Maoli Intelligence
Noelani Arista
Abstract
Abstract The chapter argues that indigenous data sovereignty is not new, but rather is rooted in the practices and protocols Indigenous communities developed to secure, verify, and maintain traditional and ancestral knowledge. Centring Hawai‘i, this chapter provides a comparative Indigenous epistemological framework for reconsidering artificial intelligence (AI) as Maoli Intelligence (real, indigenous, Hawaiian). It provides a mini example in the successful inter-Indigenous prototyping project called Hua Ki‘i, which produced a point-and-click Hawaiian language application. Because ʻIke Hawai‘i is instantiated in the largest indigenous language oral-to-textual archive in North America and the Polynesian Pacific, it provides sufficient materials to develop approaches that are scalable to other contexts. The author makes the case for using Maoli Intelligence to shape the computational architecture of our future digital technologies, asking what the future of computational science, AI, and an ethics based out of Indigenous concepts of relationality might become if Indigenous technological capacity is allowed to flourish.