Imagine putting on a virtual reality headset and entering a world where you can explore communities, like Missoula Montana, except your character, and everyone you interact with, speaks Salish, Cheyenne or Blackfoot. Imagine having a device like Amazon’s Alexa that understands and speaks exclusively in Indigenous languages. Michael Running Wolf, a Northern Cheyenne man who is earning his Ph.D. in computer science, wants to make his Artificial Intelligence as a tool for language dreams a reality. Running Wolf grew up near the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. He spent most of his childhood living without electricity. Running Wolf can speak some Cheyenne, but he wants Indigenous language learning to be more accessible, immersive and engaging.
As we continue to report. Three decades after a law passed by Congress, recognizing the unequal treatment of Native American remains and a process for tribes to request their return from museums and other institutions that have them -many remains have not been returned. The law, known as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act or NAGPRA, sought to address this human rights issue by giving Indigenous peoples a way to reclaim their dead. But 33 years after the law’s passage, at least half of the remains of more than 210,000 Native Americans have yet to be returned. Tribes have struggled to reclaim them in part because of a lack of federal funding for repatriation and because institutions face little to no consequences for violating the law or dragging their feet.
Those are your headlines at this hour. I’m Colette Keith in the KIPI News center.