The Great AI Unraveling, Part 2: Tiokasin Ghosthorse & Pooja Prema

This is the second gathering in SAND's ongoing series on AI and the human spirit — and it takes a deliberately different rhythm. Rather than asking "is AI safe?" or "will it take our jobs?", Tiokasin Ghosthorse and Pooja Prema invite us to slow down and ask the deeper questions: What cosmology is AI extending? What is intelligence, really? And what happens when the earth-based, organic, living intelligence of Indigenous and ancestral ways of knowing gets replaced by a synthetic one? A spacious, felt-sense conversation that asks us to remember what a living mind actually is.

Timestamps

00:00 — Welcome & framing the deeper questions

00:04 — Opening body practice: tuning into felt sense before speaking

00:07 — Tiokasin: AI as the latest ship on the shore — colonization in a new form

00:17 — "There is no artificial intuition" — what technology cannot replace

00:18 — Pooja: the cosmology behind AI — colonial linearity vs. the curving motherboard of Earth

00:25 — AI as the latest savior narrative — and why that story keeps repeating

00:45 — Who owns the data? Who controls the intelligence? The politics of AI

01:05 — AI as therapist, AI replacing elders — the cost to young people and mental health

01:10 — Ghost in the Machine: how to resist empire over the long game

01:15 — Closing: "Our body is the mystic" — an invitation to make this a living inquiry

Guests

Tiokasin Ghosthorse is a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation and lifelong Indigenous activist. He is the founder and host of First Voices Radio, which broadcast for 33 years before its final episode in July 2025. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016, is a National Native American Hall of Fame nominee, and a master musician who performs worldwide. He describes himself simply as "a perfectly flawed human being." He is also featured in SAND's film The Eternal Song.

Pooja Prema is a first-generation Indian American writer, multidisciplinary artist, and ritualist from Kerala, South India. Her work weaves ecofeminism, decolonial somatic practice, and animistic cosmologies. She is the founder of The Rites of Passage Project and The Ritual Theatre. Her work has been featured at the Kennedy Center, Ebony Magazine, and NPR.

Resources & Links

Tiokasin Ghosthorse

Akantu Intelligence — website

First Voices Radio — archive

Featured in The Eternal Song — SAND film

Pooja Prema

Website: poojaprema.com

The Rites of Passage Project

The Ritual Theatre

Instagram: @thecabinwitch

Film referenced

Ghost in the Machine — documentary directed by Valerie Veatch, Sundance 2026 — traces the buried history of AI and its roots in eugenics, racism, and colonial power. Featuring Tasheka Lavann on how indigenous nations are resisting data centers and how we resist empire over generations.

Concepts discussed

Conspecific aggression — Tiokasin's term for what happens when a species competes so aggressively over shared resources that it turns on itself

Present-phobic language — technology as a tool for escaping the present into an imagined future

The real motherboard — Pooja's framing of Earth and cosmos as the original curving, relational, non-linear intelligence that AI's linear grid cannot replicate

SAND series context

Part 1 of The Great AI Unraveling — with Tristan Harris

The Eternal Song — SAND film series

Contact SAND

[email protected]

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