Mélanie O’Bomsawin didn’t grow up speaking Abenaki, her great-grandfather’s mother tongue. But in the past few years she’s been learning the language, and a year ago she started teaching it to others, including online courses from her home in Montreal. So when she saw a post online warning about Indigenous language books on Amazon that seemed to be generated by artificial intelligence, O’Bomsawin was on high alert. Sure enough, a quick search revealed a three-volume series of Abenaki learning books she had never seen before.

The books were titled The Most Frequently Used Abenaki Nouns, The Most Frequently Used Abenaki Verbs and The Most Frequently Used Abenaki Adjectives. They were part of a collection of language books on Amazon called Save Time by Learning the Most Frequently Used Words First.

O’Bomsawin immediately knew something was wrong about these books: unlike in English or French, there are no standalone adjectives in Abenaki. Her suspicions were confirmed when she opened up a sample of the text. She said the translations were incorrect, and some words were not even Abenaki.

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