In the back room of an old and graying building in the northernmost region of New Zealand, one of the most advanced computers for artificial intelligence is helping to redefine the technology's future. Te Hiku Media, a nonprofit Māori radio station run by life partners Peter-Lucas Jones and Keoni Mahelona, bought the machine at a 50% discount to train its own algorithms for natural-language processing. Mahelona, a native Hawaiian who settled in New Zealand after falling in love with the country, chuckles at the irony of the situation. "The computer is just sitting on a rack in Kaitaia, of all places--a derelict rural town with high poverty and a large Indigenous population. I guess we're a bit under the radar," he says. As a nonprofit journalism organization, we depend on your support to fund coverage of Indigenous issues and communities. Donate any amount today to become a Pulitzer Center Champion and receive exclusive benefits!

In March 2018, Peter-Lucas Jones and the ten other staff at Te Hiku Media, a small non-profit radio station nestled just below New Zealand's most northern tip, were in disbelief. In ten days, thanks to a competition it had started, Māori speakers across New Zealand had recorded over 300 hours of annotated audio in their mother tongue. It was enough data to build language tech for te reo Māori, the Māori language – including automatic speech recognition and speech-to-text. The small staff of Māori language broadcasters and one engineer were about to become pioneers in indigenous speech recognition technology. But building the tools was only half the battle. Te Hiku soon found itself fending off corporate entities trying to develop their own indigenous data sets and resisting detrimental western approaches to data sharing.