TribalNet 2025: 3 Ways Tribal Nations Are Using AI

The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma Uses AI for Language Preservation

The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma is the third-largest Native American tribe in the country.

“And yet, we only have about 300 first-language speakers left,” Zachary Harbort, IT manager of low-code platforms for Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, said at TribalNet. “I myself have lost the last first-language speaker in my family in my lifetime.”

Harbort and his team are digitizing raw materials such as elder interviews and other primary sources to catalog the language and construct digital resources that can aid in its preservation.

“We spent quite a bit of time gathering it, and it’s an intensive data process,” Harbort said. “It’s really important to digitize them for the integrity of the language and the historical aspect of it.”

The result of this effort is what he calls “a digital seed vault” for the language that can be used to construct more advanced preservation and learning tools.

For example, Harbort and his team used AI coding, also known as vibe-coding, to build an intuitive object recognition application in under an hour that helps with language learning.

“I point it at a cup, point it at a person, point it at a car, and if that word exists in that dictionary that I have grounded it with, it’ll tell me what it is,” Harbort said.

Harbort said he hopes this use case can act as a guidepost for other tribal nations.

“We’re actually really big critics of AI, especially when a lot of listener technology has been thrust onto people,” he said. “But there’s an opportunity cost if we don’t pay attention now and figure out how to reliably leverage these tools.”

AI Helps Cherokee Nation Health Services Reduce Burnout

Darylin Doublehead used to be a clinician with Cherokee Nation Health Service.

“Almost half of providers report one symptom of burnout, and I think that’s something that all providers at some point go through, myself included,” she said. “I want to do what I can do to help improve that."

In 2024, she transitioned to the health IT team and piloted Oracle Clinical AI Agent. The system uses ambient listing technology to convert patient-provider conversations into clinical documentation. This includes patient symptoms, clinical observations, treatment plans, relevant medical history discussed during visit and provider assessments.

Doublehead said she wanted something easy to set up and use. Initial training took approximately 30 minutes. The clinician simply clicks to start recording at the start of a session. At the end of the session, they send notes for generation and subsequently review the outcomes and make edits as needed.

“This is not replacing you,” Doublehead said. “So, it’s still important for you to review those notes and make sure it has the information you want it to have in it.”

The agent has 92 users and has processed at least 4,864 recordings across the Cherokee health system since deployment. On average, it saves two minutes per session, or 40 minutes per day in a day with 20 patients. Doublehead noted that this could mean the difference between “being able to eat dinner with your family” and missing it.

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AI “Legal Agent” Helps Cherokee Nation Navigate Tribal Law

The Cherokee Nation’s tribal code is over 1,700 pages long, according to Paula Starr, and that number doesn’t even include amendments from the tribal council.

“You can actually have codes sitting out, publicly available, that do not reflect all of the amendments, and that can get you in trouble,” Starr said. Additionally, there are executive orders issued by chiefs, Cherokee Supreme Court rulings and treaty law, which refers to legally binding agreements between tribal nations and the U.S. federal government.

From a technical standpoint, these legal documents live on different platforms, in different places and often in different formats.

“As a citizen who’s trying to navigate the legal system, it’s extremely complicated. But even for the lawyers who work within it, for our own attorney general’s office, it’s very hard to pull all of those sources together,” Starr says.

To navigate the technical complexity, Cherokee Nation created an AI legal agent powered by Microsoft Copilot that can sift through these disparate sources of legal information.

The goal of making the information more navigable via AI agent, Starr said, is to make the law more accessible for citizens, lawyers and employees within the Office of the Cherokee Nation Attorney General.

Developing the agent was not simple, and it required assistance from MIT interns who had to “intensely get to know that data, to a point that they can correct the attorney general’s office when they’re in a meeting with them,” Starr said.

The outcome is an AI agent that, once approved for rollout, would function as a legal assistant. Users, in turn, can provide feedback to the agent to help refine its outputs.

KEEP READING: The Cherokee Nation and other tribes are preparing for artificial intelligence.

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