Michael Running Wolf left Amazon so Indigenous tribes could own their own AI.
Montreal, Quebec, Canada (McGill University); FLAIR operates across North America · Michael Running Wolf
Published July 16, 2026
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 story
The person and the place
Michael Running Wolf is a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, with Lakota and Blackfeet family ties, now a PhD student at McGill University in Montreal.
The problem
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 moment he didn't wait
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 don't want us to be the only ones doing this. I don't want to have control over their AI destiny. I want there to be an ecosystem of research. I want tribes to take over their own destiny," he said.
FLAIR's Lakota AI Code Camp trained 20 rural South Dakota youth with no prior software experience. Every single graduate is now enrolled in a four-year college pursuing a computer-science-related field. Running Wolf has also described a longer-term vision for the technology itself: speaking Lakota inside a VR headset and experiencing a Lakota buffalo hunt, or holding conversations with digital avatars, built by and for the community, not around it.
"I want there to be an ecosystem of research. I want tribes to take over their own destiny." — Michael Running Wolf, Prism Reports
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