BIPOC, Trans, and Women Also Built Tech. It’s Now Being Used to Track and Kill Us. We Need to Talk About It. | Dragon 🐉 Letter #124

Hola! I’m Ixchel Lunar (they/them), an Indigenous-Time ecologist, ancestral medicine guide, and rhythm witch for creative rebels, decolonial dreamers, and neuroqueer visionaries. This Substack is dedicated to weaving business, body, and belonging into something no empire can replicate. Still punk as fuck. Still cozy in the chaos.

Reminder: K’iinBody Weekend, May 30+31, reply to join us! Learn More →

Beautiful Wildling,

Something happened after my first email about the K’iinBody Build Weekend.

I want to talk to those still here, who are curious, cautious, or carrying real grief about what technology has done to us. Because there are some stories we haven’t been told.

The first distorted narrative is about who dreamed technology into existence.

The second is what it’s doing right now, today, to bodies like ours.

The story we inherited

The distortion we’ve been told is this:

Technology was built by men in garages. White men. Solitary geniuses. And we either keep up or get left behind.

That story is incomplete. And the gaps aren’t accidents.

Before Silicon Valley existed

Traditional Ecological Knowledge, what researchers now call TEK, is the accumulated wisdom passed down through generations within Indigenous communities. It includes knowledge about the physical environment, about technology, about social systems.1

It’s knowledge encoded in oral tradition, ceremony, and the body.

This is a knowledge transmission system. It’s operated for thousands of years without servers, cloud storage, or venture capital. It carries data and holds memory. It adapts across generations. And as a knowledge and record keeper in my lineage, that is what I am doing. Adapting.

Indigenous ancestors were information architects before that phrase existed. The question was never whether we had the technology. The question was who got to name it.

The language they tried to destroy

In the fall of 1918, German forces continued to thwart Allied operations by monitoring open-air communications and breaking every coded message. The answer came from Choctaw Native culture, not new machinery.2

Code Talkers from 14 different Native nations served in World War I and World War II. Over 400 Navajo Marines served as Code Talkers in World War II alone. After the war ended, the Japanese chief of intelligence confirmed they never broke the Navajo code.3

Those young Choctaw and Diné men had been forced through boarding schools where they were beaten for speaking their own language. Then the U.S. military asked them to use that same language as a weapon.4

Read that again.

The language they tried to destroy was the most secure communication system in the world.

A Navajo speaker could encode, transmit, and decode a three-line message in 20 seconds. The machines of the time needed 30 minutes to do the same job.5

Choctaw and Diné languages were the technology. The people were the system.

The women they erased

A group of six women programmed ENIAC, the world’s first all-electronic, programmable, general-purpose computer. 6 They were mathematicians pulled from teaching positions because the world was at war and needed them. After the war ended, they were written out of the story.

Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson calculated the launch and landing trajectories that put John Glenn into Earth’s orbit in 1962.7 They worked in a segregated facility. They were called “computers” because that was the job title before machines had the name.

In 1958, Mary Jackson became NASA’s first Black female engineer.8

Most people didn’t learn their names until 2016 when the film Hidden Figures was released. Keeping their names out of the story for 54 years was deliberate erasure. Epistemicide.

Grace Hopper served as a Naval Reserve officer and invented the compiler, a program that translates human language into machine-readable code.9 She made computing speakable. She believed it should belong to more people, fewer gatekeepers.

Ada Lovelace wrote the first algorithm in the 1840s, before the machine she described could even be built. A coding language was later named Ada in her honor, used by the U.S. Department of Defense.10

Lynn Conway invented complex microchip systems in the 1960s that led to the creation of the first supercomputers.11 IBM fired her in 1968 after she told them she was transitioning. She rebuilt her career from scratch, went on to do foundational work at Xerox PARC, and spent her later years as a transgender activist. IBM apologized 52 years later. She died in June 2024.12

Sophie Wilson designed the ARM chip in 1983.13 It’s now in most smartphones and tablets. The device you’re reading this on likely runs on her architecture. She’s a trans woman. Most people have never heard her name.

A woman wrote the first instructions for a thinking machine. A century before the Menlo Park garage.

Trans women built the infrastructure of modern computing. The story told about who built tech doesn’t include them either.

What Haraway saw coming

Donna Haraway wrote the Cyborg Manifesto in 1985. It wasn’t a celebration of surveillance capitalism. It was a warning about who gets left out of the room.

She urged feminists to be more involved in the meaning-making processes of technoscientific world-building and insisted on recognition for the articulations and contributions they were already making.14

She wrote that communications technologies are the tools recrafting our bodies. That they embody and enforce new social relations. That the boundary between tool and myth, instrument and concept, is permeable. [Ibid]

Stepping away doesn’t make us safe. It makes us absent.

Haraway saw what was coming. We’re living in it now. And we must “Stay with the Trouble.”15

Living Nepantla

There’s a word for where we are. Nepantla. The in-between space. The threshold where old forms break down and something new hasn’t taken shape yet.

This isn’t comfortable territory. It’s not supposed to be.

We’re being asked to hold the history of who built these tools alongside the reality of what those tools are doing right now. To hold the BIPOC lineage of computing alongside the white supremacist narrative that’s swallowed it. To hold the potential of what AI could be alongside the documented violence of what it already is.

Both are true at the same time, without resolution. That’s Nepantla.

It’s also where new things get born.

What the technology is doing right now

In Gaza, the Israeli military deployed an AI system called Lavender. At one point, it had identified 37,000 potential targets. Intelligence sources allege that approximately 10 percent of those were marked in error.16

Ten percent error. On a list of 37,000 people.

Another AI tool called “Where’s Daddy” tracks selected Palestinians so they can be bombed when they enter their home.17

(Yes, that’s the name they gave it.)

Facial recognition systems in cities like Hebron were linked to movement prediction tools that fed directly into targeting programs. Surveillance wasn’t just about monitoring. It was connected to attacks.18

A facial scanning system deployed along so-called “safe” routes in Gaza identified Palestinians who were later abducted, beaten, and killed.19

Central to this infrastructure is Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract through which Google and Amazon provided the Israeli government and military with advanced cloud infrastructure and machine learning.20

The companies whose tools many of us use every day are directly implicated. War is their business model.

Closer to home

ICE leaders, backed by top Trump administration officials, have asserted the authority to use all available tools to monitor and investigate anti-ICE protester networks, including U.S. citizens.21

ICE is now equipped with biometric trackers, cellphone location databases, facial recognition apps, and drones. [Ibid]

Federal immigration agents are using a facial recognition app called Mobile Fortify. U.S. Customs and Border Protection recently signed a contract with Clearview AI, a company that has accessed billions of images of people’s faces pulled from the internet.22

The Department of Homeland Security has said it’ll monitor immigrants’ social media activity and use evidence found there to deny visas and green cards. ICE has detained activists following pro-Palestinian statements or appearances at protests.23

And here’s what the data shows:

Nearly three in four people booked into ICE custody this fiscal year had no criminal conviction. Nearly half had no criminal conviction and no pending criminal charges. Only 5 percent had a violent criminal conviction.24

As of April 2026, 70.8 percent of people held in ICE detention had no criminal conviction. Many of those who did have convictions were there for minor offenses, including traffic violations.25

A whopping 92 percent of ICE detention growth in fiscal year 2026 has been driven by people with no criminal convictions. Between September and January alone, ICE detention increased by over 11,000 people. Of that increase, only 902 were convicted criminals.26

Call it what it is. Abduction with paperwork. And AI is doing the locating.

What I hold alongside all of this

Technology has also been weaponized against our bodies and our languages.

The boarding schools that beat the Choctaw and Diné languages out of children and then called it a secret weapon are the same colonial logic running through every extractive platform today. I carry that. It shapes what I build.

It might feel good to say you refuse AI. Maybe even feel superior, thinking you’re pure of it.

But pretending we don’t use AI while using phones and computers to interact online is a lie of omission to ourselves. AI is already in everything we touch. Refusing it in a blanket, purity politic way, without the nuance that conversation requires, means we’re complicit in the growth of that violent order with our silence.

What we get to reject is the dominance. The narrative that says this technology belongs to them. We get to decide what we build with the tools available now. Who holds them, names the terms, and benefits.

Technology isn’t a substitute for land-based learning or face-to-face knowledge transmission. And it can help Elders reach more people. One Elder said it plainly: “I can’t be in ten places all at once. Technology helps me reach more people.”27

That’s the frame I work from: Reach. Sovereignty. Transmission.

The surveillance state runs on our absence, on our not knowing how the code works, and on our data being collected while we look away.

We’re not late to technology. We built this, but we were coded out of the story. We mustn’t look away.

The K’iinBody Weekend

We already know we can’t trust the companies building these weapons. This weekend is about getting sovereign over your digital life.

Here’s what we do together:

I help you build your AI second brain. A personal system that works with your rhythm, your ancestral intelligence, your way of thinking, and storing knowledge. One that answers to you.

And then we use it to help you move your digital life off surveillance platforms.

Over the month of co-working and open AMA that follows the weekend, I’ll support you in migrating away from surveillance platforms. Google has your email, your files, your search history, and your location. That data isn’t inert. We’ve seen what happens when it gets handed to governments and militaries.

Proton offers privacy-first email and file storage, based in Switzerland, outside U.S. jurisdiction, with end-to-end encryption. Moving your email and files there isn’t complicated. It’s time-consuming, but faster with an AI agent. And it’s easier when you’ve got a system helping you think through it, and a community doing it alongside you.

That’s what the month is for.

We’ll use your new AI second brain to map your current platforms, plan your migration, and move at a pace your body and your bandwidth can hold.

That’s what Haraway meant by getting in the room. Knowing how the tools work. Building an alternative infrastructure for your life.28

The women who programmed the first computer didn’t wait for permission to be in the room. The Choctaw and Diné men who built the unbreakable code did it in a language the colonizer tried to silence.

We’re not late. We’re writing ourselves back in.

If not us, then who? If not now, in this Time we were born into, then when?

Reply if you want to know more about the weekend. I’d love to hear where you’re at.

Learn more here and save your spot→

Stay wild, love fiercely. Your presence is golden.

With wild and rebellious love,

Maltiox! xo Ixchel

P.S. If June 5, 6 + 7 won’t work, reply and I’ll put you on the Cohort 2 list.

P.P.S. Maltiox pronounced mall-tee-osh means with gratitude in K’iche Mayan.

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Walk in beauty. Live your magic. Go wild.

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Land Lineage

I was raised and bore children on the traditional, unceded, and stolen lands of the Coast and Central Valley Miwok (colonized as Petaluma, CA) and Nisenan (colonized as Sacramento and Fair Oaks, CA), past, present, and future. I also write, work, and live in the highland forest of the traditional, unceded and stolen lands of the Totonac, Nahua, and Mexicah, past, present, and future, in what is known as Coatepec, Veracruz, Mexico.

P.P.S. I do not live or consent to the colonial impositions regarding the construct of Time. I also practice honoring rhythms of work, play, and rest so that I can serve you with embodied presence and with loving care. This means I may take several days to respond to your requests and questions. (h/t Eva Glamaris)

P.P.S. A mention is not necessarily an endorsement of someone. It’s an acknowledgment, a citation, of the origin of information in my process of understanding. (h/t Kelly Diels)

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1

Anthropology News. “Weaving Environmental Knowledge and Oral Tradition.” https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/weaving-environmental-knowledge-and-oral-tradition/

2

National Museum of the American Indian Magazine. “The Code Talkers’ Legacy: Native Languages Helped Turn the Tides in Both World Wars.” https://americanindianmagazine.org/story/code-talkers-legacy-native-languages-helped-turn-tides-both-world-wars

3

Library of Congress. “World War II’s Navajo Code Talkers, In Their Own Words.” https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2023/11/world-war-iis-navajo-code-talkers-in-their-own-words/

4

National Endowment for the Humanities. “Code Talkers Were America’s Secret Weapon in World War II.” https://www.neh.gov/article/code-talkers-were-americas-secret-weapon-world-war-ii

5

U.S. Navy. “Navajo Code Talkers: World War II Fact Sheet.” https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/n/code-talkers.html

6

Florida Tech. “Women in Computing Throughout History and Beyond.” https://online.fit.edu/degrees/undergraduate/cis/the-history-of-women-in-computing/

7

Brookings Institution. “Hidden Figures Highlights the Ongoing Legacy of Women and Minorities in STEM.” https://www.brookings.edu/articles/hidden-figures-highlights-the-ongoing-legacy-of-women-and-minorities-in-stem/

8

Missio Alliance. “Hidden Figures Teaches How Injustice Remains Hidden.” https://missioalliance.org/hidden-figures-teaches-injustice-remains-hidden/

9

Purdue Global. “History of Women in IT: 6 Female Pioneers in Computer Science.” https://www.purdueglobal.edu/blog/information-technology/history-women-information-technology-6-female-computer-science-pioneers/

10

U.S. Senator Deb Fischer. “Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace: Pioneers in Tech.” https://www.fischer.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2018/7/grace-hopper-and-ada-lovelace-pioneers-in-tech

11

FutureLearn / UAL Creative Computing Institute. “A Gendered History of Technology.” https://www.futurelearn.com/info/courses/gender-inclusive-technology/0/steps/220305

12

University of Liverpool. “10 LGBTQIA+ Tech Pioneers That Inspire Us.” https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/it/blog/community/10lgbtqiatechpioneersthatinspireus/

13

Exeter Students’ Guild. “The LGBTQ+ Pioneers Who Changed STEM.” https://www.exeterguild.com/article-post/the-lgbtq-pioneers-who-changed-stem

14

Donna Haraway. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” 1985. Full text: https://web.archive.org/web/20120214194015/http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html

15

“Rethinking Humanity with Donna Haraway: A Cyborg Manifesto for the AI Age” in Philosopheasy, Aug 18, 2025:

PhilosopheasyRethinking Humanity with Donna HarawayImagine a world where the lines between human and machine, nature and technology, mind and body, are not just blurred, but actively dissolved. A world where our very definition of “humanity” is chall…Read morea year ago · 31 likes · 1 comment · Philosopheasy16

CBC News. “Israel Accused of Using AI to Choose Gaza Targets.” https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/1.7166391

17

Global Voices Advox. “Israel Is Using Surveillance Technology to Subjugate and Target Palestinians.” https://advox.globalvoices.org/2024/10/11/israel-is-using-surveillance-technology-to-subjugate-and-target-palestinians/

18

SETAV. “Gaza as a Testing Ground: Israel’s AI Warfare.” https://www.setav.org/en/gaza-as-a-testing-ground-israels-ai-warfare

19

Tech Policy Press. “Artificial Intelligence and the Orchestration of Palestinian Life and Death.” https://www.techpolicy.press/artificial-intelligence-and-the-orchestration-of-palestinian-life-and-death/

20

Al-Shabaka. “AI for War: Big Tech Empowering Israel’s Crimes and Occupation.” https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/ai-for-war-big-tech-empowering-israels-crimes-and-occupation/

21

Washington Post. “The Powerful Tools in ICE’s Arsenal to Track Suspects — and Protesters.” (paywall) https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/ice-surveillance-immigrants-protesters/

22

NPR. “ICE Is Using Mass Surveillance on American Citizens, Activists.” https://www.npr.org/2026/03/04/nx-s1-5717031/ice-dhs-immigrants-surveillance-confrontation-deportation-mobile-fortify

23

MIT Technology Review. “How a New Type of AI Is Helping Police Skirt Facial Recognition Bans.” https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/12/1116295/how-a-new-type-of-ai-is-helping-police-skirt-facial-recognition-bans/

24

Cato Institute. “5% of People Detained By ICE Have Violent Convictions, 73% No Convictions.” https://www.cato.org/blog/5-ice-detainees-have-violent-convictions-73-no-convictions — Note: drawn from nonpublic ICE data leaked to Cato researchers.

25

TRAC Reports / Syracuse University. “Immigration Detention Quick Facts.” https://tracreports.org/immigration/quickfacts/ — data current as of April 4, 2026.

26

Austin Kocher / Substack. “92% of ICE Detention Growth in FY 2026 Driven by Immigrants with No Criminal Convictions.”

Austin Kocher92% of ICE Detention Growth in FY 2026 Driven by Immigrants with No Criminal ConvictionsUpdate 01/27/2026: The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board cited this post in an opinion piece published today titled “Mass Deportation by the Numbers…Read more7 months ago · 55 likes · 9 comments · Austin Kocher27

University of Waterloo / Taylor & Francis. “Indigenous Language Revitalization Using TEK-nology.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01434632.2022.2084548

28

Interview: “Donna Haraway on Cyborgs, ‘Oddkin’ & Resisting the Monoculture of the Mind,” January 16, 2026:

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Land Lineage

I was raised and bore children on the traditional, unceded, and stolen lands of the Coast and Central Valley Miwok (colonized as Petaluma, CA) and Nisenan (colonized as Sacramento and Fair Oaks, CA), past, present, and future. I also write, work, and live in the highland forest of the traditional, unceded and stolen lands of the Totonac, Nahua, and Mexicah, past, present, and future, in what is known as Coatepec, Veracruz, Mexico.

P.P.S. I do not live or consent to the colonial impositions regarding the construct of Time. I also practice honoring rhythms of work, play, and rest so that I can serve you with embodied presence and with loving care. This means I may take several days to respond to your requests and questions. (h/t Eva Glamaris)

P.P.S. A mention is not necessarily an endorsement of someone. It’s an acknowledgment, a citation, of the origin of information in my process of understanding. (h/t Kelly Diels)

Thanks for reading! If you loved it, tell your friends to subscribe.

We may include other affiliate links in our content. Thank you for supporting our work.

Copyright © 2026, Cheyenne, WY, and Veracruz, Mexico, All rights reserved. Sharing your lineage of knowledge is decolonial. When iterating, please cite me. Not citing is epistemicide.