Putting ancient knowledge into new machines.
Mikaela Jade is a Cabrogal woman of the Dharug-speaking Nations who founded Indigital, described as Australia's first Indigenous education technology company, from a caravan in Kakadu. The idea came from a simple frustration and a large ambition. First Nations communities hold knowledge tens of thousands of years deep, about land, water, season, story and kinship, and too often that knowledge has been extracted, recorded and controlled by outsiders. Jade wanted communities to hold their own.
So she built tools using augmented and mixed reality that let Elders and communities place their knowledge into the technologies the next generation already lives inside. Point a phone at a rock art site and see the story move. Let a child in a remote community learn a songline through the same kind of interface they use for everything else, but on Country, in language, controlled by the people whose knowledge it is.
The crucial word is control. Indigital is built on Indigenous data sovereignty, the principle that communities decide what is shared, with whom, and how. This is the opposite of the usual technology story, in which data flows from people to platforms that own and monetise it. Jade designed the flow the other way. The knowledge stays with its custodians, and the technology serves them rather than harvesting them.
She has also spent years teaching digital skills to Indigenous kids and adults across the country, because a tool nobody in the community can build or maintain is just another kind of dependence. The point is not to deliver a product. It is to transfer capability, so that the future of the knowledge stays in the hands of the people it belongs to.
Jade's work is a model for anyone who wants to use technology in service of a community rather than at its expense. The questions she starts with are the ones most technologists skip. Whose knowledge is this? Who decides? Who holds it when the project ends? Get those right and the tool can be a gift. Get them wrong and even the cleverest build becomes one more extraction.
Before you build the tool, ask who will own what it learns.
