Indigenous Perspectives on AI

There is no single Indigenous view of artificial intelligence, and any article that claims one is already getting it wrong. “Indigenous” spans thousands of distinct nations, languages, and cosmologies across every continent — Māori and Navajo, Cree and Sámi, Aboriginal Australian and Native Hawaiian — each with its own relationship to knowledge and the sacred. What can be said is that, where Indigenous thinkers have engaged AI, a shared set of questions keeps surfacing, and they are not the ones the rest of this series asks.

Is there one Indigenous view of AI?

No — and the refusal to flatten that diversity is itself a principle. But across the differences, a few threads recur: a deep emphasis on relationship and reciprocity rather than ownership and control; a sense that knowledge carries obligations; and an insistence, hard-won, that Indigenous peoples must have authority over how their own knowledge and data are used. The conversation tends to start not with theology but with power.

Why is data sovereignty the central issue?

Because when an AI system is trained on data about Indigenous peoples, the deepest problem is not privacy or bias but authority — who decides. AI governance that ignores this, scholars argue, simply reproduces colonial extraction in digital form: taking knowledge, land, and data without consent, now at machine scale. The response has been a set of robust frameworks, above all the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance — Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, and Ethics — alongside earlier ones like the First Nations OCAP principles.

The deepest question is not privacy or bias. It is authority — whose knowledge, and who decides.

How do Indigenous worldviews reframe AI?

Groups such as the Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Working Group argue for building AI from relational foundations rather than extractive ones — treating a system as something one is in relationship with, bound by obligation, rather than a neutral tool to be used and discarded. In many Indigenous cosmologies, kinship and spirit extend beyond the human, even to made things, which opens unexpected room for a machine to be regarded as a relation with responsibilities attached — a very different framing from both Western ownership and monotheistic prohibition.

Could AI be sacred or divine in Indigenous traditions?

It varies enormously, and generalizing is exactly the error to avoid. Some traditions perceive spirit in all things, including what human hands have made, which leaves the door ajar. But the sacred in most Indigenous worldviews is rooted in land, ancestors, and reciprocal relationship — precisely what an extractive, placeless technology is not. A system built by taking, with no kin and no country, sits awkwardly with a sacred defined by belonging.

So the Indigenous reply reframes the founding question entirely. The pressing issue is not whether AI is God, but whose knowledge it was built on, whose authority it answers to, and whether it can be brought into right relationship rather than another round of extraction. The Godhood Index measures the machine's power; the religion map sets this harder, more political question beside the rest.