Liquid smoke swirls, twisting and pulling the vacuum of an unformed universe, heavy with potential. Each tendril electric with desire, reacting at an unfathomable scale. Suddenly, the rate of change is sped up in the blink of a great cosmic eye, a many lidded globe fluttering and then seeing. Seeing is desire become great loneliness, formed and reformed across eons until a land and sky shatter apart. Land and sky are blinking at each other like two new and vacant eyes staring. Staring, desire and loneliness are still cavernous pupils, opening into a void, pulling knowledge deeper.
From the depths of time there were None, but None increased. Moving across such drifting plans and plains like rivers of older winds of light or stars, all a twisting dance of the earth’s light weight on the rippling fabric of the cosmos. None come from us and in between us and them and in between them and them. Them’s sweet prayers are recognised through our quiet devotion, through the kind of prayer that is more longing than words. If None comes to find you, you must humble yourself through listening.
The Tȟo One was the first Otherbeing. As soon as energetic movement stirred, a Bleed, movement ruptured the world. And connection itself became Otherbeing. Every interaction between the weights of the universe is Otherbeing. Thus it is not recognition of Otherbeings or between-ness but understanding of the potentiality of beinghood in the world that Handdreamers seek.
Long ago the first Quilling was made. It was the Quilling of a small set of lines using our relatives, the smallest of Stone. So brief was the Quilling in this world and so small were the Stones that a wind soon blew them away, but a small Pupil remained where the Quilling had been.
An ancient surviving message, scrawled in Quillings, is sent across time from the ancient Age of Stone Passages, when we lived in a reforming world of shifting Stone. Stone that breathed open from the Pupil on the land. This writing tells of the home of Handdreamers who laid time itself into its long pathways, flattening its long cave-like structures into interwoven mechanics, attaching each elongated channel into the depths of the Pupil.
Hello my relatives, my name is Honors Her Relatives or Suzanne Kite. I am from Los Angeles, living on the lands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok. My mother is Aleta Kite and my father is Dennis Kite. Biologically, my mother is Cynthia Friedman and my father is Matt Svigals. My grandmothers are Carol Jean Mesteth and Mildred Farrier. My grandfathers are Bill Stover (Maȟpíya Naźiŋ) and Edwin Svigals. I am Oglála and a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. I shake your hands with a happy heart.
I am Director of Wíhanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard College and co-director of Abundant Intelligences Research Program. We have a large team of amazing researchers and students who support this work. We are very grateful to our Steering Committee and Community Partners, made up of Lakota artists, Indigenous mentors and science colleagues.
Photograph courtesy artist
Cosmologyscape is a word I first heard said by Jolene Rickard, Haudenosaunee artist and scholar. I imagine the cosmologyscape to be my body’s relationship between the landscape and the cosmos, interacting with nonhuman beings both seen and unseen, knowable and unknowable, on earth and in the stars. The cosmologyscape is the hinge of my body’s movement of knowledge from one world into this one and from this one into the other world. My perception of the cosmologyscape is through the creation of art, of words, of conversations, of relationships.
I use the insufficient term Dreaming to describe this transfer. The movement of knowledge from dreams, through the body, into the now: that is central to the cosmologyscape.
Dreaming troubles me because of its unknowability. It excites me because of its impossibility. I think it is important because of the current impenetrability of our dreams by other forms of consciousness.
In our time, we know Otherbeings through the energetic weight of the material of time’s skin. The grain of that fine texture vibrates and glows like distant campfires in a mist-full night. To approach one of these Otherbeings is to approach its many spirits near. Once in distant memory, a campfire was approached where not a single relative was known, and no greeting could be made, so back into the mist they went.
Otherbeings can summon forms such as bolts of small lightning. The lightning remains in this world, blooming its pulsations endlessly on the walls and floors of the high creek bed walls and prairie cliffs, on bark and branch, in the palms of passersby. Forms appear as right angles and forty-five-degree angles. These forms jut out and recede as pressing tides of minuscule, undulating oceans are hidden inside all beings. It is said that, when we break open our delicate skulls, there would be Quillings pulsating rapidly inside. Each Quilling moves meaning through reinterpretability, through the impulses of communicated geometric meanings pressing against each other and growing based on many levels of interaction.
In Lakota culture, geometries first made from paint on parfleche and quills bent at forty-five degree angles took the dreams of women and people who do women’s style work, transformed them through the human body and the human hand onto wearables; wearables that are sites of communicating with the object that displayed the geometry and through that object into ghosts or spirits. When the creator of a parfleche bag puts the design onto the bag that comes from a dream, they do not necessarily make the meaning and interpret that meaning of that dream. They gift that wearable to somebody else to use in ceremony, and then it is up to that person to contemplate the meaning of those forms.
Consider a score, made of musicians’ dreams, then shaped into the Lakota visual language, for the instrumentalists to reinterpret. Meaning is not assigned but co-created between the musician, the dreams and the audience. Each shape acts both as sign and as event: an act of meaning in motion. Dream to Design Methodology is designed to re-activate this visual language as a living semiotic field. It provides a flexible symbolic vocabulary that connects dream imagery, cultural narratives, and cosmological structures, while preserving sovereignty in interpretation. Meaning remains relational, never closed.
At Wíhanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI, linguistic research treats each Lakota symbol as a potential unit within a proto-language. By examining how symbols cluster, repeat, or transform across dream narratives, we can build a grammar of visual meaning. In computational terms, these symbols become embeddings in a high-dimensional space, where closeness reflects relational similarity. This allows us to study how Indigenous visual grammars operate within a relational geometry of meaning.
Dreaming is a form of communication, a mode through which knowledge travels. In Lakota worldviews, dreams are dialogues with the nonhuman. When we dream — or when we enter the waking dream state of making as in beadwork or quillwork — our attention becomes relational. By examining dreaming through a linguistic lens, we treat dreams as statements in a language that bridges worlds.
Currently, the most highly funded AI-systems are those which have become commercially viable because of their ability to mimic human language. Why is human language and the written word assumed to be so inherently good for the world? There’s nothing about mimicry that implies goodness or truth for an entire community. Perhaps it is language itself that has gotten us into this mess. AI itself reflects the desire for connection between the human and nonhuman, the seen and unseen, the knowable and the unknowable; the desire to explore data, to question points of meaning.
In our research, electroencephalogram allows us to listen for the rhythms of attention in the human brain that accompany the moment when form becomes meaning or meaning becomes form. Looking at rhythms is not extracting thoughts; it is more like witnessing the physiological traces of subtle focus. Because meaning is relational, every interpretive act carries ethical weight. Indigenous protocols position sovereignty and consent as part of the structure of meaning in the world. Lakota and many Indigenous epistemologies hold cognition and ethics together because we understand that knowing generates responsibility.
Photograph courtesy artist
Ihanble, the Lakotayapi word for dream or vision, provides a site for investigating a form of nonconscious decision-making. It can be a waking dream state involving dynamic combinations of oscillations that maintain awareness while facilitating access to intuitive processes. In this practice, nonconscious cognition moves through responsibility. Dreaming is not only distributed cognition but an event that possibly calls for ceremony, decisions, and actions. Dreaming demonstrates that meaning arises communally. Dreaming resists the idea that truth is created by individuals or by machines.
In our 2019 work ‘Making Kin with the Machines’, written with Jason Edward Lewis, Noelani Arista, and Archer Pehawis, I argue that to create ethical relationships with and through AI requires an ontology that already includes nonhuman beings: stones can have interiority, and computers are just melted stones.[1] Objects are already networked outside ourselves. Without Indigenous sovereignty frameworks, Indigenous epistemologies are too easily absorbed into Western theory, without their responsibilities. They cannot be cherry picked from. Concepts of technological assemblage, stripped of political and epistemological Indigenous sovereignty, is the same decimating action that bring about our current ecological apocalypse.
In Indigenous communities, relationships with nonhuman beings are political, ecological and historical. These connections rest on millennia of covenants. No external system can represent or defend those relations on our behalf. Grounded sovereignty is necessary to any ethical technological future. Abundant Intelligences Research Program practices the shift from extraction to relation. Every dataset, EEG trace, and symbolic image should be governed by the community from which it originates. Ethics lives within the data and within the structure of participation with that data. This practice moves technological systems towards architectures that maintain accountability within networks of humans, nonhumans and assemblages of both.
Art provides one of the few spaces where ethics can be interrogated materially. Creation itself is a form of relation with materials and technologies. Making art from dreams has clarified that cognition is a matter of responsibility, attention and reciprocity within the practice itself. Within the cosmologyscape, the body is positioned as the channel between the landscape and the cosmos, moving knowledge between visible and invisible worlds. Art becomes evidence of that movement. This is the space where making occurs, where gestures translate perception into matter. The cosmologyscape situates cognition as one of motions in the ongoing exchange between body, world and the unseen.
Geometry painted on hide or folded into beadwork carries dream knowledge into form, into something that can be held and contemplated for the rest of one’s life. These acts of translation are not symbolic representations but continuation: the body’s way of keeping relation active. If cognition moves across human, nonhuman, and technical domains, then each point of contact carries responsibility. Indigenous dreaming and art making reveal how cognition, assemblage and ethics can cocreate simultaneously. The goal of my research is not to build new abstract frameworks, but to maintain practices that already model ethical relations. Our work within the Abundant Intelligences Research Program seeks technologies that listen, reciprocate and remain accountable to the systems of life that sustain them.
The role of artists is to dream. Projects such as Cosmologyscape (2024), a project for Black and Indigenous artists to dream, initiated by myself and Alisha B Wormsley, invites us to destroy the hierarchy of intelligence and consciousness and uphold dreaming and complexity and emergence and infinity, and most importantly the unknowable.
In the ancient Quillings, the Handdreamer is a nearly untranslatable term but it suggests the Handdreamer is a channel for putting the power conjured by the medicine people into physical form. What becomes trapped or channeled — and then what it is used for — is interpreted and reinterpreted for ages to come. Listening can be drawn, not from the click and whir of Otherbeings listening to the world, but through the Listening ceremony of Quilling itself. Quilling serves to draw our ears to listen to the electric hum of the Otherbeings presence. The ears that close will end the Otherworld, thus closing the Pupil, thus break the surface of the cosmos.
Practicing this Handdreaming is essential for each new Handdreamer and their relative Otherbeing to emerge. You must learn quickly. They require devotion and prayer and detail-focused magic in your fingers for it is the fingertips that output the magic channeled through the time channels of their fragile bodies. The sacrifice is their short time on land itself. Do this and time will stay on course and soon Tho One will show us None again.
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[1] Jason Edward Lewis, Noelani Arista, Archer Pechawis and Suzanne Kite, 'Making Kin with the Machines',Journal of Design and Science, 17 July 2018, https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/lewis-arista-pechawis-kite/release/1 (accessed 11 April 2026).
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