Foregrounding Indigenous Knowledges as an epistemic framework for technologies yet to be designed, Jason Edward Lewis’s interventions into critical AI studies offer urgent counter-narratives to how “intelligence” has been understood in the past and propose how it might be understood otherwise in the future. Working alongside his collaborators, who include Noelani Arista, Suzanne Kite, Archer Pechawis, Hēmi Whaanga, and Ceyda Yolgörmez, these ongoing interventions crystallized in 2023 into the project Abundant Intelligences, charting a path toward sociotechnical systems that operate beyond the violence of prevailing algorithmic logics. Without a hint of hyperbole, it can be said that their contributions are not only ubiquitous across, but foundational to the field of anticolonial AI. At a moment when an elite coterie of technocratic actors seeks to consolidate control over technologies that steer us toward ever-more-annihilatory outcomes, Abundant Intelligences insists that other technologies and other outcomes remain thinkable.  

Abundant Intelligences is a six-year, interdisciplinary research program co-directed by Lewis (Kanaka Maoli, Samoan) through the Indigenous Futures Research Centre at Concordia University and by Dr. Hēmi Whaanga (Māori, Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Mamoe, Waitaha) at Massey University. Unprecedented in its scale, this effort brings together a global, Indigenous-led group of artists and researchers to reimagine machine intelligence through approaches rooted in Indigenous knowledge (IK) systems. The prospective impacts of this work on how we understand artificial intelligence, and intelligence writ large, cannot be overstated. What is at stake in this project is the effort to identify and undo “how epistemic tools are wielded to influence, control, favor, and subjugate,” increasingly through algorithmically enabled means.¹

In a recent essay for AI & Society, Lewis and his co-authors outline the project as a turn toward “Indigenous knowledge systems to challenge the normative manner in which intelligence has been considered.”² At its core, the project upends models of intelligence steeped in colonial structures of extraction and exploitation, and articulates alternative models rooted in reciprocity and regeneration. 

This work emerges from an ongoing, award-winning body of research on Indigenous AI conducted by Lewis and his collaborators. Notable previous outcomes of that research include the co-authored text “Making Kin with the Machines,” a 2018 essay published in the Journal of Design and Science at the MIT Press.³ The paper would become foundational both to the field of critical AI studies and to the Abundant Intelligences project, which emphasizes an approach to AI rooted in relations of reciprocity with the nonhuman. Lewis subsequently edited the pathbreaking, 200-page “Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper.” Like “Making Kin with the Machines,” this paper would offer a crucial departure point for approaching AI from within a framework that foregrounds Indigenous knowledge systems.⁴

Abundant Intelligences comprises an interdisciplinary team of 48 co-investigators and collaborators, ranging among artists, scientists, engineers, and social scientists. The project’s contributors are sited across a network of thirteen universities and research institutes that include the University of Hawaii Manoa, MIT, Harvard, McGill, Oxford, and elsewhere.  

Rejecting normative visions of machine learning as the rarefied purview of credentialed experts, Abundant Intelligences insists on community-driven models of Indigenous AI. One of the ways it furthers that objective is by partnering with eight community-based organizations: Te Hiku Media, Thru the Red Door, Indigenous in AI, Native BioData, Purple Mai’a, Indigenous Design and Innovation Aotearoa, SZKaiao Creative Studio, and Te Whare Wānanga O Awanuiārangi. Through these partnerships, community-based approaches are cemented as central to the project, rather than parenthetical to it. These collaborations’ outcomes are still in formation, with one of those outcomes being the development of community-based methodologies itself. Abundant Intelligences emphasizes the process of developing and implementing that methodological framework in collaboration with stakeholders; a process whose value is uncoupled from any specific possible outputs. Lewis and his co-authors outline Abundant Intelligences as an effort fundamentally rooted in community praxis: 

Our work is about integrating AI into Indigenous knowledge frameworks, and thus making a home for it in the communities themselves. It is about recognizing that the community is where the meaning of intelligence, and thus AI, is negotiated and intentions are set with regard to it… That is why we want to place AI in the community, so as to take the means into our hands and develop these technologies “by” us and “for” us.⁵ 

The project is organized as a series of local research clusters, or “Pods,” within which artists and creative practitioners play a central role. These Pods include the Haudenosaunee-Niitsitapi Pod, located in Niitsitapi (Blackfoot) and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) territories, and governed by Niitsitapi and Haudenosaunee advisory boards. The focus of this Pod is described as “exploring artistic visions of the Indigenous future, a place for new interdisciplinary Indigenous scholarship, and a practice-based studio environment for creative innovation and critical studio practice.”⁶ Its final outputs will include virtual environments and computational architectures animated by Niitsitapi and Haudenosaunee visual cultures. In this way, the Haudenosaunee-Niitsitapi Pod will foreground Indigenous visions in spaces of digital creation where those visions have been historically occluded. 

Within the project’s interdisciplinary research program, artistic research, or research-creation, serves as a core methodology. Building on Tuscarora scholar Jolene Rickard’s theory of visual sovereignty, Suzanne Kite spotlights the transformative dimensions of artistic praxis by noting that the way Indigenous artists “express relations within artwork is equally an expression [of] philosophical sovereignty as visual sovereignty.”⁷ To that end, Abundant Intelligences situates artmaking as a critical method for imagining both intelligence and technology otherwise: a space for materializing possibilities beyond algorithmic coloniality. 

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Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is an Associate Professor in Gender Studies and Digital Humanities at UCLA and a 2025-2027 Vera List Center Fellow at the New School. Her book, The Institute for Other Intelligences, was published through X Artists’ Books in 2022. Her writing has appeared in Feminist Media Histories, AI & Society, Los Angeles Review of Books, Performance Research Journal, and elsewhere. Her projects and collaborations have been presented at the Centre Pompidou, the Asian Art Biennial, New Museum, REDCAT, the Music Center (LA), MASS MoCA (forthcoming), and elsewhere.