Boozhoo News River Readers,

It’s Earth Day today, and the news cycle has offered up an abundance of critical Indigenous perspectives on ecological impacts and considerations about the development of AI. Animikii CEO Jeff Ward is also featured in another episode of APTN’s InFocus for a discussion about sovereign AI and data centres in proximity to Indigenous waters, lands and community.

This week’s stories include: 

• AI for climate: from technological solutions to relational accountability

• Indigenous Design and the Intelligence of Water

• A review of recent efforts in digitalization and application of endangered scripts

InFocus: What’s behind Canada’s ‘sovereign’ AI plan? 

The big picture: Prime Minister Mark Carney says Canada’s vision is “AI for all” — but what does he mean by that? And what are the costs–environmental and beyond–of AI data centres? Amid supposed threats of U.S. annexation and geopolitical instability, Canada is increasingly using the language of ‘sovereignty’ in its messaging about AI. 

Why it matters: At the same time, around half of its Sovereign AI Compute Strategy funding is dedicated to private sector investment. Across North America, AI data centres are also being built on or in proximity to Indigenous communities. According to Honor the Earth’s Data Centre Tracker, there are over 100 data centres located on or near Native lands. Now, as the AI infrastructure race continues, how are Indigenous Peoples responding to, resisting or reimagining AI?

Interview Guests: 

• Mél Hogan explores these questions in her research and on her podcast, The Data Fix. This week on InFocus, the associate professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Queen’s University joins me to break down Canada’s rush to build AI data centres.

• Last February, Animikii Indigenous Technology CEO Jeff Ward spoke about the hidden costs of AI for Indigenous communities at an AI Action Summit in Paris. He joins us again on InFocus to talk about the impact AI data centres could have on lands, waters and Indigenous communities.

What they’re saying: “If I were a policy maker I would be challenging these narratives a lot more, I would require a lot more evidence of the societal benefits, the promise of this incredibly costly venture. My sense is to approach this… much more carefully and historically grounded. Like we’ve been here before, why do we keep making the same mistakes and what futures does it foreclose if we invest in this vision.” - Mél Hogan.

“AI needs an immense amount of data, and when we think about Indigenous data, that’s directly tied to culture, to self-determination. So, if that data is including Indigenous knowledges and languages without safeguards, that data can be extracted and misused. And AI is accelerating and amplifying that extraction and misuse of data.” - Jeff Ward. 

Learn more: Tune into InFocus for the full conversation.

Curated Articles:

AI for climate: from technological solutions to relational accountability
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly framed as a key enabler of climate monitoring, modelling, adaptation, and mitigation. In this comment, I use “AI-for-climate” to refer to AI systems designed for these purposes. From optimizing energy use and improving predictive capacity to scaling adaptation planning and offering decision support, AI-for-climate holds considerable promise. Yet AI is not neutral. Like humans, it is shaped by the political, economic, and epistemological systems from which it emerges, and in which it is embedded. AI-for-climate thus risks reinforcing the dominance of Western societies, economies, and knowledges and reproducing the extractive relational dynamics that are driving climate destabilization in the first place. The reflections offered here are informed by long-standing critiques from Indigenous, decolonial, and climate justice literatures that trace how extractive dynamics are reproduced in digital, ecological, and political infrastructures including in the development and governance of AI. I draw on this scholarship to trace three recurrent and interrelated cultural patterns shaping AI-for-climate: (1) human exceptionalism, (2) technosolutionism and optimization, and (3) epistemic universalism. Collectively, these patterns narrow the scope of whose knowledge is treated as real and important, what kinds of intelligence are accounted for, and which climate futures are deemed possible and desirable.

UN Indigenous Forum Confronts War, Climate and AI
Hundreds of Indigenous delegates are meeting at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues to address immediate threats from war, climate change, and a rapid expansion of AI-enabled extraction on ancestral lands. The gathering highlights how green-energy projects and mineral rushes overlap with Indigenous territories, producing land-rights conflicts and dangerous environmental tradeoffs. Delegates also face geopolitical barriers, including visa restrictions for Global South representatives and repression of advocates in places like Russia. For data scientists and AI practitioners, the forum reframes technical work as entangled with data sovereignty, surveillance, consent, and the environmental footprint of extraction-driven models and sensors.

Indigenous Design and the Intelligence of Water
Water is not a passive element but a living intelligence. Alongside big tech, the Age of TEKnology—synthesizing traditional ecological knowledge with contemporary design—is arriving, offering a critical yet missing alternative to industrialized approaches. This epoch will not reject contemporary innovation, but redefine technology as an entity that coexists with and enhances natural systems rather than destroying them. My recent book, Lo—TEK Water, serves as a field guide for this time of TEKnologists—practitioners who apply TEK to solve environmental, agricultural, architectural, and social challenges. Indigenous water technologies have sustained human settlements for thousands of years. It’s time to explore contemporary architectural and ecological projects that integrate TEK into modern climate adaptation strategies, providing structured frameworks for integrating it into policy, planning, and education.

‘No accountability, no checks and balances, no responsibility’: how Indigenous peoples think about AI
Much of the current conversation about AI assumes uptake is inevitable, more technology means better outcomes and the main task is managing risk. But we asked Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people how they are encountering AI in their everyday lives, and a different picture started to emerge. Our Relational Futures project explores Indigenous sovereignty and the governance of AI. Relational Futures positions AI not as a standalone tool, but as part of a wider system that shapes relationships between people, institutions, data and Country. We have now reported our findings, and there are clear warnings about what happens when questions of accountability, harm and care are ignored. As one participant told us, AI comes with “no accountability, no checks and balances, no responsibility”.

AI can help protect threatened languages — but it can also exploit them

While racing to protect cultural knowledge from extraction and misuse, Indigenous innovators are developing AI and virtual reality tools to teach, preserve and carry their languages into the future. An Indigenous language holds community connection, generations of sacred knowledge, a unique worldview and cultural nuance. A language roots a speaker in the voice of their ancestors while giving strength to be a voice of the future. Yet, when it comes to our world of rapidly advancing technology and artificial intelligence, a language is also data. And Indigenous data, like land, must be fiercely protected. “There’s a huge interest in getting access to our [Indigenous] data, our content, simply because it’s unpoisoned by those language models,” says Michael Running Wolf, a Northern Cheyenne and Lakota computer engineer and researcher who’s working to revitalize Indigenous languages using virtual reality and AI, all while prioritizing Indigenous sovereignty. 

Updates from the Indigenous-Centred Knowledge Exchange

The Indigenous-Centred Knowledge Exchange is an initiative of SFU’s Faculty of Environment and CERi (Community Engaged Research initiative) with support from MITACS. During the first year of this initiative (2025-2026) we have completed two research projects with Indigenous partners. Understanding the Implications of LiDAR for Indigenous Data Sovereignty: British Columbia’s transition to open-access LiDAR data creates a critical governance paradox for the Ḵwiḵwa̱sut’inux̱w Ha̱xwa’mis First Nation (KHFN). While this policy removes longstanding barriers to accessing high-resolution spatial data, it simultaneously weakens Indigenous control over how data about their territory is accessed and used by external actors. This research, developed in collaboration with the Nation by graduate student Nasir Tighsazzadeh, evaluates how the province’s LiDAR policy shift, from a restricted, Crown-controlled model to an open-data regime, affects Indigenous data sovereignty and self-determined land use planning. Grounded in the OCAP® principles (Ownership, Control, Access, Possession) and informed by a Two-Eyed Seeing approach, the research employs a qualitative, policy-analytical, and community-engaged approach rooted in Indigenous data governance principles.

A review of recent efforts in digitalization and application of endangered scripts

Endangered scripts carry local knowledge and culture, making digitalization vital for cultural continuity. This paper reviews 120 publications (2011-2025) through computing and design lenses and proposes a phased classification. Our analysis shows that the literature prioritizes technical aspects of digital preservation, while application-oriented studies remain limited. This paper argues for a paradigm shift from preservation to revitalization, calling for community partnership, cultural grounding, and collaboration with creative disciplines. Languages face an even greater risk of extinction than biological species. By the century’s end, 50% to 90% of the world’s 6900 languages are projected to disappear. Script endangerment is inextricably tied to this crisis. Colonialism, globalization, and the spread of colonial languages have left many Indigenous scripts vulnerable, disrupting intergenerational transmission, shrinking usage domains, and limiting digital infrastructure. In Indigenous communities, language and writing are closely to land, ecological knowledge, and worldviews, but these connections have been eroded by oppression. Not simply as tools for transcribing language, scripts are key media through which knowledge is organized and meaning articulated.