Read the passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 1...

Read the passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 12 to 21.

        On the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, speakers at a UN EMRIP side event argued that visibility is survival, stressing that communities are both modern and ancient. The UN’s neutrality, they contended, furnishes a sanctuary where testimony can be offered without reprisals, allowing narratives to contest stereotypes and convene allies. [I] In such rooms, “nothing about us without us” becomes procedural rather than rhetorical, because those affected articulate needs, risks, and thresholds for consent in their own voices.

        Taking AI into their own hands, participants reframed “data” as a historically extracted resource – language, stories, artwork – requiring stewardship, not appropriation. A Métis-led firm described matriarchal design as fairness enacted: an AI With Heart that corrects bias, centers First Peoples, and insists everyone has a place in the circle. [II] For language workers, revitalization is identity work; deciding who may hear a story, and in which tongue, is an act of self-determination that resists commodification and the algorithmic flattening of living cultures.

        Others warned that preservation without co-design can fossilize languages, freezing them at a museum’s distance. AI is no longer a mere instrument; it functions as civic infrastructure that obliges rights-based governance and accountable design. The UN Declaration’s guarantee of free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) was cited as a floor, not a ceiling, for any data use. [III] Involvement must occur at inception, not as an afterthought, and speed must yield to deliberation where harm vectors remain opaque.

        Moving forward, speakers endorsed human-centred design that begins with Indigenous worldviews, plus capacity-building so communities can elect to engage on their own terms. [IV] Stewardship implies asymmetry at first: protect data before opening it, then share when safety is demonstrable. The “move fast and break things” ethos was rejected; instead, slow down, document trade-offs, and bring dispersed learners along. The UN can convene, but sovereignty means communities set protocols, govern access, and shape cultural algorithms that encode reciprocal obligations.

(Adapted from OHCHR, “Indigenous sovereignty in the AI era”)

Question 12. The word matriarchal in paragraph 2 mostly means ______.

A. vaguely technocratic                                B. overtly paternal

C. chiefly maternal                                        D. narrowly transactional