Kahionhatá:tye is an ongoing, site-specific prototype land-based AI ecology developed at Six Nations of the Grand River and presented in the 2RO Media Festival, using small-scale unsupervised machine learning with data collected along the Grand River, combined with user-generated beadwork and realized as a place-responsive projection installation at Chiefswood Park.
The E4 Lab: Kahionhaktà:tye is a new hybrid research-creation space at Western University that reimagines sustainability through Indigenous knowledge systems, land-based practices, and advanced computing technologies. Located in the Dish with One Spoon Territory in Southern Ontario, and integrated within the OTEKH Labs ecosystem, the lab asks how cultural and ecological relationships shape sustainable futures. Rather than relying on generalized efficiency metrics or abstract carbon-reduction strategies, the project grounds sustainability in place-based practices rooted in reciprocity, restoration, and community. It establishes a first-of-its-kind research-creation environment in the region—one that integrates Indigenous land-based knowledge with AI, digital fabrication, and sustainable material innovation. The E4 Lab reduces the environmental impact of studio-based research while advancing new cultural models for sustainability, supporting Indigenous leadership and long-term climate and cultural resilience through creative research.
Working in partnership with Thru the RedDoor in Six Nations of the Grand River, the lab supports the development of sovereign data storage and alternative archival systems for relational cultural materials. In collaboration with the community, the lab identifies needs, concerns, and priorities regarding how cultural materials are not only preserved, but also meaningfully activated within the development of culturally grounded AI technologies, including language learning systems and storytelling platforms.
This project develops a community-managed bilingual conversational AI system to facilitate the preservation, revitalization, and culturally appropriate access of knowledge for the Indigenous community. The system combines a bilingual language understanding system that is capable of understanding English as well as the Mohawk language, a community-managed knowledge base organized in terms of culturally identified management guidelines, and a Retrieval-Aggregated Generation system that ensures system responses are aligned with approved cultural content while following the guidelines for accessing the knowledge in the given context. It is able to perform text and speech interaction and specifically signals about cultural constraints to users. In this experiment, we introduce a description of the architecture, data curation processes, and a governance-conscious evaluation framework to enable a pragmatic understanding and execution of both performance and indigenous governance values within a single conversational AI system.
Otkonkénhte (FIRE) is an ongoing, site-specific prototype land-based AI ecology that brings together clay material practice, traditional pit firing methods, environmental sensing technology, and unsupervised machine learning as a place-responsive artwork/event at the Lawson Site, where handmade clay forms, fire, and computational processes unfold in active relation. Otekhnòtshera is a SSHRC Insight Development Grant funded project that has synergies with F.I.R.E. Otekhnòtshera focuses on weather knowledge and cultural practices and seeks to push F.I.R.E to the next phase by incorporating all elements (fire, wind, water and earth) into AI knowledge systems; developing a complete intelligent system that acknowledges and works with all possibles forms and interjections of intelligence.
