The Salamanca city school district has announced a public educational experiment on Native children. The Guardian reported the details.
Salamanca sits on Allegany territory of the Seneca nation. Nearly 40 percent of the high school’s students are Seneca Native American — young people whose families have lived on this land since before the nation that now administers the city was a nation, and whose grandparents and great-grandparents remember what was done to their families by institutions built on the same ground. The district has ordered a humanoid robot to be brought into the building and introduced to those students as an agent of education.
Sierra May Abrams, a substitute teacher and local resident who is Seneca, said: “Out of all the schools in New York state, let alone in the US, they chose to experiment on Native children yet again.”
Alyson Brown, a community health specialist and Salamanca graduate who is a member of the Seneca nation, said: “Many native families are viewing this pilot program as history repeating itself.”
They are not confused. They are naming a documented institutional lineage, and they are right to name it on this ground.
The Thomas Indian School operated on Cattaraugus Seneca territory from 1855 through 1957. It was administered by the State of New York. It was part of a coordinated institutional effort — federal departments and Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregationalist, Baptist, and Episcopal missions across North America — designed to strip Native children out of their mothers’ arms and into institutions operating under an explicit philosophy: kill the Indian to save the man, Richard Henry Pratt, 1879. The names of the denominations are in the institutional record. Their coordination with federal departments of the interior and education is in the institutional record. What these schools did to the children in their care — the loss of language, the loss of family, the loss of ceremonial identity, abuse that the living still bear and still name under oath — is documented by the testimony that moved Congress to acknowledge these wrongs in 2024. The school in Salamanca sits on the same territory. The children in Salamanca are the latest generation whose parents and grandparents carry what was done there. Alyson Brown said: “Many students have connections to relatives who attended the Thomas Indian school located on our Cattaraugus territory.” Alyson Brown is bearing witness from institutional experience. The district is ignoring the witness.
The corporate background makes the institutional pattern harder to look away from, though the district appears to have managed.
Tokens.com, a penny-stock company operating out of British Columbia, acquired Simulacra, a Las Vegas sex-doll manufacturer, in April 2024 for $16.7 million. It rebranded itself Realbotix and pivoted from cryptocurrency to robotics, including licensing and manufacturing realistic sex dolls. Salamanca city central school district — the district situated on the only reservation within a city in the nation, serving a student population that is nearly 40 percent Seneca Native American — awarded Realbotix a school contract at $57,590 per year. United States–Mexico–Canada–America interests. $57,590 is the average salary-and-benefits package for a full-time classroom paraprofessional in New York state. That is a human being, paid a living wage, present with living children in a living room. Research continues to question whether AI tutors can match what a human teacher provides — but the educators at Salamanca are not waiting for the studies to complete. They already know what their students need: human beings.
The district bought a $57,590 robot instead. The community members who spoke to the Guardian — Abrams, Brown, the teachers and their union — knew exactly what the district could have placed in their classrooms with the same money. The district proceeded over their objections.
The regulatory field gives the question a harder edge still. Lacey Pihlblad, president of the Salamanca Teachers’ Association, raised the specific concerns that federal and state privacy law answers: “data security,” “how it will be gathered,” “recording capabilities.” Those are not general-purpose classroom-think questions. They are a set of questions to which the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and New York State Education Law §2-d supply precise answers — answers the district has apparently not acted on. Under FERPA, a school district may disclose student information to a third-party contractor only when the contractor qualifies under the school-officials exception — which requires documented direct control over data handling, a directly controllable process, and a legitimate educational purpose. Before disclosure can occur, FERPA requires that parents receive notice and the right to inspect materials. Under New York Education Law §2-d — strengthened with guardrails in 2024 — a school district must publish a Parents’ Bill of Rights for any third-party contractor handling student data. It must make any such contract publicly available. It must ensure that the contractor applies privacy and security standards equivalent to those of the district. Salamanca district has published none of those. No contract with Realbotix is publicly available. No supplemental data-privacy plan for the robotic pilot has been published. No parental disclosure specific to the robot — its language-processing capabilities, its recording function, its data-storage regime — has gone out under the protections that New York and federal law require. The state education department itself flagged the problem. JP O’Hare, assistant commissioner of public affairs for the New York state education department, wrote to the district regarding its purchase of a robot “and has raised serious concerns about student privacy, appropriate safeguards, and the risk that the robot could be used to perform functions that should remain the responsibility of trained, qualified professionals.” That is not a request for an evaluation. That is the agency charged with enforcing New York’s educational data-privacy law flagging the absence of required protections before the program launches. When the president of New York State United Teachers calls this program “really inappropriate,” when the school’s own faculty demands a pause, and when the state education department flags a privacy violation that implicates existing law — the answer is not deference to a corporate timetable. It is compliance with the law the district is required to follow.
Deuteronomy 10:18–19 speaks to this. He does not oppress the foreigner … but loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. You are to love those who are foreigners; for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord. The Hebrew imperative is specific: do not oppress the foreigner. The verse announces a God who deliberately stands with the people who are somewhere else on someone else’s land, and who declares that an institution governing a territory owes protection to the children of that territory’s original people. The question this text raises is not what Christian children owe their parents. It is what the institution governing Salamanca — an institution operating on Seneca-Cattaraugus land, with the proceeds of that land, conducting the public education of Seneca children — owes to children whose elders were taken by the Thomas Indian School, and to the granddaughters bearing witness from that documented memory, and to the substitute teacher who is Seneca and has said that this district is “experimenting on Native children yet again.” Deuteronomy answers: the institution owes them protection. Law answers: it owes them disclosure, contracts, consent — every safeguard §2-d requires, and FERPA requires, before a single robot enters the building. The district has done none of this.
The teachers’ union has asked for a pause. The state education department has flagged the absence of safeguards. The community members — Abrams, Brown, Pihlblad, Pearson, the teachers they speak for and the children in their care — are naming what this district owes these children, and the name is a human being, not a machine.
They are not confused about causation. They are not confused about whether institutional memory matters. They are naming: Salamanca district is placing the newest version of that institutional operation — an algorithm, an interactive humanoid, a piece of hardware in the room with children who were never asked whether they trusted the company that made it — in the school attended by the children of the Thomas Indian School. The corporate trail: a penny-stock Canadian holdings company bought a sex-doll manufacturer, pivoted to robotics, and the school district gave it a classroom. The community members and the state education department have identified what the law requires. The district has not complied.
The contrast between what the community is asking for is not subtle. The president of New York State United Teachers, speaking for teachers across the state, said: “The answer to the challenges in education is not more screens, it’s not more algorithms, not more robots. What we need in our schools right now are more caring adults and more human connection.” That is the moral framework. Then the law: FERPA and §2-d require disclosure, contracts, consent — every protection these children are owed before their data goes to a company that pivoted from cryptocurrency to sex dolls to classroom robots. The district has done none of this.
The teacher said: “Putting a lifeless machine in front of students is a bad idea.” The question behind that sentence is not whether the machine will be bad at what it does. The question is what the institution owes to children who were never asked whether they consented to become test subjects on the land where their schools still owe what they have never given: an accountable human presence, authorized by law and whispered by the teacher who saw the data.
The district could still act. What it owes these children — good data privacy, published contracts, parental consent, the presence of a human being paid from the same public funds — is what the district must now give them.