A young person stands at the edge of a river in a virtual forest. To cross it, they need the right word in Anishinaabemowin. That river crossing exists because of an unlikely convergence: Elders and game designers, sociologists and software developers, Anishinaabe teachings and immersive media, all building one world together. A few kilometres away in the real world, a researcher is asking today's most powerful AI systems a different kind of question: what Indigenous knowledge have you already absorbed, and who gave you the right? 

These are two very different meeting points between Indigenous knowledge and emerging technology. What they share is a conviction that when Indigenous communities lead — and when disciplines that rarely share a room start collaborating — technology can become a path back to language and culture rather than another force pulling people away from them.  

The stakes are high. In Canada, each of the more than 70 distinct languages spoken by First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities is considered at risk of becoming endangered. As new technologies increasingly shape access to education, employment and public life, revitalizing these languages is a question of equity and sovereignty, making it a central pillar of Indigenous reconciliation. 

In response, Indigenous-led research projects based at York University are advancing innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to digital design, artificial intelligence, and immersive media, and illuminating what revitalization can look like when technology is reimagined through Indigenous frameworks and developed in collaboration with researchers, educators, Elders, students, technologists and community partners alike. 

One of these projects is Biskaabiiyaang: the Indigenous Metaverse. Led by Professor Maya Chacaby, an Anishinaabe member of Red Rock Indian Band, and a faculty member in Glendon’s Department of Global and Social Studies, the project combines experiential education and digital design to support Anishinaabe and First Nations learning, including an experiential professional-development certificate grounded in Anishinaabe pedagogy. 

"Biskaabiiyaang means 'returning to ourselves' and that return is a forward motion,” says Chacaby. “What we're building is a living repository and a socially-networked community, an Indigenous Futurities learning platform where Anishinaabe ways of knowing are practiced. It's somewhere a living language and culture can keep thriving, and where future generations carry them forward." 

In Biskaabiiyaang, a user enters a virtual world shaped by Anishinaabe stories and teachings. They can explore a landscape, encounter plants, animals and cultural objects, take on quests, and learn Anishinaabemowin — the Ojibwe language — as they go. 

In many ways, the metaverse is a testament to the power of collaboration, as its creation necessitates expertise from fields as varied as education, sociology, software development, and game design. Crucially, community participation is equally essential to its design; every element of the project — from game mechanics to narrative design — is co-created with Indigenous community partners, including the Nokiiwin Tribal Council, with Indigenous governance and community leadership as its core.  

Earlier this year, for instance, Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth gathered through the Aandaakinogewin ("improvise together to do things differently") program led by Biskaabiiyaang’s co-lead, Professor Rebecca Caines, in Thunder Bay and at York University's Markham Campus to contribute stories, artwork, and ideas that could help shape the metaverse's next chapter. 

That collaborative spirit has helped position Biskaabiiyaang within UNESCO’s global community for the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022–2032). The project is also part of Connected Minds: Neural and Machine Systems for a Healthy, Just Society, a $318.4-million research program led by York in partnership with Queen’s University to develop socially responsible technologies. 

While Biskaabiiyaang explores the possibilities of virtual worlds where Indigenous language and culture can be actively practiced, another initiative is examining what happens when Indigenous languages and knowledge encounter AI systems that were developed outside Indigenous communities. 

Andrew McConnell, Anishinaabe, is a member of Nipissing First Nation. At York, he is a course director in the Faculty of Education, a member of Connected Minds, and a PhD candidate at the Lassonde School of Engineering who works out of the Practices in Enabling Technologies (PiET) Lab directed by Dr. Melanie Baljko. 

He is investigating how AI systems interact with Indigenous languages, particularly Anishinaabemowin, and what these systems can reveal about which Indigenous words, stories and knowledge have made their way into the enormous datasets used to train today's AI. 

Early experiments included testing York’s award-winning Automated University Response Assistant (YU AURA) in a controlled environment to explore how AI systems might interact with existing Indigenous scholarship. 

Today, McConnell's work has expanded well beyond YU AURA. Through collaborations with initiatives such as Connected Minds and the global Indigenous-led research program Abundant Intelligences, he studies frontier models such as ChatGPT and Claude.ai to better understand how Indigenous languages and knowledge have been represented within them. 

“My central focus is identifying what Indigenous-related material has already been absorbed into large training datasets. It’s both an exploration of sovereignty as well as an accounting process of what’s been taken,” says McConnell. “AI has a lot of exciting possibilities for Indigenous communities, but we need to prioritize maintaining community control over cultural information.”  

The question is not only whether an AI system can recognize an Indigenous word or produce a sentence in Anishinaabemowin. It is also about what the system knows, where that information came from and who has authority over it. 

That distinction matters because Indigenous languages carry more than vocabulary: they hold histories, law, ecological knowledge, systems of governance, cultural practices, and ways of understanding relationships with the world. For McConnell, examining how those languages appear in AI is therefore also a way of asking what happens to the knowledge and relationships embedded within them. 

McConnell is also exploring how these issues play out in urban Indigenous contexts. Unlike many First Nations communities, urban Indigenous populations often do not have centralized governance structures through which decisions about technology, data and knowledge sharing can be made. A significant focus of his work is considering how Indigenous communities in cities like Toronto can navigate these challenges while maintaining community relationships and cultural responsibilities. 

Taken together, Biskaabiiyaang and McConnell's research show how questions of language, technology and cultural sovereignty increasingly intersect. They also demonstrate why this work cannot happen within a single discipline or institution: meaningful approaches to Indigenous language revitalization require collaboration across disciplines and, most importantly, with Indigenous communities themselves.  

At York, that collaborative approach extends into broader institutional commitments, including an agreement with the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation to explore ways of supporting the revitalization of Michi Saagiig language and culture through research and learning. 

“For generations, Indigenous languages and worldviews have been threatened by systems that tend to erase them,” says Lisa Philipps, interim president and vice-chancellor of York University. “I am immensely proud of the extraordinary work our researchers and educators are leading to ensure that the technologies shaping society do not repeat those patterns of exclusion but instead help support reconciliation and digital equity.”  

For the Indigenous scholars leading the push to revitalize Indigenous languages, resurgence can only be achieved by creating conditions where languages can once again be lived and spoken, and where the communities whose languages and knowledge are involved remain central to the process. 

“Linguistic exclusion is not a new form of marginalization; it is a continuing form of marginalization,” says McConnell. “This is exactly the reason why many grandmothers did not teach us our languages: they were afraid it would not help us get ahead in education or business. Revitalization means creating a world where the opposite is true — where speaking our languages is a source of possibility, connection and belonging, not a barrier to opportunity.” 

"When revitalization is working, it looks like this: young people designing their own language learning adventures, sewing ribbon shirts with Elders, and reaching for the right Anishinaabemowin word because they need it to cross a river in a digital world. Elders' teachings travel further than ever, and a new generation can grow up inside the language,” says Chacaby. 

From the virtual forests of Biskaabiiyaang to explorations of AI and the broader work emerging from classrooms, research labs and community partnerships, researchers at York are helping create a future in which technology serves communities, knowledge remains in Indigenous hands, and languages not only survive but thrive.