Choctaw Nation helps preserve its language and culture with Oracle AI

The Choctaw Nation is one of the largest Native American tribes in the US, now located mainly in southeastern Oklahoma following their forced relocation along the Trail of Tears. After generations of pressured assimilation into US culture, use of the Choctaw language dwindled to just 300 native speakers, prompting an urgency within the tribe to preserve its endangered language and culture. With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Data Science, Oracle AI technologies, and an Oracle APEX–built application, the tribe trained Llama AI large language models from Meta to validate translations between English and Choctaw. Using Oracle AI infrastructure and Oracle’s model fine-tuning tools, tribal linguists can process double the translation requests per day, helping meet demand for translations from tribal programs and providing a foundational tool for future language revitalization efforts.

For years, Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma members were discouraged from speaking their native language in favor of English. As a result, only a few hundred first-language Choctaw speakers are alive today, putting the tribe’s linguistic heritage at risk and eroding its cultural identity—one of the legal definitions of tribal status and sovereignty. With the goal of preserving that identity, the Choctaw Nation sought to create an application that could help it move from manual translation processes to an AI-based approach, thereby preserving the tribe’s use and understanding of its native language. The tribe turned to its trusted relationship with Oracle to support that mission.

The Choctaw Nation chose OCI Data Science, Oracle AI infrastructure, and Oracle AI services for language model deployment with Llama, model fine-tuning, and generative AI capabilities, as well as Oracle APEX to enable rapid development of the language translation application. OCI allows for the quick spinning up of GPU resources while providing a secure, containerized environment that keeps the Choctaw’s linguistic data internal and protected. OCI Data Science notebooks let the project team use familiar development environments, reducing the learning curve and further accelerating project development.

Oracle’s suite of AI and application development services helped the Choctaw Nation build a secure, AI-powered system to translate English to Choctaw and Choctaw back to English, making its linguistic resources more accessible and supporting the tribe’s goal to make language on its digital platforms and signage available in both English and Choctaw. The application can extract and validate translation pairs from diverse and complex historical documents, including PDFs of 19th-century newspapers and interview transcripts with unique diacritic marks, which would have been nearly impossible to do manually.

The application ingests translation requests (often emails from across the community), suggests initial translations, and then routes them to Choctaw linguists, who refine and approve the content. When a translation request is submitted, an AI agent carefully plans the translation approach using a fine-tuned Llama language model and retrieval-augmented generation. The agent first consults comprehensive dictionary resources and validated translation databases, then generates a proposed translation that maintains the nuanced cultural context of the Choctaw language. This translation isn’t the final product but a starting point for human language experts who review and refine the machine-generated text, continuously improving the AI model's understanding of the Choctaw language and enabling even faster translation processing.

Oracle Database provides data storage, management, and additional AI-related functionalities, and Oracle APEX allows the team to build translation workflows quickly, reducing time to value. Developers can work comfortably within familiar OCI Data Science notebooks and frameworks and take advantage of OCI’s powerful GPU resources for model fine-tuning. Sensitive language materials never leave Choctaw-controlled OCI environments, meeting strict requirements for data residency and cultural protection.

The tribe hopes that its technology-driven approach to language preservation can someday serve as a proof of concept for other indigenous communities, offering a scalable methodology that supports language conservation for future generations.