Deusdedit Ruhangariyo
ICT
Around the world: Indigenous women rise to defend land, culture, and rights in Asia; education faces cultural loss through imported AI tools in Africa; and a Native and a non-Native university deepen Indigenous Education Partnership in Canada.
ASIA: Indigenous women rise to defend rights
Until recently, Maria Suryanti Jun had never imagined herself as an environmental defender. But that changed in December 2022, when a geothermal project was approved in Poco Leok – her Indigenous community in East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia. Since then, Maria, now 46, has become a leading voice in resisting the project, which is backed by Indonesia’s state utility, Perusahaan Listrik Negara, and funded by German bank KfW, Mongabay reported on July 25.
Together with other Indigenous residents, Maria has protested the project’s lack of transparency and consultation. “They might lose the customary land and cultural sites, such as graveyards of their ancestors,” said Surti Handayani, a lawyer from AMAN, Indonesia’s largest Indigenous peoples coalition.
Despite operating within a patriarchal culture, Maria has emerged as a powerful public voice. “She is one of the few Indigenous women who is able to speak in public,” said Seviana Yolanda, an independent researcher. Maria and other women, whose daily farming ties them closely to the land, were among the first to act. “Land is like a woman who also gives birth to life,” Yolanda added. “When the land is damaged, their life will be damaged.”
In October 2024, protests turned violent when officials escorted by police and soldiers arrived to survey the land. Maria recalled, “The police pushed the women until they managed to enter the land.” Activists reported physical assaults, sexual harassment, and intimidation of media workers during the crackdown.
This struggle mirrors broader patterns across Southeast Asia. Thanakrit Thongfa of EarthRights International, based in Chiang Mai, says outsiders often reduce Indigenous women to victims. “But they are powerful organizers, negotiators, and defenders of community rights,” she said.
The risks are real. According to Global Witness, Southeast Asia is among the world’s deadliest regions for female land defenders. Prabindra Shakya of AIPNEE noted women are seen as easier targets because “they are less well-versed in laws.”
In Myanmar, a youth NGO leader known as Nang was forced into hiding for six months after the 2021 military coup. “In my village, the community still sees me as a person from another planet,” she said, reflecting deep-seated gender biases.
Discrimination isn’t limited to outsiders. Sarah, a trans woman activist in the Philippines, faces constant pressure to conform to male dress codes when engaging with local authorities. “My culture is not accepted,” she said, “despite the official recognition of Indigenous communities.”
Many Indigenous women internalize these pressures. Linda, an environmental activist in Malaysia, said, “I feel inferior when I’m introduced as an Indigenous woman in gatherings full of non-Indigenous colleagues.”
Still, hope persists. Maria recently attended a human rights summit in Bangkok, despite language barriers. With support, she confronted project sponsors directly and expressed her community’s wish for the project to be permanently halted.
Back home, she helps organize training for young women to reclaim and protect cultural traditions. “We have so many customs, in the garden, in the house, in ancestral offerings, but these are not taught at school,” she said.
From Indonesia to Myanmar, Indigenous women are not only resisting extraction – they are redefining resistance.
AFRICA: AI questioned as solution to education problems
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly championed as a solution to improve Africa’s education systems, promising better teaching support, personalized learning, and modernized pedagogy. But beneath this innovation lies a cultural dilemma: Whose values are embedded in these AI systems? As UNESCO reported on July 24, many African educators are starting to ask – are we importing tools or importing worldviews?
Technology is never neutral. As Van de Poel & Kroes argue, all technology carries the values of its creators. Examples range from sea dikes that reflect the societal priority of safety to AI voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, which feminists critique as digitally subservient, perpetuating patriarchal norms. Similarly, Japan’s AI-powered robotic pets reflect Shinto spirituality, assigning agency to nonhuman objects.
Transferring AI tools from the Global North to Africa, therefore, is not just a technological import – it’s a cultural transfer. In Nigeria, for instance, the One Laptop Per Child project disrupted communal learning values by promoting individual digital learning (Ezumah, 2020). This tension resurfaces in AI education systems, which often exclude Indigenous knowledge entirely.
Nyaaba, Wright, and Choi (2024) warn that African students are being taught AI-generated curricula designed for Western contexts, ignoring local ecological wisdom. While many African communities teach farming rooted in spiritual and environmental interdependence, AI systems default to Eurocentric views. For example, when asked how many seasons exist, ChatGPT and Gemini replied “four,” missing that West Africa has two major seasons, demonstrating how generalized AI models erase local knowledge.
Indigenous African education often prioritizes community-based learning. The Maasai and Kipsigis traditions in Kenya emphasize social and interpersonal skills, yet AI tools like ChatGPT promote screen-based, individual learning. Research has linked such technologies to reduced social adaptability among students (Lai et al., 2023). As Kouam & Muchowe (2025) caution, the impact may erode communal and cultural practices central to African identity.
Language adds another layer of loss. While educational AI tools claim to be multilingual, they are often monocultural. Their training data rarely includes Indigenous languages or ways of knowing. When Gemini was asked to translate “God is Good” into Gurune (spoken in Ghana), the result exposed its limited grasp of both language and meaning.
As Mohamed et al. describe, digital tools are forming “digital territories” that replicate colonial dynamics – AI becomes a tool of epistemic domination. Most AI tools in Africa today are designed elsewhere, carrying foreign cultural biases and offering little room for local adaptation.
But resistance is growing. Masakhane, a pan-African grassroots initiative, is building AI tools in African languages through participatory research. Their “Decolonize Science” campaign translates STEM abstracts into Indigenous languages and sources data from community media. This promotes local ownership and cultural continuity.
If Africa is to avoid AI becoming a new form of cultural colonization, it must not only use AI – it must own it. Building culturally grounded AI tools and STEM capacity is no longer optional; it is the only way to ensure Africa’s future remains African.
CANADA: Universities deepen Indigenous Education Partnership
A newly signed memorandum of understanding between Six Nations Polytechnic and Wilfrid Laurier University marks a formal step in a decades-long relationship aimed at expanding educational opportunities for Indigenous students and fostering cross-cultural learning. The signing took place on July 24, formalizing nearly 30 years of collaboration between the two institutions, CBC News reported.
The agreement intends to increase Indigenous-centered academic offerings, pending funding, while also improving non-Indigenous students’ exposure to Indigenous worldviews and traditions. Rebecca Jamieson, president and CEO of Six Nations Polytechnic, welcomed the formal recognition.
“I find that it’s very welcoming to see … some institutions very much open to partnering as part of the way forward,” said Jamieson, according to CBC News.
With a student body of around 350 – not all of whom are Indigenous – Six Nations Polytechnic offers a diverse range of programs, including Ogwehoweh language courses, trades, college-level programs, and a STEAM-focused high school academy. Jamieson has led the institution since 2009 and has been involved since its founding in the early 1990s.
“It has been a long-standing relationship and it’s just deepening,” she said, referring to the new agreement with Laurier.
Jamieson emphasized the practical impact of partnerships, citing a recent success with Mohawk College that supported 40 nursing graduates.
“[A] partnership is a way to get things done. Good partnerships … are lasting,” she said. “Whatever follows, it will be looked at through a win-win lens for both institutions.”
Jamieson also stressed the inclusive nature of the school:
“We have people from all backgrounds who study with us who want to learn in our environment. So I think as a way forward, it’s an opportunity.”
Wilfrid Laurier University has approximately 400 Indigenous students among its 20,000 total students. Darren Thomas, Laurier’s Associate Vice-President of Indigenous Initiatives, said the agreement aligns with the university’s goal of expanding Indigenous programming across its campuses.
“Our plan … over the next several years is to construct several agreements. So this memorandum of understanding is an overarching agreement,” Thomas said.
He acknowledged that finalizing the implementation could take up to a year and will involve not just both institutions, but also the provincial government and regional Indigenous leadership.
“We’re laying [the groundwork] out as if we had funding,” he added.
My final thoughts
My final thoughts are in Africa where a UNESCO story attracted my attention about AI in education systems across the continent.
Unfortunately, by the time most of the world hears about artificial intelligence, it will no longer be arriving, it will already be operating. Why?
Because it’s already in our schools, shaping how our children learn.
It’s already in our hospitals, predicting who gets care.
It’s already in our governments, suggesting who qualifies for support.
And increasingly – it’s already in our cultures, reinterpreting our languages, misrepresenting our values, and scraping our ways of life into its training data.
What UNESCO confirmed about the dangers of AI in African education systems is something many Indigenous communities have long felt but rarely had the vocabulary to name: that AI is not neutral, and that its global spread is accompanied by a silent transfer of values – often values that do not recognize our own.
Across all six continents, AI has moved faster than the frameworks meant to guide it. In many classrooms, it arrived before the teacher could understand it. It arrived before the parent could consent to it. It arrived before the elder could protect the language being replaced by it.
In some African communities, children are taught in schools designed to reflect the rhythms of the land and the spirit of the seasons. Yet when these same children turn to AI tools for help, they are told there are four seasons – not two. When they ask for farming wisdom, they are met with foreign models that cannot recognize sacred planting cycles or ancestral environmental knowledge.
In many ways, AI has become a new digital curriculum – one that erases more than it includes.
This is not just a technical problem. It is a cultural emergency.
From Oceania to the Andes, from the Cree to the Kipsigis, from Aboriginal protocols to Amazonian traditions, the majority of the world’s Indigenous knowledge systems are unrecognized, unprotected, and unrepresented in the datasets that now define how machines “learn.”
Yet most people – Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike – still do not know this.
They do not know that when AI speaks, it may be amplifying only the dominant worldview that shaped its code.
They do not know that their child’s homework help may be filtering out the very cosmology their ancestors fought to protect.
They do not know that the erosion of Indigenous education may not come through policy – but through predictive text.
This is why there is an urgent need for frameworks to raise the alarm before the damage becomes irreversible. To name what is missing. To restore what is sacred.
If we wait until our stories are forgotten in the machine, it will be too late to retrieve them.
This week, we reflect on a simple truth: machines are already here – but conscience, memory, and culture have not caught up.
Now is the time.