“If computers that support AI are powered by crystal oscillators and rare earth minerals, what does that mean from the perspective of cultures who see crystals and minerals as sentient? Maybe the intelligence isn’t as artificial as first supposed,” writes Logan Royce Beitmen in his April 20, 2025, review of the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art’s (MoCNA) new exhibit, Kite and Wíhaŋble S’a Center: Dreaming with AI in the Albuquerque Journal. 

Kite and Wíhaŋble S’a Center: Dreaming with AI

Dreaming with AI (March 21–July 13, 2025) showcases Dr. Suzanne Kite’s (Oglála Lakȟóta) innovative works, blending Indigenous knowledge, Lakȟóta cosmology, and artificial intelligence.

Beitmen goes on to say: “As AI becomes increasingly part of our everyday lives, it seems to require new modes of theorizing consciousness. So, even hardcore rationalists may learn a thing or two from how Indigenous groups relate to wholly other, nonhuman objects and entities.” He quotes Kite writing in a Journal of Design and Science article she co-authored, titled “Making Kin with the Machines,” saying that we need to “conceive of our computational creations as kin and acknowledge our responsibility to find a place for them in our circle of friendships.”

Beitmen is intrigued by Kite’s use of dreams to underscore the kinship of AI and humanity and concludes his review: “Walking through the different rooms, as if walking through a dream, I thought I could sense Kite’s consciousness radiating out from her work, reverberating with my own and merging with something wholly other.”  

Kite herself came to the IAIA campus, along with Dr. Clementine Bordeaux (Sicángu Lakótapi) and Dr. Laura Harjo (Mvskoke), on March 24, 2025, to present a talk on “Indigenous AI and Art,” and how it relates to contemporary ethics and community. Ethical and cultural boundaries interweaving AI and Indigeneity were openly discussed during the Q&A section.