It's Time for Real AI: Ancestral Intelligence not Artificial Intelligence

“Us coming together is because our grandmothers are talking”--John Trudell

For some two years in the early 2000s, I visited a number of times with John Trudell, a former chair of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and spokesperson for the United Indians of All Tribes takeover of Alcatraz Island from 1969 to 1971. That occupation was around the time of my own radicalization as a teenager: I took part in the 1968 East Los Angeles “Blowouts,” the largest student walkouts in the U.S. up till then, and also the 1970 Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War, the largest anti-war protest in a community of color at the time. In that last incident, I was beaten and jailed… I experienced social injustices from the inside out.

I emerged from these and other acts grasping on to the lifeline of collective peace, justice, and dignity. For me it was a lifeline: I was a drug addict, homeless for three years, a gang member involved in crime and violence. The radical wing of the Chicano Movement, tied to the Black Power Movement, the Red Power Movement, for peace at home and abroad, pulled me from the madness. It provided me a new imagination away from the suicide-homicide road I was on. The movement gave me a cause, bigger than my personal and relatively petty concerns, confusions, and fears. By age 20, I had returned to high school, obtained a diploma, painted murals, took photographs, and wrote my first expressive pieces. I had organized my own walkouts and took part in other marches and actions. I also began a life of study: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Che, Mao, Fanon, but also poetry, speculative fiction, and books about class struggle and power dynamics under capitalism.

I was becoming a revolutionary thinker, organizer, and writer.

During that time, I first sought my Indigenous roots. I hung out with AIM activists and also began Mexica (Aztec) danza and learned about my own ways from Chihuahua, Mexico among the Raramuri people (my mothers’s tribal roots). I came across Trudell’s contributions. Then in 1979, a suspicious arson fire killed John’s family: his wife Tina, an unborn baby, three other children, and his mother-in-law. This happened at their home on the Paiute-Shoshone Duck Valley Reservation in Nevada, a day after John had burned an American flag at an American Indian protest in Washington D.C. When I talked to John, he said goon squads working with federal agents played a role in his family’s murder.

This devastation could have destroyed any person. It took a while, after much mourning, but John became a poet and performer. He said he wasn’t writing poetry but hanging on to lines that Tina gave him after her death. She was the poet, John explained, not him.

John and I met because I was asked to write his biography. I interviewed John for hours. I learned a lot about his life but also his philosophy. He invited me to recordings of his CD called “Bone Days” with the band Bad Dog. I attended concerts he did at the renowned Whisky A Go Go in West Hollywood. I met Angelina Jolie and her mother Marcheline Bertrand, who was John’s girlfriend until her death in 2007. I finished the book and handed it over to John.

This book never appeared. The people who paid me to do this, which included Marcheline, blamed me. But John told me it wasn’t my fault. He decided he didn’t want the book to come out. He had his reasons, which he didn’t share. It was his decision and I accepted this.

Nonetheless my time with John proved invaluable. I found out he had a grandmother named Ricarda who was also Raramuri. John’s grandfather, a Santee Sioux, met Ricarda when tribal people frequently crossed the then largely porous U.S./Mexico border.

The story of my Raramuri great-grandmother and grandmother, related by my mother, was that they left their homelands in the Sierra Tarahumara during the Mexican Revolution. They were literally starving. They ended up in Chihuahua City. However, the Catholic Church kidnapped them: The church gave them food, clothes, new names, but wouldn’t let them go. We don’t know their Raramuri names; my great-grandmother and grandmother were given the names of Manuela and Ana. It was there in the Indigenous ghetto called La Tarahumara where my mother was born in 1925.

So, John had Mexican Indian roots as well. He felt that us coming together to talk, to share, with or without a book, was meant to be. This happened because of our grandmothers in the ancestral realm.

John once spoke at Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore, the cultural arts and literacy center co-founded by my wife Trini and I in 2001. He packed the place. The audience included Chicanos, Central Americans, as well as U.S. Natives and others, including Mexica ritual practitioners. It impacted us deeply. Trini and I created an Indigenous philosophical statement as a foundation for all we do at Tia Chucha’s. Again, I learned many things from my elders among Indigenous people in the U.S., Mexico, Central and South America (including from Peru). John Trudell was one of my most meaningful teachers.

I learned many things from John, but two things stand out. That the European colonial powers, be they from Spain, Portugal, France, or England, from over 500 years ago, “mined” the minds of Indigenous people like they mined the land for silver, gold, and other minerals. They excavated “souls” and replaced them with Christianity as a method of control. The fact Indigenous people, African slaves, and others have used any messages of freedom from the Bible for their own liberation is another important story. But for the most part, the Church placed chains on our minds and spirits.

This is an undisputed fact.

John also taught about “genetic memory,” now a topic delved into by many teachers on social media, books, and youtube. It’s an old idea that we carry our ancestors with us. They don’t die; they are in the ancestral realm that is accessible wherever we go. John says this is something we can tap into, like drawing water from a well, if we open up to this possibility, often through ceremony, rituals, dance, art, and song.

And, of course, poetry.

John felt Tina continued to speak to him. But also others who have “passed” to the other world, including his grandmother Ricarda.

This is a power we are losing generation by generation. The new technology, especially in smart phones and other media, has put barriers to our abilities to reach back and move forward. Most worrisome is AI. We don’t need artificial means. Humans possess the natural gifts and properties to supersede any AI data centers and satellites. In fact, nature–the ground, the trees, mountains, the animals, birds, rivers, the air–are the most powerful environment for any human to activate their own innate capabilities. Our brains, hearts, and other organs are superior to any AI mode or machine.

Recent studies have shown that until Gen Z (persons born between 1997 and 2012), every generation surpassed previous generations in standardized tests. By 2010, corresponding cognitive measures in the U.S. have shown a decline in areas such as attention, memory, literacy, and numeracy. It’s not the schools, which haven’t changed much, or our biology, which is largely the same (although much impacted by artificial foods, chemicals, and environmental changes). It’s the growth of new technology in our schools replacing nature, teachers, books, and other means that previously engaged and elevated our own thinking and intuitive powers.

While AI can be a useful tool, in the hands of a small handful of billionaires and companies, which only care about AI as a profit-generating medium, we have become more detached from what’s in our bones, our blood, our cells.

Our minds have been mined. Our genetic memory has been blocked.

LIke others before me, I’m putting out a warning. We must extend and deepen what “God” or whatever you call the spiritual energies that has allowed us to be fully human, complete and free, in the material world. The internal systems aligned with the external ones. The more we move away from this, we become controlled by the tools (or rather the tool manufacturers), not the other way around.

It’s time for real AI: Ancestral intelligence, not artificial intelligence.