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Hi everyone. Thank you Francis. Thank you for that introduction. Thank you to the organizers for bringing education, industry, and governance into one room.

I speak today in my own capacity, not on behalf of my institution.

In some cases, when we talk about sovereign AI, we usually mean who owns the compute, the data, and the models. I want to ask a different question: for whom?

For Indigenous communities, AI is not only a technical question. It is a question of relationships. Who decides, who benefits, and who carries the responsibility long after a project or collaboration ends?

Take a system that uses satellites and sensors to watch over a community's land. It can be a powerful tool for care, or, if it is built without the people of that land, it can become a very sophisticated way of watching them. It is not my place to speak for any community, but what I can say is that Indigenous data sovereignty and early engagement deserve real support.

Every community has a choice to take up new technology or not on their own terms. When a community chooses to step in, it begins with education and partnership from the very first conversation, not after the design or collaboration is finished.

Two commitments make that choice meaningful.

First, consent that stays open. Free, prior, and informed consent is not a checkbox at the start of a project. It is an ongoing relationship, and a community can revisit its choice as the work grows. Data shared along the way should remain under the authority of the community it describes.

Second, accountability to relationships, not just outputs. Indigenous scholars have long taught that resilience lives in relationships of care and responsibility with land, water, and non-human relatives. This means AI development cannot move in a single direction set from the outside. It needs to move in tandem with Indigenous governance, with that governance acknowledged and given real space.

The UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, adopted by UNESCO's member states as the first global standard in AI ethics, recognizes that Indigenous peoples must take part in shaping AI. Our task now is to make room for that in practice.

So here is my proposal: begin with the partnership, not a product. Build the education, the trust, and the governance together, and then see where the relationship and the journey take you. What we build is not just technology. Technologies will change, data will change; what endures are the relationships carried forward by each generation to the future. If we build those well, we will have something worth carrying between and beyond. Thank you.