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 traditional knowledge with predictive models to adapt fishing patterns to shifting ice. In Chad, Indigenous pastoralists use participatory mapping with satellite data to predict drought. The Rainforest Foundation’s Alert system processes satellite imagery so community monitors can catch illegal mining before the bulldozers finish.

“For generations, Indigenous peoples have protected the world’s most intact ecosystems without satellites, without algorithms or technologies,” said Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, Mbororo and former chair of the Forum. She’s right. They did it without AI. AI just makes it faster.

Here’s the part that doesn’t make the headline.

The AI that monitors the forest requires data centers. Data centers require water — between 300,000 and 5 million gallons per facility per year. They require land. They require electricity. They require critical minerals: lithium, cobalt, copper, rare earths. The minerals require mines. The mines require water too — global lithium production alone consumed 456 billion liters in 2024, enough to serve 62 million people in sub-Saharan Africa. In Chile’s Salar de Atacama, mining takes up to 65% of regional water use. Groundwater drops. Salt lagoons shrink. Aquifers contaminate.

And the mines, the data centers, the water extraction — they go where the land is cheap, the regulations are thin, and the communities don’t have lobbyists. They go to Indigenous land.

Honor the Earth, an Indigenous-led environmental justice organization run by Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne activist Krystal Two Bulls, is tracking over 100 proposed hyperscale data centers on tribal and rural lands across the United States. The pattern is consistent: corporations approach with solar panel proposals, then pivot to data centers, then request NDAs that make tribal leadership accountable to the corporation rather than to their own people. Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon — all using subsidiaries and Native-owned energy companies as intermediaries.

Two Bulls calls it “data colonialism.” She’s being precise, not dramatic. The Seminole Nation passed a unanimous moratorium. Tulsa City Council passed a nine-month pause. The Muskogee blocked a resolution. These aren’t protests. They’re governance decisions by people who read the contracts.

The construction phase promises 1,500 jobs. In Rapid City, South Dakota, that number dropped to three full-time positions once the facility was built. Montana residents saw electricity bills nearly double. One trailer resident got a $900 winter bill during mild weather. The data centers generate 97 decibels of noise — enough to cause hearing loss — and raise surrounding temperatures by up to 16 degrees.

Meanwhile, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, thousands of children mine cobalt without protective equipment. Maternity wards near mining operations report elevated rates of miscarriages and birth defects. In Chile’s Antofagasta region, cancer mortality is the highest in the country. Lung cancer rates are nearly triple the national average. Rare earth production generates up to 2,000 metric tons of waste for every metric ton of usable material.

So here is the loop. An Indigenous community in Brazil uses AI to detect illegal deforestation on their land. The AI runs on servers cooled by water taken from an Indigenous community in Chile. The servers are built with cobalt mined by children in Congo. The data center sits on treaty land in South Dakota, where the construction crew leaves and three jobs remain. The tool that protects the forest is made from the forest.

“We’re always the one that ends up having to sacrifice our relationship to land, air, water, our communities and our nonhuman relatives,” Two Bulls told Democracy Now.

The Forum’s own reporting found that 31% of human rights defenders killed globally in 2023 were Indigenous — while Indigenous populations comprise 5% of the world’s people. The people doing the protecting are six times more likely to be killed for it. And now the technology being offered to help them is built on a supply chain that destroys other Indigenous land to function.

This is not a double-edged sword. A double-edged sword cuts both ways from the same handle. This is a supply chain where one end monitors the land and the other end eats it. The handle is held by the same five companies every time.

The solutions exist. Kate Finn of the Osage Nation’s Tallgrass Institute says the standard is simple: free, prior, and informed consent. The CARE Principles already exist. The Māori Data Governance Model already exists. Canada’s First Nations developed the OCAP framework years ago. None of this is new. None of it is complicated.

It is opposed. Because consent slows extraction. And extraction is the product.

// NEON BLOOD

Sources: Grist · Grist (land defenders) · Democracy Now · Fortune · Mongabay