Language Heritage · Ordinary People
Michael Running Wolf left Amazon so Indigenous tribes could own their own AI.
Michael Running Wolf · Montreal, Quebec, Canada (McGill University); FLAIR operates across North America
Roughly 200 Indigenous languages in North America are endangered, and the AI built to help save them was being built by outsiders. Michael Running Wolf left Amazon's Alexa team to make sure tribes controlled it instead.
The person and the place
Michael Running Wolf describes himself as Northern Cheyenne, Lakota, and Blackfeet. He grew up in Montana and went on to a computer science PhD at McGill University in Montreal.
The problem Michael cared about
Roughly 200 Indigenous languages across North America are endangered. The speech and language AI being built to help preserve them was largely being built, owned, and controlled by companies outside those communities.
The agency moment
Running Wolf left his job on Amazon's Alexa team, where he'd founded the company's first Indigenous employee affinity group, to co-found and lead FLAIR (First Languages AI Reality). His goal wasn't to build the one tool that saves every language himself. "I want there to be an ecosystem of research. I don't want us to be the only ones doing this. I don't want to have control over their AI destiny. I want tribes to take over their own destiny," he said.
What changed
The Lakota AI Code Camp, which Running Wolf co-founded, took in 20 rural South Dakota kids with no prior software experience. Every camper who finished went on to a four-year institution, studying computer science, maths, or something close to it. Back in 2023 he described a further-out hope for the technology itself: "I want to put on a headset, and be able to speak Lakota and experience a Lakota buffalo hunt or engage with conversations with digital avatars or chat bots in VR as an educational experience." By 2025 he had pushed that horizon out. "I think that was very pie-in-the sky, obviously. That's not going to happen any time soon; there are a lot of technical barriers. Our near-time objective is very modest," he said.
The move worth copying
He didn't just want to save the language. He wanted to make sure the people who speak it still own the tools that do it. If your community is being offered help that comes with someone else holding the keys, this is the version worth pointing at.
"I want there to be an ecosystem of research." — Michael Running Wolf, Prism Reports
Sources
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Curated by Good in Progress from the public record.
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