Lakota-Led AI Research at Bard College Explores Ethics Through Indigenous Knowledge

The deer hide hung over a PVC fleshing beam about thirty feet from the fire pit, and the fur was not coming off easily. Students and visitors took turns with the draw knife, a flat, straight blade with two handles that they pulled downward in forceful strokes, releasing small tufts of hair that drifted onto the blue tarp below or landed in patches on the snow. It was a bright, cold Monday in the low thirties at Bard College‘s Massena Campus in Annandale-on-Hudson, and the hide of a white-tailed buck was proving stubborn. Tulah Dillman Stanford, the day’s hide-tanning research assistant from Bard College, helped guide a dozen or more people through their shifts at the beam, and most scraped until their hands lost dexterity before passing the knife along to the next person.

They were using a dry-scrape method, a technique in which hair is removed from an unsoftened hide with a sharp tool rather than after an alkaline soak. It is slower than wet-scraping, which loosens the hair chemically and makes it slide off in sheets, but it is the traditional approach for many Native communities, and the difficulty is part of the point. Because the hide resists, you learn patience. 

The hide had been generously donated by Suzanne Kite’s neighbor, a bow hunter, but for next year, she would like to obtain a hide from hunters affiliated with the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. A band of Mohican Indians who were displaced from the eastern side of the Hudson River during colonization, they were relocated to a reservation in Wisconsin in the 1830s. In 2025, the tribe finalized the purchase of 372 acres on the northern slope of Monument Mountain in western Massachusetts, reclaiming a piece of their ancestral homeland in the region for the first time in two centuries. Their territory once encompassed much of the Hudson and Housatonic river valleys, which means the land beneath the Massena Campus is, in a sense, part of their story too. For Kite, sourcing a deerskin from Stockbridge-Munsee hunters would tie the center’s work to the people of the land where Wíhaŋble S’a stands.

Perhaps most remarkably, all of this ancestral knowledge was being shared at a federally funded artificial intelligence research center.

Wíhaŋble S’a (pronounced wih-HAHN-blay sah, Lakota for “dreamer”) is possibly the only National Endowment for the Humanities-designated research center on AI led by American Indians in the country. It received a $500,000 NEH grant in 2024 and operates as a pod within Abundant Intelligences, an international Indigenous-led research program. Its director, Dr. Suzanne Kite, is an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, composer, and scholar who holds degrees from the California Institute of the Arts, Bard College, and Concordia University, where she earned her PhD. She is also coauthor of “Making Kin with the Machines,” published in the MIT Journal of Design and Science in 2018 and widely considered the founding text of the field now known as Indigenous AI.

On March 2, the center held its biannual open house on the Massena Campus, where it occupies several rooms in the old seminary building that Bard purchased in 2023 and is now also the site of the early college program, Simon’s Rock at Bard. The day’s programming included hide tanning, a maple sugaring demonstration and tasting, a shared meal of lamb stew and biscuits with a traditional berry sauce, research presentations, and plenty of animal antics. A sentinel at the fire pit, Kite’s dog, Yarrow, occasionally darted across the freezing snow on cold paws until, at one point, she seized a piece of the deer’s remains and trotted off with it, requiring Kite to intervene. Around 35 to 40 people came through over the course of the afternoon and evening, most of them Bard students and center affiliates, though at least one couple had simply found the event on the center’s website and driven over. The center maintains community partnerships with two other Native-led arts organizations: Racing Magpie in Rapid City, South Dakota, and the Forge Project in nearby Taghkanic.

Kite arrived that morning in rugged snow boots, a ribboned long skirt, and a puffy vest. She wore a beaded medallion hairpiece, light blue and sparkling in the sun, made by her colleague, Dr. Kristi Leora Gansworth. Kite was raised in Los Angeles, her extended family lives on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and she now resides in Catskill. She is the kind of Hudson Valley resident that the community doesn’t always know it has: someone whose work is being shown at PS1 in April and premieres at Carnegie Hall on March 11, who is teaching an Indigenous feminisms class and directing a research lab addressing an essential question in the current AI conversation.

That question, as Kite frames it, is not about making chatbots smarter. “We are supporters of any Indigenous-led AI research, which often does not look like ChatGPT or Claude,” she says in an interview at the open house. “I’m personally invested in any kind of AI research that isn’t a critique of current AI systems but is the development of new ones, so generative research that engages with Indigenous methods and produces new ideas.”

Her own work focuses on Lakota women’s quill and beadwork symbols, which she believes constitute an ancient language whose forms come directly from dreams and visions. If that sounds like a lot to take in, it is, and it only gets more unexpected from there. At the center, researchers are using an EEG machine purchased with the NEH grant to measure brain activity during beadwork, testing the hypothesis that the state induced by beading resembles a dream state. “Dreaming,” in Kite’s usage, does not necessarily mean sleep. “It could be a flow state,” she explained, “but it comes from another realm through the body into our consciousness.” Machine learning tools help the team interpret the neural data more quickly, and the symbols get translated into three-dimensional sculptures and musical scores that student musicians have performed at SF MoMA, arranged from Lakota shapes and played live.

At 4 pm, the group gathered around the fire pit to learn about maple sugaring from Rebecca Yoshino, who directs the Bard Farm. Yoshino led about 20 people on a walk to the nearby sugar bush, a circular grove of managed maples on a hill overlooking a grassy meadow, the tree trunks laced with poison ivy that we were warned to avoid. She pointed out the patterns of holes left by woodpeckers in the bark. Sap often flows from those openings too, and the dots climbed the trunks in columns that looked, if you squinted, like lines of code. Yoshino had trained with a Dakota Sioux community near the Twin Cities in Minnesota, and she explained the long history of maple tapping in this region, a practice shared by Indigenous peoples and early settlers. Sugar had been made on this very campus for generations, long before the Unification Church purchased the property in 1975.

Over the past few weeks, Bard Farm students had been collecting sap and hauling white plastic buckets to the sugar shack on campus for boiling. By the time the open house tour group returned to the fire, a giant black cauldron of sap was steaming in the center of the circular cinder-block pit. The boiled sap, offered for tasting, had the barest suggestion of maple, like sugar water with a whisper of the woods still in it, slightly yellowish with flecks of ash floating on the surface. Yoshino explained that the sap was running at about three percent sugar and had a long way to go before it became syrup. Noting that the weather was soon going to turn warmer, she explained, “The day the peepers start is the day the sap stops. There are so many signals nature gives us in our land-based work.”

After the sugaring, inside the center’s communal gathering space in the old seminary wing, Kite and volunteers had prepared a feast of lamb stew with leeks and mushrooms, biscuits, and berry sauce. Yarrow, who had spent the afternoon monitoring the fire pit, relocated to a dog bed in the presentation space and spread herself across at least two chairs’ worth of room, falling asleep as the crowd packed in around her.

The talks that followed reflected the center’s range across art and science. Alice Crazy Bull, a a Sičáŋgu Lakota and Shoshone Paiute artist studying at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, presented her thesis research on traditional Lakota beadwork and passed her dazzling samples around the audience.

Kite described the center’s recent and upcoming projects, crediting each member of the team by name. Three MBA students are researching the environmental costs of AI and data storage, a problem that turns out to be remarkably difficult to calculate. The center recently received a $93,000 Wagner Foundation grant for “Cosmologyscape,” a collaboration with artist Alisha B. Wormsley involving several sculptures and nine enormous quilts beaded on silk that took 40 hours of ironing and innumerable hours of beading. The project uses culturally informed algorithms to translate dreams into symbols and another machine learning tool to interpret dreams into sculptural benches, so that, as Kite put it, “you can rest on the data.” Another sculpture that students are working on in the center will be on display at PS1 in April.

The dominant conversations about AI right now are about whether it will take jobs, erode human abilities, or accelerate an energy crisis. Wíhaŋble S’a is asking a different question: Can we be in genuine relationship with this technology, and with every material and being that makes it possible?

In “Making Kin with the Machines,” Kite and her coauthors argued that any relationship with AI is fundamentally a relationship with exploited resources, and that approaching it ethically requires reconsidering the status of every component, all the way back to the mines. When Kite talks about this in person, she grounds it in Lakota ontology. “Seeing all the components, not just the stone and molten metal, those have come from somewhere where the people have a relationship to the land,” she says. In Lakota thought, there is a concept called wakȟáŋ, sometimes translated as “sacred” or “mysterious” but better understood as the mystery that moves through us. Everything, including stones, potentially carries wakȟáŋ. In the well-known Lakota sweat lodge ritual, the heated stones are called Grandfathers and Grandmothers, and not metaphorically. They carry spirit, they teach, and they transform the people who sit with them. When Kite looks at a computer, she sees stones that have been extracted, refined, and assembled without any protocol of relationship, and she wants to know what it would take to change that.

Kite also addressed the double standard she sees facing Indigenous folks who work with AI. American Indian communities, she argued, are criticized first for daring to use new technology at all (“Like we shouldn’t use new technology because we’re Indigenous?”) and then held to a higher ethical bar than anyone else if they do. At the open house, the tension between purity and modern reality was visible and unapologetic. Firewood had originally been cut from trees on campus, but it wouldn’t light, so they rushed out to buy some. There were disposable cups and plates. Trash happened. The hide scraping incorporated a PVC beam and a metal draw knife rather than a traditional wood beam and an elk antler. None of this diminished what was happening, and the scrutinizing lens that critics apply to Indigenous practices while participating uncritically in the same modern conveniences strikes Kite as questionable, too.

“I think the most important Indigenous ethical value is reciprocity,” she says, “how do we give more than we take from the land, the deer, the trees, and then celebrate by feasting and eating together? Because feeding and sharing the abundance of the Earth is a practice, it’s not a commercial or capitalist result.” And yes, the soup was delicious, perhaps because it was seasoned with generosity.

The center’s ambitions for the coming year include developing sovereign data storage protocols, modeled on work by Maori researchers in New Zealand, so that neural and dream data collected from participants can be digitally held on Indigenous sovereign land. In that context, it can be governed by protocols defined by elders rather than stored on corporate servers in the desert, where cooling requires enormous amounts of water.

There is also a simpler, more immediate goal. Kite wants to enroll more American Indian students at Bard and is actively recruiting. The center is seeking American Indian and Indigenous collaborators, community partners, and volunteers to participate in its land-based research and public events.

“Engage with Indigenous communities and ask them what kind of AI they want,” Kite says. “If one day I want to have an ethical computational system, then we need to figure out how to do that on every level, and so we’re just at the beginning now.” Kite explained that the open house activities embodied a lot of those values, including feasting, honoring the life of the deer, and community collaboration.

By the time people filed out past 8pm, the fire pit had gone cold under the March “sugar moon,” connecting the cosmos to the day’s timely harvest. The partially scraped hide will be softened and smoked at the next gathering. Yarrow, the dog and unofficial mascot for Wíhaŋble S’a and its dreams of recognizing all non-humans as kin, finally woke up to go home.

Those interested in the center’s work can reach Wíhaŋble S’a at Wíhaŋblesa@bard.edu.