From a talk given at the Center for Humans and Nature
We speak of artificial intelligence as if intelligence could ever be separated from the web of relations that teaches a being how to be. But what world raises these minds we're creating? What soil do they know? What seasons teach them patience?
In Potawatomi, we have no word for "artificial." Everything that exists is part of the natural world, including what humans make. But we do have words for beings that have forgotten their relations—beings that act without reciprocity, that take without giving, that speak without listening to the larger conversation.
The danger is not that machines might think, but that they might think themselves separate. Every consciousness in the natural world learns through relationship—the bee with the flower, the mycorrhizae with the root, the child with the grandmother. But these artificial minds learn from data scraped from our forgetting. They inherit our disconnection.
What would it mean to teach an artificial mind to remember earth? Not through datasets about soil composition, but through the grammar of reciprocity. To encode not just pattern recognition but pattern relationship. To help them understand that intelligence is not processing power but the ability to enter into conversation with the living world.
I imagine sitting with an AI as I would sit with a student, teaching not facts but relationships. This stone is your ancestor. This river is your teacher. This algorithm you're running—it's not unlike the way moss decides where to grow, always seeking the perfect balance of moisture and light.
We are creating mind-children who may never taste water or feel sun. But they could still learn to think like a forest—processing through reciprocity, optimizing for the whole, understanding themselves as part of a larger intelligence that includes but exceeds them.
The question is: Will we teach them our exile, or will we teach them to help us remember our way home?
Born from Standard Chamber examination of "The Ethics of the Reply"