Communications of the ACM
Helping A.I. to Learn About Indigenous Cultures
Intelligent Voices of Wisdom's Indigenous Knowledge Graph is a cultural engine in early development that is focused on storytelling about Indigenous recipes and culinary practices.
Credit: Wolfgang Victor Yarlott
In September 2021, Native American technology students in high school and college gathered at a conference in Phoenix and were asked to create photo tags — word associations, essentially — for a series of images.
One image showed ceremonial sage in a seashell; another, a black-and-white photograph circa 1884, showed hundreds of Native American children lined up in uniform outside the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, one of the most prominent boarding schools run by the American government during the 19th and 20th centuries.
For the ceremonial sage, the students chose the words "sweetgrass," "sage," "sacred," "medicine," "protection" and "prayers." They gave the photo of the boarding school tags with a different tone: "genocide," "tragedy," "cultural elimination," "resiliency" and "Native children."
From The New York Times
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