--- title: Big Tech, Religion and the Missing Indigenous Voice description: Explore the concept of Big Tech Religion and its implications for AI morality in today's tech-driven world. url: https://www.taiuru.co.nz/tech-religion-no-indigenous-voice/ markdown_url: https://www.taiuru.co.nz/tech-religion-no-indigenous-voice.md type: post slug: tech-religion-no-indigenous-voice author: Karaitiana Taiuru published: 2026-11-07T21:04:10Z modified: 2026-11-07T21:04:10Z language: en-NZ taxonomies: category: - AI Governance - Artificial Intelligence (AI) - Case Studies word_count: 2289 tokens: 4153 --- # Big Tech, Religion and the Missing Indigenous Voice Big tech companies are now asking religious leaders how to teach their AI ethics and moral behaviour. Both are global institutions, and some of the churches involved played a central role in colonising Indigenous peoples. Both are acting with good intentions, but as Māori know from experience, good intentions are not a safeguard. I cannot emphasise this enough: this is a critique of colonial power and of who holds authority over knowledge, not of Christian faith, which many Māori hold dearly, including my own whānau. As an Indigenous tech ethicist and governor, my question is “are Indigenous peoples in that room, on whose terms, and if not, why not?” What is happening Several major technology companies, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, have been engaging with religious institutions and faith communities during 2026, seeking perspectives on AI ethics and moral behaviour, including: The Vatican. On 25 May Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah spoke at the launch, saying the moral questions AI raises “are not questions a lab can answer”. I agree. Meta, Google and Amazon have also met the Vatican (PBS NewsHour / AP). The Faith-AI Covenant. Run by the Interfaith Alliance for Safer Communities, a Geneva-based NGO launched in Abu Dhabi in 2018 with the backing of Al-Azhar and the Vatican, the Covenant held its first roundtable with Anthropic and OpenAI in New York on 30 April. The faiths named at its events are Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, Sunni Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, the Bahá’í Faith and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I could find no record of Indigenous participation. Company consultations. Anthropic says it has met more than 15 religious and cross-cultural groups, without naming them, and that the work is not about aligning its models with any one tradition. Again, no mention of Indigenous peoples. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said ChatGPT should reflect a “weighted average” of humanity’s moral view. Why extracting morality fails The whole approach assumes a tradition’s moral wisdom can be written down as principles and fed into a model. Scholars quoted by AP explain why that fails. Anthropologist Webb Keane calls it the “rule book” view: it suits scriptural religions, in practice the Abrahamic faiths, and distorts traditions that do not see themselves mainly as systems of ethics. Tomoko Masuzawa notes that the idea of separate “world religions” is itself a modern European construct. Paolo Carozza warns AI may blend traditions into a bland middle ground or quietly favour Western religions. The AP article does not mention Indigenous peoples once. Tikanga Keane’s critique applies even more strongly to Indigenous knowledge. Tikanga Māori is not a set of principles you can copy into a training dataset. It is relational, grounded in whakapapa and expressed through whanaungatanga, manaakitanga and kaitiakitanga. It is tied to place: what is tika on one marae may differ on another, and each iwi, hapū, marae and whānau holds its own mātauranga and authority to interpret it. And it is practice, learned on the marae, at tangihanga and through kōrero across generations. Take a principle out of that context and you keep the words but lose the meaning. There is no single “Māori view” . A weighted average gives the most weight to traditions with the most text, the most adherents and the most access to Silicon Valley, while Indigenous knowledge is largely held orally and in our art, songs, carvings, practices and environment. The missionary parallel Māori have been here before. When Samuel Marsden of the Church Missionary Society landed in the Bay of Islands in 1814, much missionary teaching held Christian morality as the standard and Māori ways of knowing as not just lacking but evil. Tohunga were cast as sorcerers, karakia as heathen superstition and ngā atua as false gods or devils. Those attitudes fed into the Tohunga Suppression Act 1907, introduced by Native Minister James Carroll and supported by the four Māori MPs and Māui Pōmare. Generations of children were punished for speaking te reo at school, a practice that persisted into the 1960s and 1970s. Missionaries translated Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and the conflicts between the te reo and English texts are still being worked through. Much 19th-century writing about Māori came from missionaries and ethnographers who left out what they did not understand or approve of, distorting the standing of women and erasing takatāpui, as Ani Mikaere (The Balance Destroyed) and Elizabeth Kerekere (Part of the Whānau) have shown. Whānau, hapū and iwi are still reclaiming mātauranga and Māori language lost because it was called evil. This was not unique to New Zealand. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission described church-run residential schools as cultural genocide. Churches have since named these harms, including Pope Francis’s apology in Canada in 2022, and in March 2023 the Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery. Many Māori also embraced Christianity and made it our own. The Māori language became a written language and Māori literacy spread rapidly from the 1830s, though regional dialects gave way to those who held the pen. Ringatū and Rātana reshaped new ideas on Māori terms, and in 1992 the Anglican Church’s three-tikanga constitution gave Te Pīhopatanga o Aotearoa its own authority. When Indigenous peoples hold the authority, new knowledge can be woven in. When that authority is taken away, the result is assimilation. A missionary machine An AI trained mainly on scriptural moral frameworks risks repeating the missionary pattern at a scale and speed no missionary could match. Models learn from the written record, and much of the older record about Māori was written by outsiders. An AI can and does absorb those colonial judgements and repeat them as neutral fact. More of our youth now ask a chatbot before they ask a kaumātua or mātanga. If it frames mātauranga as myth, that becomes what the next generation learns. Knowledge that was suppressed or held orally is missing from the training data, and to an AI, what is not in the data does not exist. A model trained on the values that displaced tikanga will present them as common sense, and assimilation stops looking like assimilation. Each answer that reframes our knowledge works against decades of effort to restore te reo, tikanga and mātauranga. The missionaries did not need to destroy tikanga outright. They only needed to become the authority on what was right. An AI trusted by millions risks becoming that authority again. When our atua are not their God The industry’s turn to religion assumes one God, a sacred text and a moral code. Atua Māori do not fit that shape. They sit within whakapapa; to speak of atua is to speak of family and of our relationship with the natural world. New Zealand law has begun to recognise this: Te Urewera Act 2014 and Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017 gave legal personhood to Te Urewera and the Whanganui River as ancestors, not resources. Hawaiian akua, Japanese kami, Yoruba òrìsà and the spiritual beings of First Nations, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and many other peoples likewise sit outside the single-God model. Even where Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism are present, they are world religions with scriptures and global institutions, not Indigenous peoples speaking for their own knowledge systems. The harms are specific: The Christian God is treated as “faith”, while atua become “mythology” or “legends”, the same ranking the missionaries applied. Papatūānuku becomes “Mother Nature”, a poetic image rather than an ancestor with whom we have real obligations. Safety rules take care not to offend major religions while atua are mocked or turned into fantasy characters. Tiki, in many tribal and Pacific traditions, associated with Tāne, is sold worldwide as kitsch on bar menus and cocktail mugs, despite his affiliations with fertility. Karakia is treated as superstition or translated into Christian terms. Advice on land, rivers and the ocean treats them as resources under human control rather than kin. When Ngāti Naho asked in 2002 for the rebuild of State Highway 1 at Meremere to protect the lair of the taniwha Karutahi, the highway was partly realigned and the story was widely mocked and still referenced in derogatory terms by some politicians and right wing commentators. Peoples with their own atua must be at that table, not as one more “religion” to average, but as holders of knowledge systems with their own authority. Extraction Knowledge gathered through “consultation”, carried away and turned to someone else’s benefit is a familiar pattern for Māori. The difference now is that the destination is a model’s weights. Once mātauranga is absorbed into a commercial AI system, the model owner holds authority over it, it cannot in practice be withdrawn, and the value flows to the company and its shareholders, not the communities whose knowledge shaped the product. This is a Māori data sovereignty issue, not just an ethics issue. The Waitangi Tribunal’s WAI 262 report, Ko Aotearoa Tēnei, addressed the relationship of kaitiaki to mātauranga Māori, and the WAI 2522 inquiry brought Māori interests in data within the Crown’s Te Tiriti obligations. Neither accepts that mātauranga becomes common property once shared. And sovereignty is about who has authority, not where the servers sit. What good engagement would look like Authority over how our knowledge is used is architecture. Good engagement in New Zealadn would include: Te Tiriti o Waitangi as a constitutional starting point, not a consultation checkbox. Tino rangatiratanga sitting with knowledge experts, hapū and iwi, not a single pan-Māori body or a handful of invited individuals. Knowledge holders deciding what is shared, how it is used, and when it is not used at all. Companies naming the groups they consult and showing how that input changed their models, with an ongoing relationship, a way to raise concerns and have them acted on, and humans clearly accountable for the loop. Communities sharing in what their knowledge helps create. Indigenous peoples have been setting out these expectations for decades. My own kaupapa Māori AI framework, He Tangata, He Karetao, He Ātārangi, sets out how AI can be governed in a way that upholds tikanga and Te Tiriti. Conclusion Tech companies are right that labs cannot answer AI’s moral questions alone. But turning to religion does not settle whose morality shapes these systems. It only moves the question. A weighted average drawn mostly from scriptural traditions will leave Indigenous worldviews absent or flattened. Genuine partnership, with Te Tiriti and other constitutions and on Indigenous terms, could let AI learn something real from traditions that have carried these questions for millennia. Indigenous knowledge is not simply another cultural perspective to be included in a global database of human morality. It is knowledge held within relationships, responsibilities, whakapapa and systems of authority. My challenge to the AI companies is “tell us who is in the room, show us what you did with what you heard, and accept that some knowledge is not yours to take.” Sources Anthropic. (2026a, May 19). Widening the conversation on frontier AI. https://www.anthropic.com/news/widening-conversation-ai Anthropic. (2026b, May 25). 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