I can’t believe we are past 50 days of not working. It has gone way longer than I thought it would. I have decided today to stop checking every day. Instead, I will just wait for the email when there is an update. They always send an email, so instead of logging in anxiously every day, I will just wait.

I also got the seed of a somewhat crazy, somewhat ambitious life change that I may look more closely at in the coming months. It is something I considered a few years ago but ended up not pursuing due to the start of my last relationship. Seeing how things turned out, I wish I had ended that relationship sooner and started my quest back then instead. Now I am starting to have the same inkling and I would rather not look back in five years and wish what I wish I had done five years ago. I need to do very thorough research and be very patient, and brave.

I won’t get into the weeds of it because the truth is I don’t know if I have the guts to jump that far. I will sleep on it for a couple of months, or maybe when my situation gets a positive update. Just like everything else, for now we wait.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office with no set return date. I will get back to you when the time is right.

Street stalls + food trucks on Sunset Blvd between Figueroa & Beaudry…

Multiple days, things move around, some are closed on certain days.

1. Hyperfocus: The New Science of Attention, Productivity, and Creativity by Chris Bailey, 256p: Great read about focus with enough scientific data and practical insights. The author talks about “attentional space”, which is like our RAM or the available working memory capacity. He argues that because the amount of distraction machines we have available at our fingertips right now, our attentional space shrinks and our minds wander less, reducing the quality of our attention. The author explores “hyperfocus”, which is deep, intense focus on an activity, versus “scatterfocus” which is mind wandering. Both of these modes are important and there are nice diagrams to help understand the concepts.

2. Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (Vorkosigan Saga (Publication Order)) #15 by Lois McMaster Bujold, 580p: This time a fun adventure with Miles' cousin: Ivan Vorpatril. It's the Ivan book! It is packed with action and Ivan getting caught in hilarious situations. Miles and Ekaterin make some appearances, but we also see Simon, Alys, Gregor and even Cordelia in some scenes. There is mystery, a fake marriage situation, family secrets and failed engineering with sinking consequences. Tej's family had an interesting mafia vibe without malice, just pure family loyalty and eccentric choices. Overall a funny and lighthearted book, which matches Ivan's eternal optimism.

3. Children of Strife (Children of Time #4) by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 496p: I didn't find this book as enjoyable as the previous ones in the series. The pacing was off, with these three different timelines alternating. Some chapters felt repetitive, telling the same story already covered in previous books. The First Age chapters with the human terraformers was by far my least favorite timeline. The Second Age with the ark ship was so-so. The only timeline I was invested in was the Third Age with the excellent mantis-shrimp hero called Cato. I missed seeing the octopuses and the corvids. 

#readinglist #books #reading

In March 1890, an anthropologist named Jesse Walter Fewkes carried a wax-cylinder phonograph to Calais, Maine, and over three days recorded thirty-six cylinders of Passamaquoddy songs, creation stories, vocabulary and legend. The voices belonged mostly to two men, Peter Selmore and Newell Josephs. Fewkes was experimenting; he wanted to know whether the new machine could capture human speech in the field. The result is now understood to be the oldest surviving ethnographic field recording anywhere in the world. For more than a century those cylinders sat in institutional custody, first at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University and then, from 1970, inside the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, catalogued, preserved, and effectively unreachable by the community whose ancestors had sung into the horn. Of the original thirty-six, only twenty-six remain playable.

Nobody in 1890 asked Peter Selmore whether his voice could be digitised, indexed, transcribed by an algorithm, or fed into a statistical model that might one day predict the next word in a Passamaquoddy sentence. The question would have been unintelligible. The technologies that make it urgent did not exist, and the legal framework that might have answered it did not exist either. That gap between how the material was gathered and what can now be done with it is the precise location of a fight that reached the United Nations in the summer of 2026.

At the nineteenth session of the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, held at the Palais des Nations in Geneva from 13 to 17 July 2026 with a dedicated panel on artificial intelligence and the rights of Indigenous Peoples on its agenda, Indigenous advocates from several countries pressed a demand that a decade ago would have sounded speculative. They argued that artificial-intelligence systems are now being trained on, and deployed against, the vast holdings of Indigenous cultural material sitting in universities, museums, national libraries and government archives, and that the institutions holding those materials have no clear obligation to treat tribal authority over the knowledge as anything more than a courtesy. The oral histories, the language recordings, the ceremonial records, the photographs, the governance documents, much of it gathered under conditions that would fail any serious contemporary standard of informed consent, are being converted into training data and searchable outputs that serve outside purposes. The communities from which the knowledge originated are frequently the last to know.

The question at the centre of the Geneva session was not whether this is happening. It plainly is. The question was whether anyone is legally, ethically or procedurally required to stop it, or to ask first.

How an Archive Becomes a Model

To understand what changed, it helps to be precise about the mechanism. A June 2026 analysis published in Governing by Kerri J. Malloy, an assistant professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies at San José State University and a citizen of the Yurok and Karuk peoples, laid out the sequence in unsentimental terms. AI systems scrape materials held in institutional archives and digital repositories without reference to tribal authority. Those materials are converted into training data or into searchable, generative outputs. The outputs serve the purposes of the party running the system, which is almost never the community whose knowledge was ingested. Malloy, whose scholarship centres on genocide, transitional justice and the mechanics of redress, frames this not as an accident of technology but as the latest expression of a much older pattern, in which knowledge is separated from the people who hold it and put to work elsewhere.

The point worth dwelling on is that the scraping requires no malice, or even any awareness that the material is Indigenous. A digitised photographic collection, a corpus of transcribed oral histories, a set of language recordings released under an open licence by a well-meaning library: to a web crawler assembling a training set, these are simply text, image and audio. The metadata that would flag a recording as ceremonial, restricted, seasonally sensitive, or governed by protocols about who may hear it and when, is either absent or discarded during ingestion. The model learns the patterns and forgets the provenance. What comes out the other side is a system that can generate plausible imitations of a cultural form, answer questions about restricted knowledge, or reconstruct fragments of a language, without any accountability toward the community.

This is the harm that data-sovereignty scholars have described for years under the heading of data colonialism, a term meant to make the analogy explicit: just as historical colonialism appropriated land and labour, the contemporary extraction of data and knowledge appropriates the raw material of culture and computation. The analogy is not rhetorical excess. The material sitting in these archives arrived there through the same institutions, and often the same expeditions, that removed ancestral remains and ceremonial objects. The wax cylinders and the funerary belongings travelled together. That the recordings can now be reanimated by machine learning does not sever them from that history. It extends it.

What Geneva Was Actually Arguing About

The Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is not a court, and it cannot compel anyone to do anything. Established by the Human Rights Council in 2007 under resolution 6/36, it is a body of seven independent experts that provides the Council with advice and expertise and assists states in achieving the goals of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Its authority is persuasive rather than coercive. But the instrument it exists to interpret carries more weight than its soft-law status suggests, because a great many of its provisions are now treated as reflecting customary international norms.

That instrument, the Declaration adopted by the General Assembly in 2007, contains in Article 31 a passage that reads with uncanny prescience given what has happened since. Indigenous peoples, it states, have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions, as well as the manifestations of their sciences, technologies and cultures, including human and genetic resources, seeds, medicines, knowledge of the properties of fauna and flora, oral traditions, literatures, designs, sport and traditional games, and visual and performing arts. They also have, it continues, the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their intellectual property over such cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions.

Read in 2007, Article 31 was understood mostly as a shield against biopiracy and the commercial appropriation of designs and medicines. Read in 2026, the phrase “maintain, control, protect and develop” runs directly into the architecture of machine learning. If a community has the right to control its traditional cultural expressions, and an AI company ingests a digitised archive of those expressions to train a commercial model, the community's control has been overridden without its involvement. The Declaration also insists, repeatedly, on the principle of free, prior and informed consent, the requirement that Indigenous peoples be consulted and give agreement before measures affecting them are taken. The Expert Mechanism has previously produced a dedicated study on the repatriation of ceremonial objects, human remains and intangible cultural heritage, explicitly bringing the intangible, the songs and stories and knowledge, within the frame of restitution. The 2026 advocates were extending that logic one step further, into the training corpus.

The gap the Geneva delegates were pointing at is the gap between principle and obligation. The Declaration says communities have the right to control. It does not say that a university digitising its holdings must obtain consent before a third party scrapes them, nor that a museum must embed enforceable restrictions in the metadata it publishes, nor that an AI developer must check provenance before ingestion. Those operational duties do not yet exist in most jurisdictions. The advocates wanted them written down.

The Principles Built Before the Machines Arrived

What makes the current moment unusual is that Indigenous communities did not wait for the AI industry to arrive before building governance frameworks. The intellectual scaffolding was largely in place, developed through the 1990s and 2000s in the context of research ethics and health data, and it maps onto the machine-learning problem with remarkable directness.

The oldest of these frameworks is OCAP, the First Nations principles of Ownership, Control, Access and Possession, established in 1998 and now administered by the First Nations Information Governance Centre in Canada. OCAP holds that a First Nation collectively owns its information in the same way an individual owns personal information; that it may assert control over data at every stage of the research cycle; that it must be able to access information about itself regardless of who physically holds it; and that possession, the physical custody of data, is the mechanism that makes ownership more than symbolic. The last principle is the sharpest when applied to AI. Possession says that if you want to protect knowledge, you keep it where you can defend it. A model trained on a copy you no longer control is the negation of possession.

The more recent and internationally influential framework is the set of CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, drafted at a workshop in Gaborone, Botswana, in November 2018 and published through the Global Indigenous Data Alliance. CARE stands for Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility and Ethics, and it was written deliberately as a counterweight to the open-data movement's FAIR principles, which hold that data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. The tension between the two acronyms is the entire argument in miniature. FAIR optimises for sharing and reuse; it says nothing about power, history or consent. CARE was built to reinsert those considerations, to say that the ease with which data can be shared is not the same as the right to share it, and that governance must account for the power differentials that shaped how Indigenous data came to sit in institutional hands. The Authority to Control principle is unambiguous when applied to a training set: the authority to decide whether a corpus becomes model weights rests with the community, not the archive.

These frameworks share a feature that distinguishes them from most Western data-protection law. They treat knowledge as collective and relational rather than as individual property with a fixed author and an expiry date. Conventional intellectual-property regimes are built around individual ownership, novelty and a term that eventually lapses into the public domain. Indigenous knowledge is frequently held communally, transmitted orally across generations, and governed by protocols that have nothing to do with authorship and everything to do with relationship, season, initiation and place. When a song enters the public domain under copyright law, the community's protocols governing who may sing it do not lapse. The two systems are not merely different in detail; they are built on incompatible premises about what knowledge is and who it belongs to. The scraping of an archive collapses that incompatibility in favour of the system that ignores protocol.

The Labels That Travel With the Knowledge

If the principles are the theory, a handful of practical tools have emerged to make them operational, and their design reveals how hard the problem actually is.

The most widely adopted is the system of Traditional Knowledge and Biocultural Labels developed by Local Contexts, an organisation co-founded by the legal scholar Jane Anderson and the digital-humanities scholar Kim Christen, and now co-directed by Christen, Anderson, Māui Hudson of Whakatōhea and James Francis of the Penobscot Nation. The Labels are not licences in the copyright sense. They are metadata, attached to cultural material, that carry the community's own statements about provenance, protocol and permission: who the cultural authority is, what traditional protocols govern access, and what uses the community regards as acceptable. A Provenance Label identifies the group that holds authority over the material. A Protocol Label communicates the customary rules attached to it. A Permission Label states what the community has approved. The point is to make Indigenous authority legible inside the metadata of a digitised collection, so that a curator, a researcher, or in principle an automated system, encounters the community's terms at the moment of access rather than never.

The companion tool comes from the same hand: Mukurtu, a free, open-source content-management system first built in 2007 by Christen and the developer Craig Dietrich for the Warumungu Aboriginal community in central Australia, and now maintained at Washington State University. Mukurtu was designed around a premise that most archives find alien: that access should be differential rather than uniform. A single item in a Mukurtu archive can be visible to the general public in one form, to community members in another, to a particular family or ceremonial group in a third, and to no one outside a restricted circle at all. Where a conventional digital repository asks how to maximise open access, Mukurtu asks who is allowed to see what, and encodes the answer.

The Passamaquoddy cylinders became the demonstration case for all of this. When the Library of Congress launched its Ancestral Voices project, engineers at its National Audiovisual Conservation Center used an Archéophone playback machine and digital restoration systems to extract sound from the 1890 wax that had been physically unplayable, and then, crucially, handed curatorial control back toward the Tribe. Passamaquoddy speakers transcribed and translated the recordings; elders reviewed them; the material was described using Mukurtu and tagged with Local Contexts Traditional Knowledge Labels, so that the digitised voices now travel with the community's own statements of authority and protocol attached. It is the closest thing to a model of how digital repatriation can work when an institution chooses to share power rather than merely access.

But the Passamaquoddy case also exposes the limit of the whole apparatus, and it is a limit the Geneva advocates understood well. Labels and differential access work only inside systems that agree to honour them. A Traditional Knowledge Label is metadata; a web crawler assembling a training corpus is under no obligation to read it, and a large language model does not preserve it. The moment a labelled recording is copied outside the governed platform, whether by an open-data release, a partner institution's mirror, or a scraper that ignores robots directives, the protocol evaporates. The tools that Indigenous communities built to assert authority were designed for a world of human curators making deliberate choices about individual items. They were not designed for a world of automated ingestion at web scale, where the default is to take everything and ask nothing.

When Revitalisation and Extraction Use the Same Tool

The uncomfortable truth threaded through the whole debate is that the technology now driving the extraction is the same technology offering some communities their best hope of linguistic survival. This is not a case where the harm and the benefit are cleanly separable. They run through the identical set of tools.

An analysis published in July 2026 by researchers at the University of Melbourne made the double edge explicit. The same AI systems that can support Indigenous language revitalisation, generating learning materials, reconstructing grammatical patterns from fragmentary historical records, filling gaps in documentation left by generations of suppression, can, if they are built and controlled by outside institutions, deepen the very patterns of extraction they appear to remedy. The mechanism is concentration of authority. A language model that becomes the authoritative interface to a language, trained on the community's own recordings but owned and operated by a university or a company, does not restore control. It relocates it. The community becomes a user of a system built from its own knowledge, dependent on an institution it cannot govern. The Melbourne researchers were echoing a broader body of work, including a systematic review by the same group published in 2025, that has repeatedly found the governance question, who owns and controls the system, to be more decisive than the technical question of whether the tool works. A separate 2026 review in AI & Society, examining AI projects in Irish Gaelic, Māori, Guaraní and Inuktitut through the lens of data colonialism, reached the same place by a different route: what divides the initiatives that empower communities from those that reproduce extractive structures is not the model but who holds the data and sets the terms.

The counter-example that everyone in this field cites is Te Hiku Media, a charitable media organisation based in Kaitaia, in the far north of New Zealand's North Island, and belonging collectively to the Far North iwi of Ngāti Kuri, Te Aupōuri, NgāiTakoto, Te Rarawa and Ngāti Kahu. Facing the same problem every Indigenous community faces, that the large technology firms had little commercial interest in a language spoken by a few hundred thousand people, Te Hiku built its own. Through a crowdsourcing campaign called Kōrero Māori, it gathered more than three hundred hours of labelled speech in ten days, from more than 2,500 people reading over 200,000 phrases, and in 2021 released an automatic speech-recognition model for te reo Māori that reportedly reached around ninety-two per cent accuracy, outperforming the offerings of far larger companies on the language. The decisive move was not technical but legal. Te Hiku placed the resulting data and models under what it calls the Kaitiakitanga Licence, a bespoke instrument built on the Māori concept of guardianship, which keeps data sovereignty inside the community, prohibits uses that would surveil or discriminate, and ensures the data is used for the benefit of Māori. The organisation refused, publicly and repeatedly, to hand its speech corpus to outside firms, on the grounds that the community had gathered the data as a taonga, a treasure held in trust, not as a commodity to be sold.

Te Hiku is the proof of concept for the Geneva argument, because it demonstrates that Indigenous-governed AI is not a contradiction in terms. The community built the tool, kept the data, wrote the licence, and set the terms of use. What Te Hiku had, that most communities do not, was the technical capacity, the funding and the pre-existing organisational strength to do all of that itself. The Melbourne researchers' warning is aimed at the far more common situation, in which the community lacks the capacity to build its own system and the institution holding the material builds one instead, positioning itself, however benevolently, as the permanent intermediary between a people and its own language.

The Consent That Was Never Given

Every strand of this returns to the conditions under which the material was collected in the first place, and here the historical record is not ambiguous. The great archives of Indigenous cultural material were assembled overwhelmingly during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in a period when the collecting institutions operated on the salvage assumption, the belief that Indigenous peoples were vanishing and that their cultures had to be recorded before they disappeared. The people recorded were rarely in any position to refuse, frequently were not asked, and could not conceivably have consented to uses that had not been invented. Fewkes did not, and could not, obtain Peter Selmore's agreement for a use case that would arrive one hundred and thirty years later.

This is what makes the informed-consent argument so difficult to wave away. When an institution says that its collection is lawfully held and that it is free to license or release it, the claim is legally true and ethically hollow, because the original acquisition would fail every element of the standard that institution would now apply to a living research subject. Contemporary research ethics require that consent be informed, specific, revocable and given by someone with the authority to give it. The archival material fails on all four counts. It was gathered without meaningful information about future use, without specificity, without any mechanism of revocation, and often from individuals who held the knowledge under community protocols that did not give them the personal authority to alienate it. A speaker might share a song with a visiting anthropologist without possessing the right, under his own community's law, to release it to the world.

The AI moment forces this latent problem into the open because it dramatically raises the stakes of the downstream use. For a century the material mostly sat inert, and the injustice of its acquisition, while real, was static. Digitisation made it copyable. Machine learning makes it generative. A model trained on a corpus of restricted ceremonial knowledge does not merely store that knowledge; it can produce new outputs in its style, answer questions about it, and disseminate approximations of it to anyone who asks. The original failure of consent is thereby compounded and multiplied, and the community's ability to enforce its own protocols, already eroded by digitisation, collapses entirely. The advocates in Geneva were not raising a historical grievance for its own sake. They were pointing out that the historical grievance is now the input to an industrial process.

Where the Law Stops Short

The obvious question is why existing law does not already resolve this, and the answer is that the relevant instruments were built for adjacent problems and stop short of the AI training set.

The most significant recent development is the WIPO Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge, adopted at a diplomatic conference in Geneva in May 2024 after decades of negotiation. It is the first WIPO treaty to deal with the interface between intellectual property and Indigenous knowledge, and its central mechanism, in Article 3, requires patent applicants to disclose the source or origin of genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge on which an invention is based. This matters, but its reach is narrow. It applies to patents, not to training data. It addresses the specific problem of patents being granted over Indigenous knowledge without acknowledgement, not the general problem of that knowledge being ingested by a model. And it enters into force only after fifteen states ratify it. Malawi deposited its instrument on 5 December 2024 and Uganda followed on 9 July 2025. That is the entire tally. Thirteen further ratifications are required, and more than two years after adoption the treaty is still not in force. The treaty is a disclosure requirement for one narrow channel of appropriation, not a consent requirement for the broad one, and even that narrow requirement is not yet law anywhere.

In the United States, the closest analogue is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, whose revised regulations took effect in January 2024 and notably strengthened the requirement that institutions obtain consent from lineal descendants or tribes before exhibiting or conducting research on covered items. Those revisions prompted several major museums to close or cover Native American displays overnight while they sought the necessary consent. But NAGPRA governs human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony in physical custody. It does not cleanly reach digitised sound, transcribed oral history or a language corpus, and it certainly does not reach a model trained on them. The statute that forced museums to reckon with consent for physical objects has no obvious purchase on the intangible material now flowing into AI systems.

Copyright, the tool a technology company would most naturally invoke, cuts the wrong way entirely. Much archival Indigenous material is old enough to be in the public domain, which under copyright law means it may be freely used, and the ongoing legal battles over whether training AI on copyrighted material constitutes fair use are, from an Indigenous-knowledge perspective, almost beside the point. The community's objection is not that its copyright has been infringed; it is that copyright never captured the interest at stake. A song can be simultaneously in the copyright public domain and subject to strict community protocols about who may perform it. The law that governs the copy has nothing to say about the protocol. This is the misalignment that CARE, OCAP and the Traditional Knowledge Labels were invented to address, and it is why the Geneva advocates were appealing to human-rights instruments rather than intellectual-property ones. The rights they are asserting do not fit inside the categories the technology industry recognises.

Procurement as the Real Decision Point

If the frameworks exist and the law lags, the practical question becomes where in the process an obligation could actually bite, and here the answer is less about technology than about timing.

Malloy's Governing analysis ends not with a call for better algorithms but with a call for meaningful tribal consultation before AI systems are designed and deployed, rather than notification after the fact. This is a deceptively large claim. In the ordinary institutional workflow, an organisation decides to acquire or build an AI system, selects a vendor, signs a contract, and only then, if at all, convenes a consultation about ethics and community impact. By that stage the architecture is fixed, the money is committed, and the consultation can influence little beyond the wording of a usage policy. Authority exercised after procurement is not authority at all; it is public relations. For tribal control to be real, the community's right to say no, or to set conditions, has to be available at the point where saying no would actually change the outcome, which is before the institution commits to building the thing.

This reframes the debate away from the familiar terrain of algorithmic transparency and bias auditing, which are downstream remedies, and toward the upstream decision that determines whether a system gets built at all. It aligns with the free, prior and informed consent standard in a way that most technology governance conspicuously does not, because the word that governance frameworks routinely underweight is prior. Consent obtained after deployment is not prior consent. A consultation convened to smooth the reception of a decision already taken is not consent in any meaningful sense. The whole argument is about procedural sequencing: who is in the room, and at what stage, is where Indigenous authority is either honoured or hollowed out.

What earlier involvement looks like in practice is beginning to be documented. A March 2026 paper by Dora Zhao and colleagues describes a series of co-design workshops with twenty-two public school educators in Hawai'i, convened around the educators' own concerns about cultural misrepresentation and bias in AI systems. Its argument is that auditing an AI system should be understood as a community-oriented process rather than the work of isolated individuals. The tools that emerged from those workshops were shaped by the participants' concerns because the participants were in the room while the tools were still taking shape, which is precisely the condition that late-stage consultation cannot reproduce.

The practical implications are concrete. A university library deciding whether to make its Indigenous collections available to an AI vendor would, under this logic, be obliged to consult the relevant communities before issuing the tender, not after signing it. A national museum contemplating a generative-AI interface to its holdings would need to bring the source communities into the design while fundamental choices, what is included, what is excluded, who governs access, remain open. Most institutions do the opposite, treating community consultation as a late-stage validation exercise, which is exactly the failure mode Malloy identifies.

Sovereignty as a Precondition, Not a Courtesy

The most ambitious of the recent contributions tries to move the whole conversation from ethics to architecture. A 2026 paper in AI & Society setting out a pluralistic, participatory approach to global AI governance argues that Indigenous knowledge systems and the right of Indigenous peoples to self-determination, underpinned by free, prior and informed consent and the CARE Principles, must be foundational to AI regulation rather than an optional addition to it. Its foundational move is to treat the right of a cultural community to exclude, limit, or set conditions on AI use of its knowledge not as an ethical enhancement but as a structural requirement of the system. In that framing, the ability of a community to say no is not a feature to be added if resources permit. It is a precondition of the system being legitimate at all. A knowledge system that cannot represent and enforce the exclusion is, on this account, defective by design, in the same way that a database without access controls would be considered defective.

This is the intellectual heart of what the Geneva advocates were reaching toward, and it inverts the default. The prevailing institutional posture treats tribal authority as something to be accommodated where feasible: a nice-to-have, honoured when a community is organised enough to demand it and convenient enough to grant. The sovereignty argument insists on the reverse. Authority over the knowledge is the starting condition. The burden is not on the community to prove why its knowledge should be withheld, but on the institution and the developer to establish that they have the right to use it at all. This is the same inversion that free, prior and informed consent performs in every other domain of Indigenous rights: consent is presumed absent until it is actively and legitimately given, rather than presumed present until someone objects.

The tradition this draws on is now substantial and cannot be dismissed as marginal. The Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper, produced in 2020 out of workshops led by the scholar and artist Jason Edward Lewis and involving more than thirty researchers and artists, argued years ahead of the current wave that AI must be designed in partnership with specific communities rather than around assumed universal values, that Indigenous communities must retain full control over their own data, and that ethical scrutiny must extend across the entire development process. That work has since grown into Abundant Intelligences, an Indigenous-led international research programme rethinking what AI could be if it were placed inside Indigenous knowledge systems rather than extracting from them. UNESCO has moved in the same direction, releasing guidance on Indigenous data sovereignty in AI and a report on Indigenous people-centred artificial intelligence developed with communities across Latin America and the Caribbean, insisting that the digitisation of Indigenous data must guarantee self-determination, governance and free, prior and informed consent. The direction of travel in the normative literature is unmistakable. It has simply not yet been translated into binding obligation.

That translation is what the July 2026 session in Geneva was ultimately about. The advocates were not asking whether AI can be used on Indigenous knowledge, a question the archives and the models have already answered. They were asking whether the institutions holding these materials carry any enforceable duty to treat tribal authority as a precondition of deployment rather than a gesture of goodwill. On the current state of the law the answer is mostly no. There are principles without teeth, labels without reach, a treaty confined to patents and still short of the ratifications it needs, a repatriation statute confined to physical objects, and a copyright regime that measures the wrong thing. What there is not, yet, is a rule that says an archive must ask before it lets a model in.

The wax cylinders in Calais have travelled a long way from the horn Fewkes spoke into. They have been catalogued, restored, digitised, labelled and, in the Passamaquoddy case, partly returned. Whether the next generation of that material, the recordings not yet governed by a Traditional Knowledge Label, the collections not yet subject to a differential-access system, the languages not yet defended by a community strong enough to write its own licence, is treated as a training set or as a trust will depend on decisions that institutions are making right now, mostly without asking. The people who sang into the machine could not consent to what would be done with their voices. The least their descendants are owed is the standing to decide.

References

1. Malloy, Kerri J. “The Protection That Tribal Nations' Data Needs.” Governing, 9 June 2026. https://www.governing.com/management-and-administration/the-protection-that-tribal-nations-data-needs
2. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. “Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” https://www.ohchr.org/en/hrc-subsidiaries/expert-mechanism-on-indigenous-peoples
3. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. “Indigenous Peoples' rights in conflict situations and Artificial Intelligence on the agenda at Expert Mechanism session.” July 2026. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/07/indigenous-peoples-rights-conflict-situations-and-artificial-intelligence
4. United Nations. “United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” Article 31, 2007. https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/declaration-on-the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples.html
5. First Nations Information Governance Centre. “The First Nations Principles of OCAP.” https://fnigc.ca/ocap-training/
6. Carroll, S. R., et al. “The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.” Data Science Journal, 2020. https://datascience.codata.org/articles/10.5334/dsj-2020-043
7. Global Indigenous Data Alliance. “CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.” https://www.gida-global.org/careprinciples
8. Local Contexts. “Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels.” https://localcontexts.org/labels/traditional-knowledge-labels/
9. Mukurtu CMS. “About Mukurtu.” Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation, Washington State University. https://mukurtu.org/
10. Institute of Museum and Library Services. “Mukurtu Software Preserves Indigenous Digital Heritage.” https://www.imls.gov/grant-spotlights/mukurtu-software-preserves-indigenous-digital-heritage-through-technologies-today
11. Library of Congress. “Ancestral Voices — About this Collection.” https://www.loc.gov/collections/ancestral-voices/about-this-collection/
12. National Recording Preservation Board, Library of Congress. “Jesse Walter Fewkes field recordings of the Passamaquoddy Indians (1890).” https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/Fewkes-Passamaquoddy-Indians-field-recordings_Revak.pdf
13. NPR. “Historic Recordings Revitalize Language For Passamaquoddy Tribal Members,” 3 September 2019. https://www.npr.org/2019/09/03/748604202/historic-recordings-revitalize-language-for-passamaquoddy-tribal-members
14. Te Hiku Media. “Kaitiakitanga Licence and Kōrero Māori.” https://tehiku.nz/te-hiku-tech/
15. NVIDIA Blog. “Māori Speech AI Model Helps Preserve and Promote New Zealand Indigenous Language.” https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/te-hiku-media-maori-speech-ai/
16. Perera, M., Vidanaarachchi, R., Chandrashekeran, S., Kennedy, M., Kennedy, B., and Halgamuge, S. “Indigenous peoples and artificial intelligence: A systematic review and future directions.” Big Data & Society, 2025. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517251349170
17. Vidanaarachchi, Rajith, Perera, Maneesha, Chandrashekeran, Sangeetha, Kennedy, Brendan, and Halgamuge, Saman. “AI must be built with Indigenous Knowledges, not against them.” Pursuit, University of Melbourne, 3 July 2026. https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/ai-must-be-built-with-indigenous-knowledges,-not-against-them
18. “Data colonialism and indigenous languages in AI: a critical review of existing initiatives and their struggles with data sovereignty.” AI & Society, 2026. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-026-03091-w
19. World Intellectual Property Organization. “Summary of the WIPO Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge (2024).” https://www.wipo.int/en/web/treaties/ip/gratk/summary_gratk
20. National Park Service. “Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act — Revised Regulations (2024).” https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nagpra/index.htm
21. Zhao, Dora, et al. “Whose Knowledge Counts? Co-Designing Community-Centered AI Auditing Tools with Educators in Hawai'i.” arXiv:2603.16646, March 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16646
22. “Pluralistic AI governance: Indigenous knowledge and the right of Indigenous peoples to self-determination.” AI & Society, 2026. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-026-02938-6
23. Lewis, Jason Edward (ed.). “Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper.” Indigenous AI Working Group and CIFAR, 2020. https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/986506/
24. Lewis, J. E., Whaanga, H., and Yolgörmez, C. “Abundant intelligences: placing AI within Indigenous knowledge frameworks.” AI & Society, 2024. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-024-02099-4
25. UNESCO. “New report and guidelines for indigenous data sovereignty in artificial intelligence developments.” Global AI Ethics and Governance Observatory. https://www.unesco.org/ethics-ai/en/articles/new-report-and-guidelines-indigenous-data-sovereignty-artificial-intelligence-developments

---

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

Just because I like this (relatively) new neon sign at L.A. Rose Cafe on Fountain.

This unmarked pizza truck in Eagle Rock is apparently “Swizzle Pizza” and was once a stand on Heliotrope in East Hollywood. They weren’t quite ready when I passed by, maybe you will make it there before me.

A variety of chili crisp / chile crunch inspired by Mexico, China, Japan & Cambodia at Olive Wine + Liquor (by Wine + Eggs) in Burbank.

A number of fancier oils and soy sauces at the same.

Elderflower Candy Fish.

Enter around back.

In Summary: * Last night's sleep was surprisingly good. When I put head to pillow I checked the time; 20:00 on the dot. the next thing I saw when waking was a clock reading 04:00. Eight solid hours without any interruption. I cannot remember the last time I had such a sleep. Thank you, Jesus!

Over three hours of yard work done midday. For most of it I was using snips and a big, two-handed lopper. I was cutting, pulling, lifting and carrying, but no mowing or grass cutting. And much of the work was done under trees, away from the direct sun. So soreness now in the hands, arms and shoulders, but not so much in the legs and lower back for a change. Bet I sleep well again tonight. Heh.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 226.86 lbs. * bp= 128/77 (73)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:15 – 1 banana * 06:05 – pizza * 12:30 – Sesame Beef lunch plate, fried rice, egg drop soup, rangoon

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:55 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:30 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 10:00 – listen to Jack in 60 Minutes Podcast * 11:00 – yard work, cutting down weeds, branches, vines * 12:30 to 13:00 – watch old game shows and eatlunch at home with Sylvia * 13:15 to 15:15 – back to the yard work * 16:30 – listening to 700 WLW, Cincinnati Reds Radio, ahead of tonight's MLB game vs the Pittsburgh Pirates

Chess: * 10:30 – moved in all pending CC games

Hi blog friends! Cute Snail and I published our back to school newsletter today. We put some things in there that we thought some of you might enjoy so we’re sharing. One is a back to school themed word search puzzle. The other are the links to the coloring pages we created for fall and back to school.

Skateboard Cruisin' Into My First Day | Snail-tastic School Year Learning Adventure | Beautiful, Bright Spec-tacular School Year | Colorful, Bright Spec-tacular School Year | Fresh Starts, Fall Leaves And Smiles | Beautiful Bright Spec-tacular Fall | Colorful, Bright Spec-tacular Fall

All coloring pages are easy print US letter size PDF’s and can be printed at any scale you like. Smaller scales give you more margin which makes the pages look like they came out of an old school story book. All pages are FREE to download with opportunities to contribute to help keep the coffee, cookies, smiles and SNAIL-TASTIC good cheer flowing if you like. Enjoy! 

❤️ Juliet (And Cute Snail)

IMAGE ID: Picture of the Cute Snail back to school word search puzzle. Contains words that have to do with school and learning as well as a picture of Cute Snail wearing her disco ball shell and riding her skateboard.

VVA Lijfstijl Vandaag Aflevering 7 serie 5 ; Met de Holbewoners

Vandaag in VVA Lijfstijl hebben we ons zelf uitgenodigd bij Renee en Rene Anderthaler voor een complete remake van het door hun bewoonde hol. Renee en Rene zijn onduidelijk te verstaan en daarom hebben we ze die paar keer dat ze iets gromden ondertiteld, de ondertiteling is gebaseerd op wat wij wilden horen en maar hebben aangenomen dat ze dit op geheel eigen wijze ook tegen ons zeiden.

Na de wilde, supersnelle rit over de A1 met gemiddeld 160 km per uur en een tergend langzame wandeling door de woestenij kwamen we uit bij het jonge stel in hun grot, die hier ter plekke al een poosje samenwonen in zonde en helaas ook zonder de gemakken zo hard nodig voor succesvol samenkleven, vloerverwarming, een airfryer, kast ruimte, een esresso maker, de man cave in de grot, hobby kamers voor renee en schilderijen aan de wand met daar op abstracte kunst of hobo art afbeeldingen. We moesten hier aangekomen zomaar zonder wat dan ook pardoes binnen vallen, alles wat wonen zo'n unieke ervaring maakt ontbreekt hier, de deurbel met lichtje, anders een klopper met drakenkop, een mooie moderne zelfsluitende protiek deurkruk, de hele deur, lijst en al ontbrak, je moest er zo in, we zeiden 'klop, klop' pas na een poosje overleggen bij de hol ingang over het juiste woordje, waarbij het ging tussen 'tring', 'rinkel' en 'klop, klop' dus.

'Hallo, welkom team enthousiaste decorateurs' 'Leuk dat jullie er zijn om ons hol te verbeteren'

Gromden ze.

Wij keken rond en zeiden tegen de camera 'OMG! Hoe kun je zo leven, waar zijn de gordijntjes, kussentjes.. waar zit hier de lichtknop eigenlijk en waarom is het zo nat. Hier is een makeover een plicht geen overbodige luxe meer. Vree-se-luk! Dit kan echt niet, hoe moet u hier binnen de visite entertainen, waar is de feng shui, de balans tussen u energie en de objecten, de familie foto's. De inloopkast, de schuifdeuren, er is hier niet eens een onbewoond kook eiland!'

We liepen, de stijleur en wij, door de grot in het gezelschap van de Anderthalers, zij wezen hier en daar ergens heen, en gromden..

'Hier moet de inloopkast met schuifdeuren' 'Dit lijkt ons de plek voor de bank en de televisie, zodat we ook hier 'thuis' naar jullie programma kunnen kijken en niet alleen verder op in Anderthalistan Stad.' 'We willen wel graag leuke kussentjes' 'En Hobo Kunst'

We gingen voor zover mogelijk iets afzijdig staan en daar praten tegen de microfoon en in de camera. 'We moeten hier en nu ontzettend veel re-stylen en wel meteen. Niet alleen om u te plezieren, Rene, met u veel betekenende andere, maar Samen, met ons team want re-decorating doe je samen met een team experts. Samen, met ons en de sponsoren van deze serie, de leveranciers van schitterende plakhaakjes, plak vloerverwarming en plakjes voorgebakken cake en nog veel meer.'

'We geven u, Rene en Renee, natuurlijk ook het idee dat u echt iets bijdraagt aan het binnenste van u van god gekraakte grot en daarom gaat u met behulp van deze tijdschriften, lijm, schaar en kleur potloden een moodboard maken voor het bepalen van de sfeer in dit vochtige, duistere hol. Hier kijk, onze drie eigen beheer VVA lifestyle magazines, Grot Style, BC Wonen en de Lynda, knip er uit wat u het liefste in u leven wil zien, mode bewust als u van nature bent, kleur de binnenkant van u hol met de binnenzijde van u wat hoekige, zeer harige en noeste hoofd.

'Leuk' Gromden ze...

'... Eh, nee! Stop! verkeerd om, pas op! Niet in u zelf knippen en niet in Renee.. niet bevestigen aan u significante ander, dat spul krijg je nooit en te nimmer uit dat haar. Doe dat nou niet, alsjeblieft, hou op, hou op ... Ruim de potloden, lijm en schaar maar weer op schat, dit wordt niks. Pak de vingerverf maar weer. We laten ze hun moodboards bekliederen.'

'Ook leuk' Gromden ze...

We knippen in een ruk door naar de afgevingerverfde stemmingsplakaten

'Laten we even samen kijken welke stemming u graag wilt zien, hier, in dit nu nog zo grimmige overkomende hol, weliswaar is dit gegeven, dit kleine klieder kunst werkje, iets dat wij voor u eigen belang volkomen gaan negeren tijdens de gehele show en beyond. 'Goh, nou, schitterend. Dat is wel iets om ter kennisgeving aan te nemen!', 'Ik snap wel waarom u het samen niet eens wordt over verbetering in het leefklimaat alhier, het verfraaien van deze basic woning. Dat u hier samen zo zonder alles bent gaan holen is wat ons betreft een groot wonder.' Zo complimenteerden wij Renee en Rene met hun leven en levenskeuzes.

'Het is door de liefde dat wij hier, Renee en ik, in deze berg, in dit door wind en water ontstane gat samen zijn gaan wonen' Gromde Rene Anderthaler

'Bij dit stijl en bouwproject werken we samen met de meest geliefde stijl goeroe van dit moment, bij onze redactie tenminste, Josje Magda' Lena Xantstralia van Balen Nazaat Dribbelbips, meesteres van het eenvoudige, zij zal u grot in slechts twee a drie weken omtoveren tot een modern magisch leef paleis. Tot die tijd slaapt u op kosten van onze sponsor VVA reizen, eten en overnachten in Het VVA van der Aiolornis Incredibilis hotel en restaurant maar voor het zover is nemen wij u mee naar de grote VVA wonen op maat showroom waar wij u laten zien wat wij gaan inkopen, krijgen aangeboden voor in u grot, maar het is ook voor de kijker koper, zodat zij weten, en dan denken na het zien van deze uitzending 'Deze producten maken ook voor ons het verschil tussen een goede of een slecht relatie met ons huis, en dus ons zelf in deze standvastige relatie.'

In een wip monteren we met Rene en Renee naar de showroom, elk daar met in hun handen het gevingerverfde moodboard, stemmingsplakaat.

'Renee en Rene Anderthaler, welkom in het lifestijl etablissement van het establishment, deze schitterende winkel vol uitstallingen van spulletjes die de fabrikanten waarmee wij in c zijn gegaan, de artikelen die zij via ons kwijt moeten spelen aan goedgelovige en dus zeer bereidwillige kijker kopers. Zie hier bijvoorbeeld een grote collectie gordijnen, vitrages, kussentjes, boho kunst ornamenten, strak en simpel scandinavisch design meubilair, glazen schuifdeuren, open keukens, alleen op eenzame eilanden, kastjes met laadjes en laden met kastjes, de modernste apparatuur, hd ready, 4k 8k ready, 16k als het aan ons ligt, via wifi, google, bluetooth, alle kabels netjes weggewerkt achter het gebroken geel en zweverig groen behang op de muren van u gemoderniseerde grot. Allemaal hier te zien, elke uitzending weer. Deze stoel zit toch geweldig, ik zie u meteen onderuit zakken,

'Ja zit geweldig'

u wervels en overig gebeente passen zich rustig en gedwee aan aan het trendy meubelstuk, de tevredenheid straalt er vanaf.

'Ik ben tevreden, straal'

Het is ook exact in overeenstemming met de kleur in de linker bovenhoek van u eigen moodboard, ziet u.

'Ja, ja, ik zie het, alles klopt'

Van deze stoel zijn er maar twee miljoen verkocht van de vijftig miljoen geproduceerde, een exclusieve musthave. Staat geweldig schuin tegenover die nieuwe 4k hhhd ready voor Google geprepareerde P0k LED cinematisch breedbeeld televisie met sfeervolle backlighting.

En dan deze lampen uit de industrieel neo-modern PipeLijn serie zullen goed staan in iedere hoek van u dan inenen sfeer verlichte grot, en boven u platte schedel hangen we deze prachtige hang lampen, klassiek kandelaar model, maar een tikkeltje moderner dankzij op afstand bedienbare lampenpitten. De andere Anderthalers zullen u benijden om zoveel moois, zo schaars maar toch warm verlicht.

'Zeker weten'

Natuurlijk regelen we ook een deur voor u, met kijkvenster, inbraak veilige wentelkruk, u kunt vanaf nu veilig slapen, slot en sleutel, en een bel met uniek bel geluid, Da da da da, Trio daar geniet iedereen van. Ze, de buren, vrienden en bekenden, zullen alleen al hierom in drommen bij u langs komen, en u zult dan trots die mooie boho scandinavisch tribal stijl deur openen en hun de herboren grot tonen. Samen hand in hand met Renee paraderen in u betere lifestijl, uw primitieve stam al het moois laten zien een welke wij voor u hebben geregeld, ingekocht en voor zover mogelijk hebben aangesloten op een netwerk van stand alone nood aggregaten en kortstondig aanwezige, tijdens de uitzending, (want prijzige) sat verbinding voor de wifi. Wilt u dat internet houden en die aggregaten aan de praat houden adviseren wij u om te gaan zoeken naar een betaalde baan, mogelijk bij de kippenslachterij of in de tuinbouw kassen, daar zoeken ze eigenlijk altijd goedkope werkkrachten, fysiek sterk, niet kleinzerig of veeleisend, u lijkt me daarvoor zeer geschikt. Wij daarentegen allemaal niet, nee, nee,

'en Josje dan'

ook Josje niet.

We monteren hier weg, en terug naar de oorsprong, en terug in de tijd maar dan later en ..

'Huh'

Knip

Dan is er ook nog de onbewerkte buitenkant van deze grot, ook daar moet aardig wat aan gebeuren. U moet de aandacht vestigen op u, wonend en straks werkend voor aggregaten voeding in de kippenslacht, hier tussen die andere eenvoudiger ingerichte Anderthalers tiny huisjes. Een leuk tuintje met kleurrijke plantjes, standaard bistro setje, neergezet op zeer unieke keramische buitentegels waarvan te weinig zijn verkocht, met een mooie buiten verlichting, vooral rondom de deur, alles zegt kom maar niet KOM ogenblikkelijk, het is liefdevol, gastvrij maar nooit te.. u bent immers de vriendelijkheid zelve, aardig voor kinderen, huisdieren, vol liefde voor deze weerbarstige omgeving, een goede holbewoner. Dat laten wij voor u aan anderen zien, wij exposeren u zoals u bent, moet zijn volgens ons. Maar wel alleen met spullen op voorraad, ruim op voorraad. Honderd procent uniek materiaal, voor u op maat gefabriceerd. Die tuin laten we niet door Josje doen, hier is ze niet goed genoeg in, mag ook niet, de show en werk wet houdt het tegen, maar dit moet worden gedaan door onze eigen VVA Tuin en Huiswerk TV Show gast Kabouter Sjinkie Hekwerk, door onze talrijke kijkers zeer gewaardeerd vanwege zijn enorme kennis van tuin zaken doen en spontane manier van presenteren.

Laten we maar meteen aan de montage van het werk beginnen. Het studio aftreksel van twee weken schelden en tieren tijdens het mooi maken van dit donkere en koude gedrocht.

Josje wijst aan waar ze de eerste schuifdeur wil hebben, Josje wijst aan waar het kookeiland moet komen te staan, Josje wijst aan waar de inloopkast moet komen, Josje wijst aan waar haar statement komt te hangen, Josje lacht, de bouwers lachen, ze plakken behang, schilderen, timmeren, sjouwen, lachen, steken hun duim omhoog, slaan elkaar joviaal op de schouders, Josje wijst waar de lampen moeten hangen en hoe hoog, de spots en welke kant ze op moeten belichten, waar de tv aan de grot moet worden genageld, tegenover de bank, de meubel sjouwers lachen, zetten het spul met groot gemak en altijd volgens de CAO regels voor zwaar en lichter til werk neer, wat hebben ze het naar hun zin tijdens het decoreren van het hol van Renee en Rene Anderthaler, Josje wijst waar de klok moet hangen, waar de airfryer, smoothiemaker en het espresso apparaat moeten komen te staan, de techneuten sluiten alles met groot plezier en gemak aan op de beschikbare diesel aggregaten, Sjinkie wijst nogmaals aan waar het vijver ornament moet komen, graaft een gat, propt er een hoopje planten in, wijst waar het hekwerk komt te staan en daarmee dus bepalend hoe groot de tuin van de Andertalers is, het loopt allemaal op rolletjes, niemand schreeuwt tegen ondergeschikten, over aansluit problemen, moeilijk roterende schroefjes, uitvallende wifi, haperend licht, niemand verliest zijn geduld tijdens het behangen van de lastige ongelijke hobbelige onbewerkbare nog natte en bemoste rotswanden, het deert niemand dat de kastjes, trolleys, zelden waterpas staan, er water stroomt over het nieuwe lama wollen vloerkleedje, de grot is weliswaar totaal ongeschikt terrein voor dergelijke ingrijpende visuele stijl interventies maar voor dit perfecte stel show werknemers lijkt het een klusje van niks, heerlijk genieten, dollen en lachen, en dan is het opeens af, twee weken werk in vier minuten klaar, het show leven is gewoon heel monteerlijk.

Amper een snee later, staat onze Pre Centator klaar bij de deur met Josje, klaar om de twee Anderthalers liefdevol en enthousiast te begroeten.

Hier nog snel een paar rode kussentjes, daar twee blauwe en een witte langwerpige daar rechts naast het kokette bijzettafeltje. Schitterend, wat een verschil. Eerst al dat grauwe grijze steen, nu dit. Prachtig behang, voortreffelijke keuze, stijleur José. José glanst in het felle licht van de camera, in haar eigen gemaakte sfeer hol, klaar om haar creatie te tonen aan de Andertalers, aan Rene en Renee, wat zullen ze zeggen als ze dit allemaal zien...

Die fraai afgewerkte inloop kast met glazen schuifdeuren voor alle drie de berenvellen is effectief, fraai en heel trendy. In een oogopslag zie je alles wat je bezit hangen, de huiden, zoveel makkelijker om nu het juiste vel te kiezen voor het juiste moment. Mooie kledinghangertjes van Gandalf Woonstijl, afrikaanse motiefjes, echt tribaal, past zo goed in deze omgeving, onmisbaar voor iedereen met meer dan twee huiden om uit te kiezen, O en die nieuwe sjaaltjes, echt zijde, gemaakt door echt kleine handen in vreselijk lage lonen landen, maar ondanks dat mooi!

Hoor

Da da da da …

De bel! Daar zul je de Anderthalers hebben.

Bij de deur staan Renee en Rene onhandig te staan met de bel en de kruk, rondom de deur naar hun eigen hol, geen idee wat te doen. Ze grommen.

'Wat een schitterende deur, fraai hoor' 'Het is ongelooflijk, en kijk onze tuin eens, is dat niet ongelooflijk Rene Anderthaler'

Ze moeten zodra ze in beeld komen elkaars handen vasthouden. Dit gaat niet vanzelf, ze ontvangen meermaals de duidelijke instructies, de camera man en geluids man doen het ze voor, ze grommen hoog en laag iets.

'We zijn zo onder de indruk dat we zijn vergeten hoe we normaal altijd samen door de wildernis lopen' 'Inderdaad en hier in onze grot zitten zitten, altijd samen, altijd hand in hand'

Toch staan ze daar zo, handjes ineen, als wij de deur voor ze open doen omdat ze hebben gebeld om naar binnen te mogen gaan in hun zelf gekraakte hol. Welkom Renees, welkom terug, thuis.

'Ooooh wat mooi' 'Kijk nou toch Renee, die inloopkast en wat zijn dat, toch niet, sjaaltjes?'

Laat eens zien, doe eens om. Gut wat leuk. Echt een vooruitgang. Hier hebben we jullie zit en lig bank staan, dichtbij de televisie, het kijk altaar voor u zit offer, stereo set, hier de meterkast met alle meters nodig om zo mooi in luxe te wonen, daarin zit ook de modem, alle draden overal aan hebben we weggewerkt zodat u ongestoord door die duizenden draden kunt genieten van u heel erg verbeterde grot.

'Netjes hoor' 'Alle draden?'

Ja, niet eentje zie je nog zitten, zelfs de waslijn niet in de tuin, die trek je uit de berg, bevestig je aan de paal verderop in de tuin, en dan hang je de was op, tenzij je het wilt drogen in de droger dat kan ook, die hebben we hier, op de wasmachine, voor al uw huiden, en ernaast de kleine vaatwasser voor de stenen mokken, het nieuwe bestek, koffie, thee kopjes, servies werk en pannen voor bij het onbewoonde kookeiland, en aan de in de berg verstopte lijn hangt u ook het vers van de fabriekspers beddengoed ook al uit ontstaan in lage lonen landen, genaaid met de kleinste, fijnste handen die een klein beetje inkomen kan betalen en huisvesten en voeden, echt als een niet gezien zonne schijntje op de lange werkdag, ze verdienen per kwartaal, neen, per jaar minder dan wij per dag uitgeven aan sjaaltjes en leuke kussentjes.

'Uitbaten die lui' 'Hadden ze maar in de kippenslacht tak of in de tuinbouw kassen moeten gaan werken net zoals ik ga doen, zodat de aggregaten blijven stoken en de Sat connectie met Google behouden blijft, eigen bluetooth eerst'

Gromden Renee en Rene kortaf.

Magnistraal, fabulanties. Hier zien we een heel ander type holenmens, gewoon met de juiste stoffige decoratie om de beresterke schouders, het lijkt al bijna sjiek. We zijn blij dat we dit stel vooruit hebben geholpen naar onze vaart der volkeren, nu kunnen ze ook meepraten en weten waar wij het over hebben als we het er even over hebben voor we ergens anders over beginnen, want ook holen mensen hebben echte mensen wensen, zijn niet veel minder dan gewone huizen mensen zijn, voor je het weet willen ze een villa en dan worden het onze buren, maar eerst maar een flinke poos intens genieten van dit schitterend door ons team gerenoveerde hol, wat jullie Rene en Renee Anderthaler

'Enorm bedankt voor alles wat jullie voor ons hebben gedaan' 'We staan voor eeuwig bij jullie in het krijt'

Als je dat maar weet dan komt het allemaal goed. Dit was dan weer VVA Lijfstijl volgende week meer dan komen we voor het eerst in contact met buitenaardse wezens voor een make over. Tot dan

Friday's MLB Game of Choice has the Pittsburgh Pirates playing the Cincinatti Reds in a game scheduled to start at 5:10 PM CDT. As I usually do, I'll follow the game's score and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.

A description often arrives as if it were direct.

It says: c = a.

But very often something has happened in between. There is a missing term, a mediating frame, a typology through which the description has become possible. What has been presented as direct recognition may in fact be recognition through b. The danger is not only that b may be forgotten. It is that b may become so familiar that it disappears into the description itself.

This is where consensus has value. Consensus is not merely agreement about the final description. It is a shared knowledge of the character and necessity of the mediating term. We know, together, why c can be described as a, because we share some understanding of b. Consensus, then, is a kind of social memory. It remembers the typology that the description has hidden. It preserves the route by which the fact became legible.

But this also explains the danger. Consensus can keep b alive, or it can bury it more deeply. What everyone knows may become what no one thinks to examine. So perhaps the question is not only whether we agree. It is whether our agreement still remembers what made agreement possible.

For Example A spirit level offers a simple illustration. When the bubble settles between the two lines, we say the shelf is level. The description arrives as if it were direct. Yet the claim rests on a mediating term: the behaviour of liquid under gravity, the calibration of the vial, the shared convention that this particular bubble’s position encodes “horizontal.” Consensus makes the reading feel immediate because everyone already remembers, or once remembered, how the tool works. But that same consensus can also bury the mediating term. The bubble becomes authoritative even when the vial is warped or the temperature is wrong. What looks like direct recognition is really recognition through a frame that has been naturalised into the act of seeing.

David Marshall Skerries

What happens when a question stops asking for an answer and begins asking to be understood?

Perhaps that is the moment it ceases to be a problem and becomes an essay.

David Marshall Skerries

Photo by Zosia Szopka on Unsplash

Dear Aunt Martha,

I’ve been trying to keep a daily journal but writing to you is much easier.  I used to tell my students in composition classes that they had to write to an audience, so you are mine now.

Keeping myself clean and fed has proved to be more of a job than I thought it would be.  I didn’t realize how spoiled I am.  Friends once paid big money to spend time at retreats doing what I have to do every day now.

I once had a dishwasher, now I wash everything by hand.  I have to drive an hour and a half to a decent grocery store now and it’s too late in the year to put in a garden.  Fresh vegetables are expensive and I am grateful for the overflow from Caleb and Ann’s garden, but what am I going to do with all of this squash and zucchini? Ann is teaching me to can. There isn’t much room in the freezer to store more than weekly groceries.

Samu practice at retreats was fun and exciting, largely because for many of us it was not things we had to perform every day and there was an “odor of sanctity” about it that made it feel special, as if we were earning spiritual brownie points for doing menial work.  I had a housekeeper and  reliable appliances at home and  am reminded of Marie Antoinette playing at being a shepherdess. I wonder what my former retreat companions would do if they had to evict a 6-foot black snake from a chicken coop.

Speaking of chickens, they are not your original flock.  They were  dispersed by the hurricane.  I stuck my head into Tractor Supply looking for cat food when they had chicks and fell for the cute little balls of peeping fluff.  David, Caleb’s youngest, helped repair the coop and has taught me about caring for them as a 4-H project.

 I never knew domesticated fowl could be so funny. There is no way I could sacrifice one for dinner, even if the preacher came to visit.  I remember watching you do it and how you showed me the eggs inside the butchered hen. These are pets and are more entertainment than a television could ever be. The fresh eggs are a bonus and they lay enough that I can return Caleb and Ann’s generosity.

Caring for the flock and the lack of automation in the kitchen  caused me to realize that I have romanticized rural life based on trialing after you and Uncle Bud as a child. You were always a safe place for a troubled kid and I never knew how much hard work it took for you to keep body and soul intact.  Watching Uncle Bud do the milking twice a day was an adventure for a child, as an adult it would be part of the daily grind of responsibilities with no relief.

I think it’s human nature to romanticize our pasts as we search for parental figures to replace the ones we lost or never had.  There are jokes among professors about student crushes and tales told at cocktail parties after a few drinks.  I was privy to more than one student-teacher affair that went sour.

 I had an embarrassing crush on my first Buddhist teacher and spent hours staring at his crotch during dharma talks.  I will always appreciate his kindness and patience as he gracefully ignored my puppy eyes. Reality hit especially hard many years later when I tracked him down and he did not remember me.  I shed too many tears over him during our association, but healed a great deal from the experience.

Roshi talks about having no preferences. That’s a tough one to swallow, especially as basic survival depends on our atavistic brains picking and choosing. We gravitate towards the pleasurable and reject the uncomfortable while Roshi instructs us to embrace both. We talk about the Sandokai, the Harmony of Sameness and Differences, and try to apply it to our lives.  Meanwhile the Four Noble truths remind us that suffering arises when we want things to be different from what they are.

We put people, places, things, experiences, on pedestals and imbue them the qualities that we want for ourselves or are repelled by them.  The flock of chickens are hilarious entertainment. Each has a name and a distinct personality. Perhaps somewhere in my psyche I see them as the toddlers I was never able to mother or grant them mental processes that they don’t really have as I compare their behavior to people I know.  I wonder if that is what Roshi means when they talk about life as a mirror. Projection.

Maybe my next book will be about the chickens.

 

Love,

Geneva