At Mila’s Indigenous AI Gathering this week in Montréal, AI minister Evan Solomon was gifted a sacred braid of sweetgrass.
“I see this technological revolution coming, and there’s a lot of Indigenous people who are being left behind,” said Mick Elliott, a Mila research fellow, of the Okanese First Nation, as they handed Solomon the gift. “When I offer this to you, it comes with a great weight and a responsibility. But also in a warmth and a sharing of, ‘we will walk this with you.’”
Elliott said the three strands of sweetgrass often represent the past, the present, and the future.
Canada’s government has a history, both past and arguably present, of gatekeeping data and using it to exploit Indigenous communities—leading to a lack of trust that Solomon called “scar tissue.”
Right now, the Canadian government is moving to accelerate major projects like pipelines and potentially data centres for AI compute, while the Assembly of First Nations has voted against changes to speed up this process. Public polling also shows Canadians broadly are resistant to AI and its related infrastructure buildout.
The minister has repeatedly said Canada needs to move fast and adopt AI to be globally competitive. Yet at Mila, Solomon struck a slightly different tone: the future’s moving fast, but we “don’t have any obligation to follow the speed of the silicon chip in our community.”
The debate around AI has largely focused on a binary: forge ahead on innovation, or hit pause on development altogether. Mila’s builders gave a glimpse of an alternative AI future that’s Indigenous-led: where AI is harnessed to advance the economic interests of communities with smaller, open-source models with lower energy footprints.
While the feds’ AI strategy nods to some of these elements, and Solomon said the AFN is developing its own AI recommendations, the feds have not provided concrete details regarding how it will weigh environmental priorities or ensure Indigenous data sovereignty. Whether the government can, or will even try to braid these ideas together into an equitable path forward remains to be seen.
Madison McLauchlan,
Montréal reporter
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Dominion Dynamics CEO and BetaKit Most Ambitious honouree Eliot Pence joins to discuss why he came back to Canada to build. Watch now ›
Contributors: Madison McLauchlan (Montréal reporter), Douglas Soltys (editor in chief), Sarah Rieger (managing editor), Trevor Nichols (web editor).
Feature image courtesy Maryse Boyce for Mila.