Indigenous Rights and Artificial Intelligence: Standing up for justice, influencing tech's tomorrow
On the International Day of Indigenous Peoples in 2025, it's crucial to highlight the Indigenous vision for the future, where Artificial Intelligence (AI) can serve as a tool for resurgence, preserving languages, protecting lands, and amplifying ancestral wisdom.
However, the misuse of AI has the potential to perpetuate centuries of exploitation under the guise of progress. When AI systems extract, process, and monetize Indigenous knowledge without Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC), they risk cultural erasure and data exploitation for Indigenous Peoples.
The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) states the right of Indigenous Peoples to maintain, control, protect, and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions. Yet, the digital economy is expanding colonial resource frontiers, often without regulation or reparations, with environmental costs disproportionately borne by Indigenous lands and waters.
One such instance occurred in 2024, when Kenya's State Department of Culture used AI-generated images to represent Maasai culture in a public campaign, resulting in a concerning misrepresentation. For the Maasai, symbolism present in cultural attire is deep and specific, representing age, social rank, spiritual milestones, and complex relationships between individuals and the natural world.
The ethical future of AI is not in Silicon Valley, but in the collective knowledge, values, and sovereignty of the world's First Peoples. Indigenous communities can prevent cultural erasure and data exploitation by asserting sovereignty through active leadership and governance roles in AI development.
Indigenous Peoples must help design the rules, systems, and technologies governing AI, embedding their laws, values, and cosmologies. This recognition of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination is mandated by UNDRIP Article 18.
AI has the potential to amplify Indigenous knowledge, but most current AI systems are trained on data that rarely prioritizes Indigenous knowledge systems, leading to patterns of exclusion. Indigenous communities can participate in the development and governance of AI primarily by being full co-creators and decision-makers from the very start of AI projects.
Key approaches include Indigenous-led governance and co-creation, rights-based frameworks and FPIC, supporting Indigenous research institutions and funding Indigenous tech projects, building ethical principles and trust-based relationships, and addressing environmental and resource impacts.
Governments must align their AI strategies with the UNDRIP, tech companies must adhere to the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, and international organizations must create dedicated mechanisms to ensure Indigenous representation and oversight in global AI governance.
In short, Indigenous communities prevent cultural erasure and data exploitation by asserting sovereignty through active leadership and governance roles in AI development, asserting control over their data and cultural heritage, and establishing ethical, culturally grounded consent and use frameworks.
Technology, when developed with the participation and sovereignty of Indigenous communities, has the power to preserve their cultural heritage and amplify their wisdom. However, the absence of Indigenous voices in technology development can lead to misrepresentation and perpetuate cultural erasure.
