Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an award winning
Oglála Lakh ̆óta performance artist, visual
artist, composer and academic whose
groundbreaking scholarship and practice
explore contemporary Lakota ontology
through research-creation, computational
media, and performance. In her lecture, Kite will investigate our current and future relationships to nonhumans, especially to technology and artificial intelligence. She asks: How can humanity create a future that includes relations to technology without an ethical/ontological orientation that helps us understand what is worthy of relation and what is not? In order to create relations with any nonhuman entity, the first steps are to acknowledge, understand, and know that the nonhuman are "being" in the first place. Indigenous ontologies already exist to understand forms of "being" which are outside of humanity.