MohawkLanguage.ca

07/28/2025

Call for Kanien’kéhake & Allies: Join our XR Dream Team for upcoming Hackathons & Similar Events

We’re assembling a Kanien’kéhake led dream team to create bilingual XR (Extended Reality) experiences for hackathon / competitions and we’re looking for passionate, talented collaborators to join us.

We’ll be creating immersive spaces that center our stories, language, and culture in Kanien’kéha and English. These projects will be submitted to international hackathons & competitions where creativity, innovation, and storytelling matter just as much as technology.

Our Mission:
To build interactive XR worlds that honor and support the revival & retention of Kanien’kéha dialects, connect with our cultural teachings, and stand out in the global tech and creative scene.

We’ll combine 3D worldbuilding, narrative design, AI tools, and powerful visual storytelling to craft experiences that resonate deeply both within our communities and with international audiences.

Roles we need to fill.

Storyteller / Cultural Narrative Designer
You dream up the emotional and thematic journey of a world rooted in Haudenosaunee protocols, values, symbols, teachings.

Language + Voice Designer / Prompt Crafter
You help shape how we use AI to generate bilingual dialogue, narration, or character voice with care, accuracy, and cultural depth.

Visual Designer / World Stylist
You bring the visuals to life: UI, visual flow, styling, and symbolic references. You help make the world beautiful, clear, and culturally grounded.

Bilingual Presenter + Pitch Designer
You help craft and deliver our pitch with confidence, style, and clarity in both Kanien’kéha and English. You’ll also help shape how we present our project online and to judges.

Tech Stack:
Your Preference for being successful in your role - within the guidelines & constraints of each competition
Tools and workflows will be accessible we’ll teach and learn together

Who We're Looking For:
No need to be a tech expert - curiosity and commitment matter most
Fluent or learning Kanien’kéha speakers
Leaders, Teachers, Students, Creatives, Designers, Storytellers, Presenters, UX minds
Passionate about Kanien’kéha revival & retention, Kanien’kéhake culture + emerging tech
Connected with Mohawk, Kanien’kéhake, Haudenosaunee, Onkwehonwe family and community.
You have internet access, laptop (for our team travel).
Online and remote team communication skills (email, phone, text, etc).
Able to travel within North America for in person team events and meetings.

What You’ll Get:
A chance to co-create bilingual immersive worlds
Experience building XR projects that will be seen by global judges
A supportive, Kanien’kéhake-led team focused on authenticity, respect and excellence
Portfolio projects, creative joy, and maybe a few wins

Interested? Let’s Talk.
Send a message to [email protected] with a few lines about you:
Your background (storytelling, design, language, tech, teaching, learning, etc.)
Your level of comfort with Kanien’kéha
Why you want to be part of this
Whether you're a fluent speaker, a language learner, a creative spirit, or tech-curious or a storyteller there's a place for you in this team.

Let’s build something we can all be proud of.

Send a message to learn more

07/13/2025

Matrix Decompositions in Language, Culture, and Code

Matrix decompositions (LU, QR, SVD) aren’t just dry mathematical tools. They’re ways of seeing. Of understanding complex systems. Of peeling back layers to reveal the structure underneath. For me, they’re as vital in language revival and cultural expression as they are in code or rendering pipelines.

I live in matrices. I bend space with thought. I apply transformation matrices not just to vertices in Blender or Maya, but to ideas, symbols, and soundwaves across languages, across realities, across time.

https://researchengineer.wordpress.com/2025/07/13/matrix-decompositions-in-language-culture-and-code/

Digital Art : Cloaked Sky Visitor in Ocean of Oil by MoniGarr

07/13/2025

Linear algebra helped me map relationships in language and space that I did not learn from Western systems. This post isn’t about math as abstraction. It’s about math as a tool for decolonization, cultural survival, and generative design.

https://researchengineer.wordpress.com/2025/07/12/what-linear-algebra-taught-me-about-kanienkeha-xr-and-ai/

07/11/2025

Cultural Intelligence is Not Artificial, It’s Ancient and Alive

07/05/2025

One example of Autodidact Learning - Self Directed Memorization of Conjugations, Pronouns... Consistent every morning when waking, every evening before sleeping, while waiting in line, during work breaks, during lunch break, while walking.

07/04/2025

Only 2 spots are left for students as of this morning in this Kanien'keha class.

07/02/2025

I just updated the Kanien’kéha Vocabulary Rules yaml file for the AKWESASNE dialect and it’s available in the code repository as of now.

If you are Kanien’kéhake and speak any of the other dialects / work with a Kanien’kéha speaking tech consultant, it’s fairly easy to use my yaml file as a template for your own Kanien’kéha dialect.

NOTE: This runs on your own computer and their is no need to upload / share / give away your community data to any tech corporations.

Explore the GitHub Discussions forum for monigarr mini-indig-llm-kit. Discuss code, ask questions & collaborate with the developer community.

06/29/2025

Indigenous Language Models
- Build a voice assistant for home or classroom use (offline)
- Translate stories and oral history for community archives
- Create auto-correct / grammar suggestion tools for youth
- Power interactive art, games, or cultural installations
- Enable simple chatbot apps to help learners explore your language
- Explore language patterns and preserve rare dialects through AI simulation

Powerful Features:
- Jupyter Notebooks for training, inference, evaluation, visualization
- Editable templates for your corpus, tokenizer rules, ethical consent files
- Low-spec compatible code — CPU fallback, offline-first deployment
- Worksheets for non-coders (artists, Elders, teachers, youth)
- Ethical frameworks for consent, data sovereignty, and cultural respect
- Public GitHub repo with clean structure and contribution guide

Let’s Bring Our Languages Back to Life

06/26/2025

New Open Source Launch!

My Polysynthetic Language Mini-LLM Starter Kit is live on GitHub.

This project fine-tunes LLaMA 3 (8B) using QLoRA and a custom tokenizer, specifically built for morphologically complex, polysynthetic Indigenous language dialexts: even those without proper ISO codes. It’s designed to run efficiently on low-cost machines, offline, and with culturally respectful workflows (as well as the high end computers I work with).

🌱 As the granddaughter, daughter, niece, cousin, relative, peer and friend of Onkwehonwe who survived and in too many cases, did not survive Indian Residential Schools, Scoops, Forced Foster Care, Work Camps & Similar ... I’ve committed my life’s work to producing Kanien’kéha Revival & Retention content and tools because that is the language my relatives and community of Akwesasne speak. It’s the first language I spoke as a baby and it’s where the roots of Ohenton Kariwahtehkwen tanon Onkwehonwehneha Ancient Intelligence originate.

Since the 1990s, I’ve developed interactive learning systems, Kanien’kéha chatbots, robots, animatronics, talking toys, telephony systems, voice tools, and more with one goal:
🔊 To make it possible for Onkwehonwe to speak our languages freely in every career, every classroom, every boardroom, every industry without fear of harm, punishment, losing opportunities or erasure.
🛠️ This new open source project is my latest contribution to my ongoing life work and it’s a Konoronkwa letter to future generations of Onkwehonwe:

Now booking Tech Consulting contracts
If your team or organization is working on Indigenous Language AI / XR / 3D / Digitization / Content Production, cultural UX, conversational systems, Indigenous knowledge systems: I am willing and fully able to collaborate. I'm available for:
🔹 Technical consulting (AI, NLP, LLMs, Fine Tuning, Offline Production)
🔹 Automation (polysynthetic digital content productions)
🔹 Ethical language data design
🔹 Custom language model workflows
🔹 Workshops & mentoring

mini-indig-llm-kit is a Polysynthetic Language Mini-LLM Starter Kit is an open-source project that fine-tunes LLaMA 3 (8B) with QLoRA and a custom tokenizer, tailored for morphologically complex la...

06/24/2025

Onkwehonwehneha AI Competition
Ancient Intelligence collaborating with Artificial Intelligence.

Onkwehonwehneha AI Competition
Ancient Intelligence collaborating with Artificial Intelligence.

We are planning the world’s first Onkwehonwehneha AI Competition to happen later this year.

[https://forms.gle/pWjd7jjYzLbWbyC89](https://forms.gle/pWjd7jjYzLbWbyC89)

Prepare yourself with our new Open Source Github Repository:
Note, it is brand new living work in progress:
Please pay attention to the Ethics & Protocols Section, you will need to show you are respecting communities’ protocols.
https://github.com/monigarr/mini-indig-llm-kit

I am planning physical and digital prizes for participants.
We will have First, Second and Third prize winners.
Participants will be publicly recognized, supported and celebrated.
̱Participants community and personal data will NOT be shared online - that is not necessary nor should it ever be demanded / expected for producing language revival & retention solutions that respect Indigenous protocols.

Available for Haudenosaunee, Onkwehonwe, Kanien’kéhake, St. Regis Indians, Mohawks, Indigenous, First Nations that collaborate with their own community elders / fluent speakers ...

Put your name on our contact list if you are interested in participating as a contender, as a judge, as a supporter of your favorite language revival & retention projects and activists.

Photo: Onkwehonwehneha AI (Kanien’kéha chatbots) produced in the 1990s competed in a world first tech competition with 88 other corp & university TEAMS. MoniGarr entered the competition while running her Kanien’kéha bots on an old windows desktop in a cheap apartment in a scary side of town while climbing out of financial poverty by winning tech contracts as a result of her novel tech solutions and automation scripts. Competing teams sent their bots, tried dos attacks and every underhanded trick you can imagine to shut down Onkwehonwehneha AI - each attack made the work stronger, more entertaining and able to assist with Kanien’kéha Revival & Retention support for any and all communication devices one could imagine back then (web, beepers, animatronics, wearables, telephones, tts, stt, voice reco, true multimodal), today (augmented reality, virtual reality, animation, procedural, ai / ml, and well into the future (quantum, bio, AI+).

[https://forms.gle/pWjd7jjYzLbWbyC89](https://forms.gle/pWjd7jjYzLbWbyC89)

06/19/2025

What if these Kanien’kéha sounds could unlock your past and your future?

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