Indigenous Peoples, AI and State Decision-Making

This session explores how artificial intelligence becomes entangled with state governance and what this means for Indigenous Peoples globally. As governments increasingly rely on AI for welfare administration, resource management, policing, and population monitoring, existing power imbalances between state institutions and Indigenous communities are intensified but often hidden behind claims of technical neutrality.

We frame AI-driven state decision-making within a longer history in which Indigenous Peoples have been made legible, countable, and governable through technologies that enabled dispossession, forced relocation, and assimilation. AI marks a new phase in this trajectory, extending state surveillance and predictive capacities into Indigenous lands, bodies, and ways of life. Examples include predictive policing, biometric identification, and algorithmic risk-scoring that interact with existing surveillance systems targeting Indigenous populations.

Against this backdrop, the session highlights Indigenous Lifeworlds—relational ontologies, kinship systems, and place-based knowledges—that often resist datafication and standardized state categories. We invite papers examining tensions between AI-driven state decision-making and Indigenous self-determination, as well as Indigenous-led responses, data governance frameworks, and alternative technological futures.