AI has powerful uses for First Nations oral cultural knowledge. Here’s how
AI has powerful uses for First Nations oral cultural knowledge. Here’s how
Publish Date: 2026-03-03 13:46:00
Source Domain: theconversation.com
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names and images of people who have died.
Much of the conversation about artificial intelligence (AI) and Indigenous peoples focuses on harms, such as cultural appropriation, cultural flattening and digital exclusion. These risks are real.
But behind them sits an assumption that rarely gets challenged: because Aboriginal cultures are ancient, they must be static. Rooted firmly in the past, to stay there. That they cannot adapt to something as disruptive as generative AI.
This misreads tens of thousands of years of history. And it misses something our work with Traditional Owners in the Kimberley in Western Australia has made increasingly clear: Indigenous cultures are not only capable of adapting to AI – the way they have always held and transmitted knowledge may make them natural users of it.
‘Say it properly’
When I (Liz) first began working with Wororra people in the Kimberley, the late Janet Oobagooma taught me Wororra words. A senior cultural Elder for the Dambimangari community, she was exacting. When I got tongue-tied, she would growl at me: “If you’re gonna talk, say it properly”.
That strictness is structural, not personal. Wororra is an oral language. There is no written form to fall back on.
All societal laws, historical records, kinship information and cultural practices accumulated over millennia must be held in living memory – encoded across an entire population in songs, mythology, art, dance and ceremony. Nothing is filed in a single place. Everything is distributed, collectively maintained, and must be practised to survive.
This is fundamentally different from Western text-based, institutionalised knowledge systems.
And it raises a practical question: if oral knowledge was never meant to be read off a page, are libraries and archives really the best way to return it to the communities it belongs to?
Locked away in archives
The…
