BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM
The U.S. Indian boarding school system spent decades trying to remove Native American languages from Native children. Kids were separated from their families and punished, sometimes violently, for speaking their mother tongues. Many never passed those languages on. Generations later, some languages have only a few dozen fluent speakers while some have none.
Danielle Boyer grew up watching this happen close to home. Her grandmother speaks Anishinaabemowin, which includes the Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe languages, but she is one of the last fluent speakers of their dialect. Fewer than 10,000 people in the U.S. speak Anishinaabemowin; the number is around 25,000 in Canada. “It is devastating to feel like your language could be lost,” said Boyer, a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. “You lose your culture, you lose a way to describe who you are.”
Her solution was inspired, of all things, by Tickle Me Elmo. “There are toys that teach us in English, but there aren’t toys that teach us Anishinaabemowin,” she said. “And I wanted that to be different.”
At 18, Boyer started a nonprofit and began building SkoBots: small robots shaped like woodland creatures, decorated in Native American florals, small enough to sit on a shoulder. Children program them to answer questions in their own languages. Ask a SkoBot what bear is, and it says “makwa.” Crane is “ajijaak.”
Who builds these robots
Now 25, Boyer has mentored hundreds of Native American children across the country. One of them is Holden Hoy, a 12-year-old Ojibwe student at JKL Bahweting Anishinaabe School in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. He named his SkoBot Sabe, the Anishinaabemowin word for Bigfoot. In Ojibwe culture, Bigfoot represents honesty, one of the seven sacred teachings.
Hoy programmed Sabe to answer three questions at a school science fair, responding in his own recorded voice: “Aaniin, Hello. Sabe indizhinikaaz, Bahweting indoonjibaa. I was built by Holden Hoy. I will not gain sentience and take over the world. Or will I?”
Why not generative AI?
The SkoBots run on pre-recorded audio triggered by key words. No language generation, and that’s deliberate. Boyer has watched ChatGPT invent fake words in Anishinaabemowin. “If we’re not learning our language correctly, we shouldn’t learn it at all,” she said.
“Basically when it hears that one trigger word, it then plays a prerecorded audio file. So there isn’t synthetic speech, there isn’t any generative AI,” she said. “It’s simply listening to what you’re saying, identifying it and playing
that already exist.”
Accuracy is only part of it. “Artificial intelligence, especially when it’s not created by Indigenous people, stands to do a lot of harm to our communities,” Boyer said. “When you are putting accurate information into these models … you’re giving away sacred information to companies that don’t have our best interests at heart.”
Hoy put it plainly: “AI tends to falsify things a lot, not get things from trustworthy sources.”
Boyer isn’t trying to replace fluent speakers. She wants the robots to get kids curious about their language, their culture, and the science behind what they’re building. For Holden’s mother, Jocelyn, something else has happened: Holden has started teaching her.
“As someone who, at a time in my life, did not want to be identified as Native American … now as an adult, I cannot wait to learn more, and I think the SkoBots are going to help me and so many kids, so many people in general, learn their heritage and who they are.”
Holden had the last word: “The language is the culture!”
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