Recently, I helped lead a staff rollout of the Treaty Ed Planner AI, an AI tool developed by my school division and intended to support teachers as they incorporate Treaty Education into their planning. I entered the meeting expecting to discuss what the tool could do. It is designed to help teachers find an entry point, connect ideas to curriculum, generate possible activities, and make Treaty Education feel less intimidating to those who may be uncertain about where to begin. Those possibilities were part of the conversation, but the meeting quickly became about something larger. The conversation shifted to whether a technology built around speed, automation, and large-scale data can meaningfully support a form of education grounded in relationship, language, place, and connection to the land.
The tool itself has practical value. It can help a teacher move past the blank page and begin imagining how Treaty Education might connect with a particular subject or outcome. It may also encourage teachers to see Treaty Education as part of their ongoing practice rather than as a separate lesson taught at a particular time of year. For educators who are hesitant to incorporate Treaty Ed because they fear making a mistake, the planner can offer enough structure to begin. Used this way, AI may create an opening for further learning and conversation.
That said, however, an opening is not the same thing as the learning itself. Indigenous knowledge is relational. It comes through people, community, language, lived experience, story, ceremony, and the land. This tool, or any AI tool, cannot enter into those relationships on a teacher’s behalf. It cannot know the students and communities in front of us, understand the local significance of a teaching, or determine whether a lesson is appropriate in a particular context. It may be able to assemble information about Treaty Education, but assembling information is different from participating responsibly in Treaty relationships.
This leaves me with a difficult question: can we genuinely use AI to support the Indigenization of education when the technology itself may reproduce ways of thinking that a decolonizing lens asks us to challenge?
AI systems often present knowledge as something that can be collected, reorganized, and delivered efficiently. That model collides with understandings of knowledge as contextual, reciprocal, and connected to responsibilities. There is a risk that a tool designed to make Treaty Education more accessible could unintentionally flatten it into curriculum outcomes, classroom activities, and generated text. A lesson might appear polished and complete while remaining disconnected from local knowledge, community relationships, and the teacher’s own responsibility to learn.
Not to mention the struggle when you add to this debate the tensions of the environmental impact of generative AI. We cannot discuss connection to the land while ignoring the environmental impacts and systems that make these technologies possible. AI depends on data centres, electricity, water, minerals, devices, and infrastructure. Even if an individual prompt feels invisible or minor, it belongs to a much larger system with environmental consequences. If caring for the earth is central to the knowledge and relationships we hope to honour, then we cannot treat the tool’s cost as unrelated to its educational purpose.
I did not leave the meeting feeling strongly that we should simply accept or reject the Treaty Ed Planner. Instead, I left thinking more carefully about the conditions under which it might be used responsibly. The tool can suggest possibilities, but teachers must still determine whether those possibilities are accurate, appropriate, locally relevant, and relationally responsible. Its suggestions should lead us toward curriculum documents, trusted resources, colleagues, Elders, Knowledge Keepers, community members, and the land instead of becoming substitutes for them.
My role in leading the rollout also complicated my own position. I was not only learning about the tool; I was helping others decide how it might fit within their practice. That meant I could not present it as either a solution or a threat. I needed to help create space for usefulness and discomfort to exist together. This experience reminded me that responsible AI use is not simply a matter of checking whether its information is correct. It also requires us to ask what understanding of knowledge the technology promotes, whose knowledge it draws upon, what relationships it might displace, and what environmental impacts it yields.
The Treaty Ed Planner might be most valuable when it begins a process rather than completes one. It can help generate a first question, an initial connection, or a possible direction. The deeper work of building relationships, listening, learning locally, exercising judgment, and accepting responsibility must remain the work of the responsive teacher.
