90-Minute Webinar: Water is Still Life – Visualizing Native and Indigenous Resistance to Generative AI

Across the United States and North America, Native and Indigenous people are mobilizing to resist the latest colonial resource extraction – AI-boom fueled data centers. This talk will focus on the environmental challenges presented by the mass adoption of generative AI, with a special focus on environmental impacts and risks in the greater Pacific Northwest. From there, we will discuss in-process original research that maps, tracks, and shares Native and Indigenous resistance to AI environmental impacts, including opposition efforts to data centers, power plants, and uranium and rare earths mining. To conclude, we will collectively envision what our role to play is as information and truth protectors.

Meeting the reality of the large-scale environmental harms AI brings requires an embodied and grounded experience of both of ourselves as individuals with agency, and as an interconnected part of a larger whole. The short practice after Marco’s talk and before the Q&A is intended to help us regulate our nervous systems and connect to the support of our bodies and breath, so that we have space to feel what needs to be felt, and the ability to respond skillfully from a place of steadiness and clarity.

This 90-minute webinar takes place from 1-2:30 Pacific time, March 3, 2026.
The session will be recorded and captioned to share later.
We will enable automatic captions in the session. Please let us know about additional accommodations you need to participate in this webinar.
Register for this webinar

About the Presenters

Marco Seiferle-Valencia is the Open Education Librarian at the University of Idaho, where he leads the Library’s open educational resources efforts. His areas of expertise include community archiving, static web development for cultural heritage preservation, and, more recently, the environmental impacts of generative AI. Marco’s research interests and projects span a diverse range of outputs, but share a central focus on academic practice as liberatory work for both creators and learners by bringing historical and marginalized histories to bear on understanding modern issues.

Marianne Tanner is a part-time faculty Reference and Instruction Librarian at Portland Community College. She is also a registered yoga teacher, and has been teaching yoga and mindfulness practices for over twenty years.