07/29/2026
The little robot sits on your shoulder, shaped like a woodland animal and decorated in Native American florals. Ask it "What is bear?" and it answers in Ojibwe: makwa. Its inventor is Danielle Boyer, a 25-year-old self-taught roboticist and member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, who built it to keep her language alive.
Danielle calls it a SkoBot, and she has taught hundreds of Native children across the country to build their own. The languages they are trying to save are disappearing quickly. Fewer than 10,000 people in the United States still speak Anishinaabemowin -- the language of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples -- and Danielle has watched the loss reach inside her own family, where her grandmother is one of the last fluent speakers of their dialect.
It's a sadly common story. Of the nearly two hundred Indigenous languages still spoken in this country, all but four are endangered, according to Ethnologue, the most comprehensive catalog of the world's languages. Much of that loss traces to the government boarding schools that spent a century punishing Native children for speaking their own tongues until many stopped passing them down.
This is the loss Danielle set out to fight. She founded a nonprofit at eighteen to put free robotics kits in the hands of Native kids who couldn't otherwise afford them, and the SkoBot grew out of that work. The technology is deliberately simple: it uses artificial intelligence in a limited way; rather than generating speech the way a chatbot does, it plays back words recorded by real Indigenous speakers. That distinction matters to Danielle, who has seen AI models invent Anishinaabemowin words that don't exist. "If we're not learning our language correctly," she says, "we shouldn't learn it at all."
As described in a new NPR story on her work, one of her students is Holden Hoy, a twelve-year-old member of the Sault Tribe in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, who named his SkoBot Sabe, after the Bigfoot who represents honesty in Ojibwe teaching, and programmed it to greet his classmates in his own voice at the school science fair. His mother, Jocelyn, who once rejected her Native American identity, now watches her son come home with words she was never taught and finds that she wants them too.
"As someone who, at a time in my life, did not want to be identified as Native American … now as an adult, I cannot wait to learn more," she observed, "and I think the SkoBots are going to help me and so many kids -- so many people in general -- learn their heritage and who they are."
For Danielle, that's the whole point -- saving her language and others, and the robots are one way to help. "It is devastating to feel like your language could be lost," she says. "You lose your culture. You lose a way to describe who you are."
To read the new NPR piece on Danielle and her SkoBots, visit https://www.npr.org/2026/07/26/nx-s1-5825798/robot-speaks-endangered-native-american-languages
To learn more about Danielle's nonprofit, The STEAM Connection, visit https://www.steamconnection.org
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For children's books about more real-life women who love to invent, visit our blog post "30 Books About Mighty Girls and Women in Engineering" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=35594
For a powerful bilingual picture book about a young Cree girl who helps her grandfather regain his lost language, check out "Stolen Words" for ages 4 to 8 at https://www.amightygirl.com/stolen-words
The practice of removing indigenous children from their homes to force assimilation in the larger society occurred in various places throughout the world -- Margaret Pokiak wrote two children's books about her experience in a residential school in Canada: “When I Was Eight” for ages 5 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/when-i-was-eight) and “Fatty Legs: A True Story” for ages 9 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/fatty-legs-a-true-story)
For more books for children and teens starring Native American and Aboriginal girls and women, visit our blog post "50 Children's Books Celebrating Native American and Indigenous Mighty Girls" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=10365
