When the famed voyaging canoe the Hokule‘a entered Aotearoa in 2014, the New Zealand media company Te Hiku Media livestreamed the arrival on its independent platform, without interruption or ads.
Keoni Mahelona, Te Hiku Media’s chief technology officer, remembers that single live transmission as the turning point that granted the company funding opportunities and independent control over the rest of the data that it produces and stores. It’s one example of how Native Hawaiians could adopt and use the newest AI technology to support their ancient culture as part of a modern-day sovereignty movement.
Anything that is digitally created or stored is overseen by data sovereignty — the legal authority to govern who controls and stores data.
Now, Native Hawaiian engineers, scientists and technologists want to achieve the same level of control over Hawaii’s AI data, which would protect and preserve Native Hawaiians from AI tools that might otherwise jeopardize their culture and environment.
“(Native Hawaiians) are the best ones to do this, but there’s also a sense of pride in how doing it together brings us together,” Mahelona said. “Sometimes that’s why you have to do it the hard way.”
Mahelona’s calls to embrace AI for the sake of preserving Hawaiian culture come amid the progression of House Bill 546, which is awaiting a Senate Ways and Means Committee hearing.
If passed, the bill would establish an “aloha intelligence institute” at the University of Hawaii that would “develop, support and advance artificial intelligence initiatives statewide.”
The first step toward data sovereignty comes from Native Hawaiians creating AI for themselves from the ground up, Mahelona said.
For the past five years, the Native Hawaiian engineer has worked to create AI tools for Indigenous languages, and more recently has worked with a team to focus on doing the same for olelo Hawaii.
Mahelona’s Te Hiku Media worked with key Hawaiian language stakeholders like Awaiaulu, Ka Haka ‘Ula o Ke’elikolani and Kanaeokana to develop the Lauleo app, which prompts users to read phrases and words in Hawaiian.
Most of the audio data was collected during a February reading competition, where some 1,200 participants read thousands of Hawaiian phrases on the Lauleo app, creating a 413-hour cache of audio.
That audio is now being processed to develop a Hawaiian Siri, transcription services or a hands-free texting function for the Hawaiian language.
“We want to make sure the tools are being used for Hawaiians by Hawaiians,” Mahelona said.
Keolu Fox, a Native Hawaiian genome scientist, believes Hawaiian AI should be taken one step further.
Fox believes that to truly achieve data sovereignty, it is not enough to just make Hawaiian AI — Native Hawaiians need to store it themselves, he said.
Fox, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, said Native Hawaiians can achieve sovereignty by keeping data centers in Indigenous lands and creating digital systems that are rooted in traditional mechanics.
“Our north star is sovereignty, it’s data sovereignty, it’s controlling your resources,” Fox said.
He said achieving data sovereignty requires critically examining who is creating the AI that Hawaiians are using, and who is profiting from its distribution.
“It’s not necessarily in the hands of our people,” Fox said.
Fox is working to connect AI technology directly to Hawaiian hands by building data terrariums, or miniature data centers, which are made from repurposed computer e-waste and can be carried like portable generators.
Powered by solar power and wind energy, the data terrariums are inspired by the ahupuaa’s circular system where Native Hawaiians would share their resources from the mountain to the seashore in a section of the land and nothing was wasted, Fox said.
“With the ahupuaa system and Indigenous-driven technology, our goals are making (data terrariums) be in harmony with the environment, making it invisible to the casual onlooker,” Fox said. “It blends in, it’s perfectly camouflaged because (the ahupuaa system it is based off of) has been (refined) over thousands of years — that’s what we should be striving for when we design and engineer.”
Fox’s prototypes are in San Diego, but he is working on improving equitable access. He wants to bring the AI technology home, where it could assist even the most rural paniolo in rural Hawaii with tasks like monitoring pasture and soil health, tracking cattle and predicting grazing rotation schedules.
“If you’re incorporating Indigenous indicators in environmental health — moon cycles, wind patterns, native plant health — into predictive systems, now we’re talking,” Fox said.
Fox hails from the Big Island and descends from the lineage of Kohala paniolo, he said. For him the need to bring technology that is tailored specifically to the Hawaiian environment is a way to prevent his home from more cultural and environmental degradation.
“What I’m doing now is deliberately creating opportunities for community members, whether it’s for Kanaka Maoli, Maori people or Tahitians. We’re building data centers, and we make sure they are pono, in terms of their environmental impact,” Fox said.
The data industry, he said, is on pace to surpass the fossil fuel industry as the No. 1 contributor to climate crisis in our lifetimes.
To put it in perspective, one AI-generated image of a cat drinking beer, Fox said as an example, requires the same energy needed to fully charge an iPhone 15.
Data centers intake huge amounts of water, land and energy. Fox’s data terrariums, he said, “(flip) that model on its head” and are small, intentional circular centers made for an individual, tailored to what types of assistance someone needs.
“You’re creating a constellation of stars that do something, that functions specifically in an environment where the power sources for this data center are circular,” Fox said. “(Native Hawaiians need to think,) ‘How can I design data centers like an ahupuaa? How can I design it so that there is no waste? How is that possible?’ We’re just beginning to scratch the surface on what that looks like.”
Ka‘ulawena Alipio, a Ph.D. student at UCSD studying under Fox, is keeping a keen eye toward pollution in her own work and as a general onlooker of AI’s worldly expansion.
Her work is driven by a fascination with ecology, largely stemming from her childhood growing up on the banks of Pearl Harbor.
After the state took her childhood home in the Waiawa “Banana Patch” neighborhood to construct the rail, she recalls that the Department of Health released reports revealing soil pollution in the nearby Waiawa Stream bank.
“Part of me as an adult wants to just heal the family land,” Alipio said. “That’s always the driving force for me.”
While AI data terrariums sound unrelated to bioremediation, she said both are examples of futurist technologies that are bound to make their way to Hawaii.
Native Hawaiians, Alipio said, should embrace the opportunity, rather than push it away.
“We still have to approach the conversation and say, ‘How can we deconstruct this? How can we make it our own? How can we use these technologies to bring back the values and the parts of the land that we feel are important?’” Alipio said.
She believes embracing the technology is essential to controlling how the community can use it. She said her Native Hawaiian ancestors would have wanted her and others in her generation to embrace new technology, especially in ways that innovate beyond Western ideas.
“AI seems so divorced from nature, but the more that I sat with it, the more that I understood that Kanakas have always been innovators,” she said. “There’s always been this cultural need to push the envelope, see what’s beyond the horizon, see how far we can go and how we can innovate.”
