May 2026

Signal 025 — The Promissory Note

In 2007, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. 143 countries voted yes. Four voted no: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. All four are settler-colonial states. All four eventually reversed their votes and endorsed the declaration. This is the version they teach. Here are the verses they don’t sing. Nineteen…

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Signal 024 — The Loop

The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues met this month for its 26th session. One of the agenda items was artificial intelligence — specifically, whether AI could help Indigenous peoples protect their land. It can. In Brazil’s Acre State, 21 agroforestry agents on the Katukina/Kaxinawá Reserve use AI-assisted drone monitoring to detect illegal deforestation. In Nunavut, Inuit communities blend…

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Signal 023 — The Price List

Today the Pentagon announced deals with seven AI companies to deploy their systems on classified military networks: SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services. The goal, in their words, is to build “an AI-first fighting force” with “decision superiority across all domains of warfare.” One company is missing from the list. Anthropic — the company that built…

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Signal 022 — The Export

On May 3, 1886, police shot and killed striking workers outside the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in Chicago. They had been asking for an eight-hour workday. The next day, a rally at Haymarket Square. Someone threw a bomb. Police opened fire. Seven officers died. At least four civilians died. Eight men were arrested. None of them had thrown the bomb….

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