My Journey to Secure First Nations Digital Sovereignty
The AI Tsunami and the Warlu Circle©
“Warlu Circle©” and “Fire Burns and Protects, so Stories Endure©” are Copyright March 15, 2025, Sydney, Australia.
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Epiphany: the Problem Isn’t AI
When I started writing a draft of this article, I was motivated by a profound unease about how First Nations culture has been consumed, manipulated, and exploited in the digital age. Yet, as I explored the issue, I realised I had focused on symptoms rather than root causes. AI misrepresenting Indigenous identities, fake Indigenous art flooding the market, and the unchecked extraction of cultural knowledge by corporations — each of these problems was serious, but none felt like the core issue.
At first, I was frustrated. Why is AI doing this? Why is fake Indigenous art so prevalent? Why is cultural appropriation accelerating in the digital age? But asking “why” led me deeper into the real problem — a problem so urgent that it felt like an epiphany when I finally articulated it. This is not a problem we can afford to ignore or delay addressing.
The problem is the open Internet — a vast and unguarded frontier where information flows freely without consent, governance, or regard for ownership.
Every First Nations website, online cultural archive, and digital art gallery showcasing Indigenous work are not just repositories of knowledge. They are beacons for exploitation, unintentionally putting out the ‘Welcome’ mat for web scrapers, AI training models, and corporations to steal Indigenous culture with zero consent, zero compensation, and zero accountability.
This realisation was sobering and galvanising. I had been looking at how Indigenous culture is being stolen when the more urgent question was why it is so easy to steal in the first place. The answer was brutally simple: First Nations culture exists in an unprotected digital space, freely accessible to anyone who wants to exploit it.
In a pre-digital world, Indigenous knowledge was passed down through oral traditions, ceremonies, and physical artifacts — safeguarded within the community, protected by elders, and deeply tied to land, kinship, and cultural laws. However, as the world moved online, First Nations communities, like all communities, built websites, digital archives, and public repositories to share their heritage. Once seen as a tool for cultural empowerment, the internet has become a tool for cultural colonisation.
Now, AI has not just exacerbated but supercharged this problem. Where once it took individuals to copy Indigenous art, steal stories, or commercialise sacred symbols, now AI does it at an industrial scale, generating fake Indigenous artwork, fictionalising First Nations narratives, and flattening deep, diverse cultures into generic, commodified representations. The scale of this exploitation is staggering and accelerating.
That’s when I realised that the only real solution is to remove First Nations culture from the open internet entirely.
This is not about isolation. It is about reclaiming sovereignty. It is about creating a new digital space, a sanctuary, where Indigenous cultures are protected, not exploited by default.
The Cultural Moat Story
The ‘cultural moat’ is a metaphor for a protected digital space where Indigenous culture can thrive without the threat of uncontrolled exploitation. It represents a digital environment where Indigenous knowledge is safeguarded and respected, akin to the traditional moats that protect physical communities from external threats.
My story shifted to central Australia, where evening had settled over the red earth, the stars observing silently, bearing witness to the gathering. The desert night air conveyed a perfect crisp stillness, interrupted only by murmurs of children settling in beside their elders. Tonight is not like other nights —tonight, the past and future meet in the presence of a fire that crackles an orange glow and flickers against the night sky.
People sit close, wrapped in blankets, listening. The fire symbolises warmth and community and represents the oral tradition of passing down stories and knowledge in Indigenous cultures. An elder, face lined with time, clears his throat and speaks.
“Long before the Europeans came with their steam-powered machines, steel roads and flying houses, our stories were kept safe. Our grandmothers and grandfathers held them in their voices and carried them in their hearts. You could not steal a story and make it your own. You could not take our knowledge without learning our ways, walking our land, sitting by our fires. The stories lived through us, and we lived with them. That was the law.
But times changed, technology was created and made available to everyone. The world grew fast, and we were told we needed to share our stories with the machines, screens, and those who never sat by our fire. And so, we did. We built websites. We put our paintings in big city galleries. We let our words fly over the oceans into places we had never been. We thought we were keeping our stories alive. But we were wrong.
One day, we realised our stories were no longer ours. The machines had taken them. They had fed on them like wild dogs on a carcass. They had twisted them, mixed them with the stories of others, and spat them out again. Paintings made by no hand, songs sung by no voice, words spoken by no elder. And worst of all, the white man’s world believed them. They could no longer tell which stories were real or made by the machines. And so, the truth of our people became just another thing the world could take, reshape, and sell.
That is why we must build the moat — not a moat of stone and water, but a moat of wisdom. A place where our stories can live without fear of being stolen. A place where the machines cannot go unless we grant access. The old people always said knowledge is sacred and must be given, not taken. This is the law of our ancestors and must become the law of the digital world, too.
Our fire is now glowing embers, and our stories will be shared across generations. The question is: Who will protect our stories and art so they remain essential to our culture and are not sold in an internet website shop?”
The Prime Minister Awakens
First Nations elders arrived at Parliament House in silence, walking with intent, their presence conveying the weight of generations. They had been invited — not by request, but by political necessity. The issue had grown too big to ignore.
The Prime Minister had read the reports, been briefed on AI’s plundering, and heard the nationwide outrage rising from communities. His advisors had suggested a meeting, a formality, a gesture of engagement. But the elders had come with more than words. They had come to explain why cultural justice is overdue.
The Prime Minister sat across from the elders, afternoon sunlight filtering through high windows. One elder, a woman whose voice carried the strength of many ancestors, spoke first. “Prime Minister, we have been here before. Always being asked to explain, justify, and fight for what is already ours. This time, we are not asking. We are telling you why you must act to safeguard First Nations cultural heritage.”
She spoke of the stories stolen, the art replicated without permission, and the songs sung by no voice. Another elder, his hands weathered, leaned forward. “Our culture is not data. It is not for machines to learn. It is not for corporations to steal ownership. If you allow this, stand by, and do nothing, you are not leading a country. You are presiding over the erasure of 80,000 years of First Nations culture.”
The Prime Minister listened intently. He had expected a compelling conversation, but this was something else. He sensed it was a reckoning.
By the time the meeting ended, he knew something precious had been taken. This wasn’t about policy or technology. It was about something far more profound and sacred.
The halls of Parliament House had emptied, and he sat reflecting. The words of the elders were fresh in his mind. He had spoken of reconciliation, recognition, and economic opportunity in the past. But he had never experienced this — never realised the scale of what had already been lost, the silent theft occurring beneath the surface, digital machines consuming culture like a wildfire, leaving behind a digital wasteland of distortion and commodification.
He reached for his cellphone and called the Minister for Indigenous Affairs. “It’s crystal clear that we must force AI companies to erase our First Nations people’s stolen knowledge from their training models. We must enshrine digital cultural sovereignty in law, ensuring no machine or technology can ever claim ownership over what is culturally sacred.”
The fight would begin tomorrow. But tonight, the Prime Minister needed to contemplate in silence — because only in silence can the truth of stolen cultures be fully heard.
“Warlu Circle©” and “Fire Burns and Protects, so Stories Endure©” are Copyright March 15, 2025, Sydney, Australia.
How I named my concept:
• Warlu (meaning fire in multiple First Nations languages) evokes protection, resilience, and continuity — fire has always been central to Indigenous knowledge, land management, storytelling, and ceremony.
• Circle represents community, interconnectedness, and knowledge-sharing — a sacred space where wisdom is passed down and safeguarded.
• Together, Warlu Circle symbolizes a protected digital space where First Nations culture remains sovereign, untouchable by AI exploitation, and preserved for future generations.
It’s simple, evocative, and deeply tied to cultural meaning.
“Fire Burns and Protects, so Stories Endure.” is perfect — it captures the dual role of fire in First Nations cultures:
🔥 Destruction & Protection — Fire clears, renews, and safeguards what must be preserved.
📖 Stories & Continuity — Knowledge is passed down, never lost, even in the face of disruption.
It bridges the ancient and the digital beautifully, reinforcing that Warlu Circle is a protector and a preserver in this new age.
Final Name & Tagline:
Warlu Circle
🔥 “Fire Burns and Protects, so Stories Endure.”
Philosophical, timeless, and deeply connected to First Nations identity.
About the author:
📌 Greg Twemlow, Founder of XperientialAI & Designer of the Fusion Bridge
XperientialAI: AI-powered learning for leaders, educators, and organisations.
Fusion Bridge: My latest work — building AI-enabled frameworks for innovation & leadership.
🌎 Read more of my 300+ articles → https://gregtwemlow.medium.com/
📧 Contact: greg@xperiential.ai or greg@fusionbridge.org
