Today is International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (August 9). Every day, we honor the sovereignty, richness, and beauty of Indigenous Peoples, languages, and lifeways.

The first meeting of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations was held in Geneva, Switzerland, on August 9, 1982. Since then, many spaces have opened up for Indigenous voices to be heard, and new agreements protecting the rights of Indigenous Peoples have been adopted. While we celebrate these outcomes, we also recognize that the promise of human rights for Indigenous Peoples worldwide remains unfulfilled. In many parts of the world, Indigenous Peoples are still facing grave human rights abuses and challenges.

This year’s theme is “Indigenous Peoples and AI: Defending Rights, Shaping Futures.”

As our Executive Director, Aimee Roberson (Choctaw and Chickasaw) says, “Indigenous Traditional Knowledge systems are grounded in place and developed over many generations, hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. Indigenous Knowledge is shared and verified in community and governed by traditional systems that respect all life and Mother Earth and accept our responsibility to care for each other. This is Indigenous intelligence because we know that we are all interrelated and that one of us cannot thrive unless we are all thriving. Artificial Intelligence is scraping information from all over the internet, stealing intellectual property and images, often without attributing their sources. It’s full of bias, unregulated, and has the potential to cause a lot of harm in the form of completely leaving out Indigenous perspectives and knowledge, in the form of appropriating our knowledge without consent, taking things out of context, and creating misunderstanding. Artificial Intelligence is being used for surveillance. The biases, the gaps in knowledge, and things we don’t understand are used to make decisions that harm people. It’s possible that AI could be used in a more thoughtful and respectful way if Indigenous people are included in every step of the process….Data sovereignty is critical.” 

We call on states, policymakers, and corporations to: 

• listen to Indigenous people and respect Indigenous sovereignty;
• uphold and implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples;
• protect the ecosystems we all depend on;
• include Indigenous Peoples in shaping the future of technology;
• support land back initiatives allowing Indigenous Peoples to reclaim and steward their homelands; and
• find real solutions to the climate crises that don’t just greenwash increased energy consumption.

Indigenous Peoples, our values, and knowledge systems hold solutions to today’s greatest challenges, including climate change, ecocide, and biodiversity loss. But all too often, we are not listened to, consulted, nor given seats at the tables where important decisions that impact us are being made. 

At Cultural Survival, we are working around the world and around the clock to support the priorities of Indigenous Nations and communities that are protecting Mother Earth for generations to come and for the millions of people, plant, animal, and mineral relatives that share our homelands.
 

4 Calls to Action for International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples

1. Know the Facts about Artificial Intelligence!

Artificial Intelligence is not “intelligence.” You can’t build an AI without the data. Energy consumption by data centers is so astronomical that their existence would foreclose the possibility of ever reaching carbon emission goals.
 

Read: Refusing Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear “Manifest Destiny”

Read: Indigenous Peoples and AI: Defending Rights, Shaping the Future of Technology