Grounding Our AI: A Live Ritual Ceremony

Before the buzz of keynotes, demos, and algorithms, this transmission from the Vancouver AI Community Meetup brings us back to where all real futures start: with land, lineage, and song.

Damian George—Stellast to his people—of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, stood alongside his son Ethan to welcome us home. Not into a venue. Into presence. Into memory. Into a shared space pulsing with song, spirit, and story.

With a name passed down through generations—from his great-grandfather Chief Dan George to his grand uncle Bob George, and now through him to Ethan—Stellast doesn’t just speak history. He embodies it. He sings a victory song composed by his uncle, carried in the Squamish language, and performed beside his son as a living act of Indigenous futurism. An invocation. A blessing. A reminder.

In a room filled with code and conversation, this wasn’t a “ceremony before the tech.” This was the tech.

In this moving moment:
Ancestral names become portals to lived history and embodied futurity.

Songs reconnect us to the land—right outside the walls of the venue, where Damian’s great-great-grandfather once kept a home.

Community becomes kin, through sound and story, not status or credentials.

We’re reminded that data isn’t neutral—it has lineage, place, and power.

This isn’t tokenism. This is protocol. This is mycelial memory. This is how we show up, with heart and humility, in an AI movement that dares to be human.

Learn about the Vancouver AI Community: https://lu.ma/vancouver-ai
Explore the BC + AI Ecosystem vision: https://kriskrug.co/2025/02/16/bcs-ai-ecosystem-a-mycelial-network-of-creation/

Part of the BC + AI Ecosystem Archive—where we don’t just document what’s happening, we ground it. In territory. In truth. In relationships that stretch beyond servers, beyond timelines, and beyond the limits of our imagination.