Reigniting the Many Voices of a Communal Bison Hunt in Virtual Reality

A major challenge to language and culture revitalization is geographic dispersal, as over 60% of Native Americans do not live on their language communities’ reservations. Immersive environments in Virtual Reality (VR) bridge this distance for those Native Americans who can’t readily sit down with a tribal elder. We are grassroots language activists who are combining VR technology with GIS data, film, and 3D imaging to create rich, interactive experiences for language, history, and culture teachings. Our pilot project focuses on buffalo jumps and the buffalo culture. Our culturally relevant software centers on a sacred site in Montana, the Madison Buffalo Jump. Now it is a popular recreational park. For millennia, this was a shared hunting ground for dozens of Indigenous nations. Before the horse and rifle, buffalo jumps served as the center of tribal nourishment. Though communal bison hunts are not practiced in this form anymore, there is great reverence for these sacred sites by all tribes in Montana. Each tribe has a unique perspective on communal bison hunts, and our software demonstrates this with the support of our partners. The VR experience shares culture teachings, traditional environmental knowledge, and Indigenous botanical science from various tribal nations of Montana in multilingual scenes. This presentation will demonstrate how we are using advanced 3D gaming technology, consumer mobile devices, and the voices of tribal elders to recreate an exhilarating communal bison hunt in Virtual Reality. We will also outline our non-exploitive data-collection process under consideration of the 6 R’s: Respect, Relevance, Relationality, Responsibility, Reciprocity, and Representation. Tribal communities shaped our VR software to foster knowledge sovereignty and ownership by our collaborators. We believe this is just the first step in delivering language and cultural material on a compelling and technologically advanced platform. Our VR experience not only contributes to the respectful preservation of American Indian cultures, languages, and oral histories, but also reintroduces tribal histories, knowledge, and perspectives to the public, and helps preservation efforts at the Madison Buffalo Jump State Park

Kaʻina Hana ʻŌiwi a me ka Waihona ʻIke Hakuhia Pepa Kūlana

He wahi hoʻomaka kēia pepa kuana no ke Kaʻina Hana ʻŌiwi (KHʻO) a me ka Waihona ʻike Hakuhia (WʻIH) no ka poʻe e ake nei e haku a hana he WʻIK mai ke kuanaʻike kūpono e hoʻokele ʻia nei e ka manaʻo ʻŌiwi. He kiʻina hana ko kēlā a me kēia kaiāulu ʻŌiwi i nā nīnau a mākou e ui aʻe ai. ʻAʻole kēia mea a mākou i kākau ai he pani i ke kūkulu a mālama ʻana i ka pilina kākoʻo kekahi i kekahi me kekahi mau kaiāulu ʻŌiwi. Eia naʻe, hāpai aʻe kēia palapala i kekahi mau manaʻo e noʻonoʻo ai ke komo i kēia mau kamaʻilio ʻana ʻo ka hoʻomaka koho ʻana i ke kuanaʻike ʻŌiwi i ka haku ʻana he waihona ʻike hakuhia. He hoʻāʻo kēia wahi pepa kūlana e hōʻiliʻili i nā ʻano kamaʻilio like ʻole no 20 mahina, no 20 kāʻei hola, no ʻelua hālāwai hoʻonaʻauao, a ma waena hoʻi o kekahi mau poʻe ʻŌiwi (a ʻŌiwi ʻole hoʻi) no nā kaiāulu like ʻole i Aotearoa, Nū Hōlani, ʻAmelika ʻĀkau a me ka Pākīpika. ʻO ke kia nō naʻe, ʻaʻole ʻo ka hoʻolōkahi ʻana he leo. Paʻa nō ka ʻike ʻŌiwi i kekahi mau ʻāina a aupuni kikoʻī a puni ka honua. Hoʻohuli aku kēia mau ʻāina a mōʻaukala like ʻole i nā kaiāulu ʻokoʻa a me ko lākou mau kaʻina hana ʻŌiwi i ke au o ka manawa. ʻAʻohe “kuanaʻike ʻŌiwi hoʻokahi”, a hoʻomau a haku ʻia nā kālaikuhiʻike e ka hoʻokumu ʻana o kekahi mau kaiāulu kikoʻī i loko o kahi mau ʻāina. Ma mua, he hopena ulūlu o ke kālaikuhiʻike a kālaikuhikanaka ko ka loina naʻauao i hoʻāʻo e naʻi a hoʻohilimia i ka loina ʻŌiwi, a hoʻohāiki ʻia ke ʻano o ka manaʻo a kuanaʻike ʻŌiwi. ʻO ko mākou pahuhopu ke kālele ʻana i nā ʻōnaehana ʻike ʻŌiwi like ʻole a me ke ʻano o ka ʻenehana e hāpai i ka nīnau ʻo ka WʻIH. Ma muli o ia palena, a ma kahi o ka hoʻokuʻikuʻi ʻana he manaʻo lōkahi, he hōʻiliʻili kēia pepa kūlana o kēlā ʻano kēia ʻano o ka moʻokalaleo: ʻo nā manaʻo hoʻokele hakulau ʻoe,, ʻo ka ʻatikala akeakamai ʻoe, ʻo ka wehewehena o ka mana ʻenehana mua ʻoe , a ʻo ka poema ʻoe. I ko mākou manaʻo, he ʻolokeʻa kūpono maoli nā leo a kuanaʻike ʻokoʻa i ka ʻoiaʻiʻo he pae kinohi maoli nō kēia kamaʻilio ʻana, a he hōʻike i ka mea heluhelu no nā kuanaʻike i kupu mai i loko o nā hālāwai hoʻonaʻauao

Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper

This position paper on Indigenous Protocol (IP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a starting place for those who want to design and create AI from an ethical position that centers Indigenous concerns. Each Indigenous community will have its own particular approach to the questions we raise in what follows. What we have written here is not a substitute for establishing and maintaining relationships of reciprocal care and support with specific Indigenous communities. Rather, this document offers a range of ideas to take into consideration when entering into conversations which prioritize Indigenous perspectives in the development of artificial intelligence. It captures multiple layers of a discussion that happened over 20 months, across 20 time zones, during two workshops, and between Indigenous people (and a few non-Indigenous folks) from diverse communities in Aotearoa, Australia, North America, and the Pacific. Indigenous ways of knowing are rooted in distinct, sovereign territories across the planet. These extremely diverse landscapes and histories have influenced different communities and their discrete cultural protocols over time. A single ‘Indigenous perspective’ does not exist, as epistemologies are motivated and shaped by the grounding of specific communities in particular territories. Historically, scholarly traditions that homogenize diverse Indigenous cultural practices have resulted in ontological and epistemological violence, and a flattening of the rich texture and variability of Indigenous thought. Our aim is to articulate a multiplicity of Indigenous knowledge systems and technological practices that can and should be brought to bear on the ‘question of AI.’ To that end, rather than being a unified statement this position paper is a collection of heterogeneous texts that range from design guidelines to scholarly essays to artworks to descriptions of technology prototypes to poetry. We feel such a somewhat multivocal and unruly format more accurately reflects the fact that this conversation is very much in an incipient stage as well as keeps the reader aware of the range of viewpoints expressed in the workshops

How to build-your-own practical A.I. tools for language maintenance

AI offers useful tools even for low-resourced languages. Using the example of Hua Ki’i, our Hawaiian language image recognition app, we will walk you through the steps to build your own app using open-source AI tools. Participants need an active Google and GitHub account, no machine learning experience required

Playfully revitalizing languages and traditional knowledge through collaboration

This presentation showcases our collaborative model for developing language materials: Native Teaching Aids (NTA). Collaboration is an important concept for language documentation and revitalization (Rice 2009; Czaykowska-Higgins 2009). In developing pedagogical materials as part of revitalization, collaboration between linguists and language teachers is believed to be ideal, and such collaboration has recently been the subject of attention (e.g., Hermes 2012, Yamada 2007, Little et al. 2015). In our experience, a collaboration that is expanded to include traditional knowledge keepers as well as the greater (language) community has been very successful. When a wide range of disciplines and expertise are involved, the teaching materials produced have linguistic features, cultural content, pedagogical efficacy, and entertainment value. The NTA model of expanded collaboration emphasizes the vital importance of preserving and revitalizing indigenous culture, language, and history to empower communities. The NTA model is currently in use in multiple endangered language communities to develop, design, and create educational and entertaining materials. In our talk, we will describe the development of the Blackfoot language and culture game Picking Berries as an example of the NTA model and process. This technologically enhanced card game has two significant aspects which strengthen the players’ language and culture acquisition process. First, it not only teaches vocabulary and basic phrases using native speaker pronunciations, but also demonstrates cultural components through traditional environmental knowledge, indigenous botanical science, images of the indigenous environment, a sense of community, and negotiation skills. Secondly, Picking Berries includes a companion mobile app that enables the user to interact with the game cards in augmented reality (AR). The technology projects audio and imagery corresponding to specific playing cards onto the pupil’s mobile phone screen. Our use of AR bridges the real world and the virtual space to create a compelling, culturally driven interaction with the game. The presentation will outline our multifaceted activities toward the development of culturally relevant pedagogical materials (initial meeting with the tribe to identify their goals, cultural and language content development with tribal knowledge keepers, play-testing sessions with the targeted age group, linguistic consultation, student training, etc.) and lessons learned. We hope this showcase of our NTA model will benefit similar collaborative teams of language activists and linguistics