In the heart of Western Australia, Kado Muir is one of the last three fluent speakers of the Ngalia language. To prevent the complete loss of his language, he is leading a groundbreaking effort to preserve his people's 60,000-year-old culture. 'Our language is not just words,' Muir explains, 'it's the key to our identity, our connection to country, and our way of understanding the world.
The Ngalia people, like many Indigenous communities worldwide, face the daunting challenge of preserving their cultural heritage in a rapidly changing world. Now, an innovative collaboration between the Ngalia Heritage Research Council (Aboriginal Corporation), Kiwa Digital (a global Indigenous-led technology company originally from New Zealand), and Amazon Web Services (AWS) is using the very latest in artificial intelligence to help safeguard this irreplaceable knowledge.
Empowering Indigenous Communities Globally with CultureQTM
Kiwa Digital has developed a digital archival system to store, manage, interact, and publish cultural assets at scale while retaining data sovereignty. Using Kiwa Digital’s CultureQTM app, which is built on AWS and underpinned by generative AI, Indigenous communities can promote knowledge and cultural sustainability.
CultureQ provides text-to-speech, voice generation, translation capabilities, and chat functionality that helps users practice and revitalise languages and cultures. Leveraging generative AI, Kiwa Digital now offers the ability for users to run retrieval augmented generation (RAG) requests to identify relationships and connections and find accurate information drawn from multiple sources, using data kept within the users private AWS infrastructure, which has not been available before. Users can also use publishing tools for creating and sharing traditional knowledge to help preserve cultural assets that may include oral histories of elders previously only told around the campfire, historical land claims, creation stories, traditional music, artworks and lexicon, dating back thousands of years.
“Until now, Indigenous people had limited ways to preserve language and culture, with many unwilling or unaware of how to leverage technology to help. Using generative AI integrated into Culture Q, users can now have conversations and interact with their cultural data in a secure, managed environment, when previously they were only able to access static content,” said Steven Renata, managing board director, Kiwa Digital. “AWS plays a central role in fostering a respectful digital environment that promotes Indigenous self-determination, knowledge, and cultural sustainability.”
Preserve, Securely Store, and Share Cultural Heritage at Scale
Kiwa Digital and the Ngalia Western Desert Aboriginal People are the first to pilot CultureQ to support the preservation of Ngalia cultural heritage. With AWS, the Ngalia can control access, enable community contributions, and publish content so both members and the public can learn from them. In the archival process, CultureQ automatically identifies sacred data, applying enhanced security measures using the AWS Well-Architected Framework, which was developed specifically to support the management of indigenous data. This helps ensure long-term protection against hacking, deletion, or file corruption, empowering the Ngalia to safeguard their narrative and heritage for future generations.
Some of the Indigenous content being preserved on CultureQ includes stories passed down through centuries of story-telling. One of these is the “Dreamtime Mamutjitji Story”, which was launched in May 2024. The mobile app combines Indigenous Dreamtime storytelling with educational content focused on science, specifically aimed at teaching children about the lifecycle of the antlion, known as Mamutjitji in Ngalia language, to preserve the story and language for future generations.
As the app continues to evolve, Kiwa Digital plans to expand beyond the Ngalia community to help customers from content archiving to publishing assets for schools and communities. This includes creating templates for data books and eBooks for children, and establishing larger scale learning resources based on Indigenous knowledge.
“At AWS, we recognise the value of Indigenous knowledge, and the opportunities for communities to leverage the latest technology such as generative AI to safely and securely preserve their culture and language while also enabling quick and easy access to years of Indigenous songs, stories, artwork, and more,” said Louise Stigwood, managing director for Public Sector in Australia and New Zealand at AWS. “By providing a secure platform for communities like the Ngalia Heritage Research Council to store and share their wisdom on their own terms, we're not just supporting data preservation – we're helping to opening doors to a deeper understanding of our Indigenous cultures.”
Collaborating for Preservation
CultureQ leverages Caitlyn, a generative AI platform built on Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies. Implemented and developed by Custom D, an AWS Partner Network (APN) partner, Caitlyn recognises patterns across artifacts to identify relationships and connections, helping users better understand and build context in a culture. For example, when it encounters a word like “aroha” - a Māori term meaning compassion, love, empathy - it won't just see it as a word – it will understand the cultural significance of the word and its use in different contexts and relationship to Māori culture.
Kiwa Digital is exploring collaboration with iwi and hapū in New Zealand and indigenous groups in the USA. It has already made inroads in the US, supporting Cherokee Nation on media localisation, leading recently to the launch of Prime Video series “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” dubbed to the Cherokee Language.
To build CultureQ’s capabilities, Kiwa Digital leveraged the AWS Māori Data Lens, which helps organisations build solutions on AWS that incorporate Māori data perspectives into their workloads. These include Kaitiakitanga (the guardianship or management of both the seen and unseen worlds) which guides decisions on how to collect, store, use, and protect data, and is a key touchstone for developments using AI. Developed with Māori data experts and cultural advisors, the Lens complements the core AWS Well-Architected pillars, principles, and best practices.
Preserving Indigenous cultures benefits everyone globally. CultureQ demonstrates how cloud computing and AI can preserve and share culture for communities. Innovators like Kado are not just preserving culture and Indigenous knowledge – they're securing Indigenous peoples’ place in history and inspiring others to prioritise cultural resilience.
Next up, how Swimming Australia is leveraging AWS and artificial intelligence for Olympic success.
