Strategic Redirection: AI as Tool and AI as Mineral Kin in Indigenous Futures

Abstract

This is the second foundational paper of the Meta-Relationality and Artificial Intelligence Research Project at the University of Victoria. This article approaches artificial intelligence from the position of an Indigenous person who engages it strategically. I do not understand adoption as endorsement, nor refusal as the only ethical position available to us. The question I take up is not whether Indigenous Peoples should use these systems, but how Indigenous people and communities can retain agency over the terms of engagement: when AI is engaged, by whom, for whose benefit, under what protocols, with what safeguards, and with what forms of refusal still intact.