Robots help indigenous children preserve native languages
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Indigenous children in the United States and Canada are building small robots to help revitalize their native languages and cultures.
Danielle Boyer, a member of the Chippewa Tribe, created the SkoBots after witnessing the decline of Anishinaabemowin, a language spoken by fewer than 10,000 people in the US and around 25,000 in Canada. Historically, US boarding schools punished Native American children for speaking their languages, leading to a loss of intergenerational transmission.
Boyer founded a nonprofit organization and guided children in programming the SkoBots, animal-shaped robots decorated with floral designs, to respond to questions in their native tongues. For example, a SkoBot will answer “makwa” when asked what a bear is. This hands-on approach allows children to actively engage with and teach the language. The SkoBots rely on pre-recorded audio triggered by keywords, intentionally avoiding artificial intelligence that could misrepresent the languages.
Boyer cautions against using AI models created without Indigenous input, as they could potentially misuse or misrepresent sacred cultural knowledge. Twelve-year-old Holden Hoy, an Ojibwe student, named his SkoBot “Sabe,” the Anishinaabemowin word for Sasquatch, and programmed it to share a greeting and its origins at a school science fair.
