial Intelligence can assist with legal research, legal reasoning, or the production of legal knowledge, a prior question deserves far more attention than it receives: whose law do these systems know? Large language models acquire their legal competence from text: judgments, statutes, treaties, journal articles, and regulatory instruments that have been digitised, indexed, and made computationally accessible at scale. The composition of these corpora is neither neutral nor complete. The legal traditions of Indigenous Peoples and of much of the non-Western world are characteristically oral, relational, etched in carvings, seasonal, performative, and place-based. Their normative content lives in narrative, genealogy, ceremony, and the deliberations of communities; their authority is constituted through relationships between people, land, ancestors, and the non-human world. An AI system built to learn from text does not merely fail to locate such law. It is architecturally incapable of recognising legal knowledge in the forms in which that law exists.

New digital repository opens Pacific research to communities

Pacific research at Waipapa Taumata Rau (University of Auckland) is now available through a new digital repository designed to share scholarship with communities across Aotearoa and the wider Pacific. Measina o le Pasefika | Treasures of the Pacific brings together research in a searchable online platform for students, academics, communities and future generations. Pro Vice-Chancellor Pacific, Professor Fonoiā Jemaima Tiatia-Siau, launched the repository at the Fa'anānā Efeso Collins Space in the university's General Library on October 8. Ms Tiatia-Siau, who named the repository, described its role in preserving Pacific knowledge. "It's more than a digital repository," she said. "It is a living vessel of Pacific scholarship, connecting past, present and future generations while ensuring Pacific voices, identities, and ways of knowing, being and doing are preserved, celebrated and accessible for generations to come."

How Apple Puts Indigenous Languages on the iPhone Keyboard

To save endangered languages, tech companies like Apple are working with Indigenous communities to meet the next generation where they type. Chuck Hoskin Jr. fondly recalls watching a room full of Cherokee immersion students crowd around a screen to watch How to Train Your Dragon. Except Hiccup and Astrid weren't speaking English—the protagonists were speaking Cherokee, dubbed by voices from the local community. “They're hearing it in our mother tongue—that didn't happen a generation ago,” Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, tells WIRED. “We're a long way, thankfully, from rote classroom instruction and memorization to a world where kids can see the sort of creativity that sparks imagination and helps every kid become more articulate and literate.”

Guidelines for the Governance of Indigenous Peoples’ Data in Scholarly Publishing

This webinar introduces the new Guidelines for the Governance of Indigenous Data in Scholarly Publishing, which offer a hierarchical framework of implementation strategies tailored to diverse publishing contexts. The guidelines provide clear, actionable steps for integrating Indigenous rights and interests into manuscript submission, review, curation, and dissemination processes. We also highlight endorsements from major publishers and outline next steps for adoption and evaluation. These guidelines aim to support Indigenous scholars and communities in navigating the publishing landscape while ensuring that Indigenous data are protected, governed, and shared with purpose, authority, and intention.

Resources and opportunities

• Learn it: Introduction to CARE Data Principles and Indigenous Data Sovereignty

• Vote for it: Binesi’s new track: Courage - > on the Indigenous Music Countdown 

• Attend it: Tribal Data Sovereignty: A Legal Framework for Cultural Protections

• Deeper read: Lessons from indigenous communities on the secure and community-led use of offline knowledge sharing tools