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Launching the BC + AI Ecosystem Association Nonprofit at H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, Vancouver BC w/ ~250 humans, plus the ghosts of ancestors, datasets, and machine spirits
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Vancouver AI Highlights: Ceremony, Justice, Music, Launch | BC + AI Ecosystem
Vancouver AI Community Meetup August 2025 (Web Size) · Wednesday, Aug 27 📸
Carol Ann Hilton Opening Speech Recap – August 2025
When a Healthcare Data Analyst Drops an AI Album That Makes You Cry
You don’t walk into a Vancouver AI meetup like you’re checking into a hotel ballroom. You step into a living organism. A hundred different storylines colliding under the planetarium dome… founders, high school hackers, elders, journalists, artists, scientists, and my mom and dad, who braved the border crossing just to see what the hell I’ve been building up here.
I kicked things off with the basics: it’s our 20th meetup. Twenty months straight, we’ve gathered to mix art, tech, ethics, and beer. Tonight was special… we weren’t just meeting, we were founding. The official launch of the BC + AI Ecosystem Association nonprofit.
But before bylaws and board seats, we started where we always should: in ceremony.
Gabriel George (Tsleil-Waututh Nation) stood up first. No slides. No jargon. Just lineage. He reminded us that his great-great grandmother lived in this very village before her family was forcibly relocated. He reminded us that surnames themselves are a colonial hack — his people understood identity not as a line but as a web.
And then he dropped the line that rewired the room:
“Our people saw it coming. They said one day our world would be connected by a web, and through that we would be able to speak to each other. These were prophecies preached before colonization.”
Think about that. The internet, AI, the whole lattice of connectivity — not invented by Silicon Valley, but anticipated by Indigenous knowledge systems. The elders already called it.
Gabriel didn’t just bless the space, he warned us: “When we do this work in AI, it’s good to have integrity, to have values. What is the base that you’re operating from?”
Then he sang the Eagle Song — gifted to his father as a boy — a reminder that every eagle carries our prayers to the ancestors. His voice filled the dome. It wasn’t a performance. It was anchoring.
The night started not with hype, but with history.