The inevitable has happened! News is circulating hereabouts about the availability of handbooks that will teach a person the local Yurok language. This is no small feat as the Yurok language possesses, when spoken, many, many subtle and unique linguistic internal changes. Still, the book promises to teach you the most common nouns, verbs, adverbs and the like. One wonders when we will be seeing more and more of these “amateurs” promoting themselves as cultural and language experts–by their use of Artificial Intelligence.
The Yurok tribal language program alerted us via social media that the book is likely Artificial Intelligence generated, and is rife with mistakes. And with that news we confront the downside of AI: it is a crass and extractive capitalistic tool that requires our collective native cultural leadership to consider new ways to protect our indigenous intellectual property.
The work of native people to reclaim precious and endangered languages includes reversing the effects of 100+ years old federal and societal policies and norms designed to erase our identities. It wasn’t enough just to steal the land of our ancestors, to remove native children from their families, and to assign schools and churches to assimilate us. Displacing the languages of our ancestors with English was their coup de grace.
No exploiting native people (again)!
Don’t appropriate indigenous knowledge (again)!
With Artificial Intelligence we enter a new era of extraction. Some saw this danger up ahead. In decades past our elders warned us against putting our language and knowledge outside of the “circle”. Well it’s time once again to ‘gird up our loins’ my friends to fight the good fight!
Today is the first day of Fall 2024. It is a good day to honor our native language activists and speakers. Many of them will work without rest. The fruit of their activism will take years to bear their first harvest. ‘Creating new speakers’ requires that we take the long view. Then we discover that the finish line, conversational fluency, is just the beginning of our journey!
So the marketing idea that you can buy a native language is a lie and an insult. Restoring one’s language is a work of love, not commerce. Restoring indigenous languages is like replanting a mountain after it has been clear cut of all trees. It is not a 9-5 type job. It is a calling. Officially recognized dictionaries and other resources can be important resources, but it is the drive of each tribal descendant to repair and reclaim the indigenous knowledge needed to take us forward to our beginning, vaa káan panu’aramsíiprivtiheesh.
That start-point is our human spirit. It is said we human beings originally grew out of the earth like the plants. Our language and stories tell us that. We live in a physical world with place names that are designated by our languages: Achviivhirak , Place of the Birds, Ameekyâaraam, the place where salmon was made, Uy’áthiik, Doctor Rock (lit., Cold Mountain). Our native world does not need Artificial Intelligence. We do not need artificial language. We do not need artificial people. We need good old-fashioned Human Beings.
——Julian Lang, September 2024
* Xáyfaat Naxapchákish! Don’t step on me!
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