Show Notes
The third conversation in "The Great AI Unraveling", recorded live with our community on July 10, 2026.
Throughout time, humanity has experimented with playing God, and each time we have been humbled by forces larger than ourselves. Many Indigenous Nations consciously chose not to pursue certain technologies, recognizing that not every innovation serves life, and that wisdom lies in understanding the boundaries of nature and those of our human condition.
As artificial intelligence promises ever greater efficiency, productivity, and control, we are invited to ask a deeper question: Which problem are we really trying to solve? Beneath the relentless pursuit of more—more knowledge, more power, more convenience—lies a profound inquiry into sufficiency, relationship, and meaning.
Guests
Dr. Lyla June Johnston (aka Lyla June) is an Indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages. Her messages focus on Indigenous rights, supporting youth, traditional land stewardship practices and healing inter-generational and inter-cultural trauma.
She blends her study of Human Ecology at Stanford, graduate work in Indigenous Pedagogy, and the traditional worldview she grew up with to inform her music, perspectives and solutions. Her doctoral research focused on the ways in which pre-colonial Indigenous Nations shaped large regions of Turtle Island (aka the Americas) to produce abundant food systems for humans and non-humans.
Ashley Nicole Leitka comes from the Absentee Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma and the Oglala and Sicangu Lakota nations. She lives on Absentee Shawnee land in so-called Oklahoma and is the Director of the Department of Sovereignty and Self-Determination at Honor the Earth.
Kathy Wan Povi Sanchez is a native spirit-rooted social activist, community educator, traditional blackware potter, and fluent Tewa language speaker from the Tewa Pueblo of San Ildefonso in New Mexico. For more than two decades, she has been a guiding force within Tewa Women United, advancing environmental justice, cultural revitalization, healing, and social transformation.
A respected elder, teacher, and mentor, Kathy developed the acclaimed Two World Harmony Butterfly Model and Trauma Rocks, innovative frameworks that support cross-cultural understanding and intergenerational healing. Her lifelong work bridges Indigenous wisdom, environmental stewardship, community empowerment, and the protection of cultural and spiritual traditions. Through local, national, and international advocacy, she continues to inspire pathways of healing, resilience, and right relationship with the Earth and one another.
Topics
00:00:00 — Welcome and The Great AI Unraveling
00:04:00 — Superfluity: what if we don't need it
00:08:00 — The maple syrup story
00:12:00 — Kathy Wan Povi Sanchez on natural law
00:19:00 — Data centers on Native land
00:24:00 — Falsely generated demand and cognitive decline
00:27:00 — The data center toolkit and Stop Data Colonialism
00:30:00 — AI as ancestral intelligence: the Butterfly Model
00:38:00 — Why ceremony is never filmed
00:39:00 — Water, energy, and the growth curve
00:48:00 — Surveillance, ICE, and biometrics
00:57:00 — Yvette Running Horse Collin on Lakota science
00:58:00 — Einstein, Hiroshima, and being humbled
01:01:00 — Choosing oral tradition
01:08:00 — Love is the greatest technology
01:10:00 — A litmus test for any technology
Resources & Links
Lyla June — lylajune.com
Tewa Women United — tewawomenunited.org
Honor the Earth
Honor the Earth data center toolkit
Stop Data Colonialism, national coalition and manifesto
Big Tech Is Now Targeting Native American Land for Massive Data Centers, The New York Times, July 2026
Yvette Running Horse Collin on Lakota science, interviewed in Science
ACLU campaign on Flock surveillance cameras
Ashley Nicole Leitka and Dallas Goldtooth in conversation
The Great AI Unraveling series
#1 AI risks, soci
More from Sounds of SAND
What if humans and AI share the same hallucination?
Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee grew up with a Sufi teacher living downstairs and fell in love with jazz at an early age. He is now a Sufi teacher himself, a filmmaker, and the founder of Emergence Magazine. His new book Remembering Earth asks what it would take to come back into relationship with the living world. We talk about silence, the primordial covenant, the eye of unity, walking as practice, dreams, and what it means to meet this moment without turning away from beauty.
Joan Tollifson returns to the podcast three years after her first conversation. We talk about her June essay Two Inseparable Truths, on the relative and the absolute and the trouble with getting stuck in either one. Along the way: the silence of many nondual teachers in a dark time, what cancer and an aging body insist on that philosophy cannot, and why "I don't know" may be the answer closest to truth. She closes by reading her essay 'Radiant Light in Dark Times' in full.