Indigenous science and education provide classification systems for ordering the natural, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual worlds. Alaska Native groups have shared values about life, kinship, and the interconnectedness of human beings. However, these values and knowledge systems are contested in the European American educational landscape, subjugating Alaska Native peoples through assimilatory acts of settler colonialism (e.g., boarding schools, Eurocentric achievement standards). Decolonization demands action, more than inclusion, to dismantle settler-colonialism and to address all the diverse manifestations and permeations across Tribal Nations. Further, Indigenous psychologies of liberation presume that action needs to take the form of indigenization, cultural-derived antidotes to healing soul wounds, with embodied representations of cultural practices, lives, and epistemologies. Thus, we will discuss the intentional, liberatory act of embedding and reinforcing Alaska Native Elders (i.e., wisdom holders, culture bearers) in the classroom within the Rural Human Services program at the University of Alaska. Using an Indigenous Inquiry Framework, we interviewed four Alaska Native graduates, one non-Native graduate, two allies, and one Alaska Native Elder graduate. Analysis of barriers and Indigenous liberation identified four key domains: (a) transformative healing and love, (b) Indigenous identity development, (c) a generative and holistic education, and (d) allyship. This organization of Alaska Native expertise in the University of Alaska system reflects the growing reclamation of Alaska Native education in the hands of Alaska Native leaders and communities. Alaska Native Elders in the classroom is a fruition of ancestral directives that facilitate space for gathering, deepening, and sharing knowledge, wisdom, and healing.

This paper reviews the main motivations and arguments of my work on comparative development, colonialism, and institutional change, which was often carried out jointly with James Robinson and Simon Johnson. I then provide a simple framework to organize these ideas and connect them with my research on innovation and technology. The framework is centered around a utility-technology possibilities frontier, which delineates the possible distributions of resources in a society both for given technology and working via different technological choices. It highlights how various types of institutions, market structures, norms, and ideologies influence moves along the frontier and shifts of the frontier, and it provides a simple formalization of the social forces that lead to institutional persistence and those that can trigger institutional change. The framework also enables us to conceptualize how, during periods of disruption, existing—and sometimes quite small—differences can have amplified effects on prosperity and institutional trajectories. In this way, it suggests some parallels between different disruptive periods, including the onset of European colonialism, the spread (or lack thereof) of industrial technologies in the nineteenth century, and decisions related to the use, adoption, and development of AI today.