David Gaertner works on Indigenous literatures, new media, and the critical study of artificial intelligence. His current research asks what it means to read Indigenous literatures after AI. Drawing on Indigenous theory, critical data studies, and media theory, he examines generative AI as extractive infrastructure, connecting large language models to longer histories of colonial extraction. This research takes shape in his forthcoming chapter, “The Alignment Problem: Reading Indigenous Literatures after AI” (Indigenous Literary Studies, Bloomsbury), and a monograph in progress, Mining Interiority: Relief, Memory, and Relational Capture in Generative AI. At Trace and Address, he writes about what happens when questions of writing, interpretation, and relation meet new machines. A settler scholar of German descent, he is an Associate Professor in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and an Associate Member of the Department of English Language and Literatures.

Gaertner is the author of The Theatre of Regret: Art, Literature, and the Politics of Reconciliation in Canada (UBC Press); co-editor of Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island and the forthcoming Indigenous X: Networks of Relations and Resistance on and Beyond Native Twitter (both Wilfrid Laurier University Press); and editor of Sôhkêyihta: The Poetry of Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe. He is co-founder of #HonouringIndigenousWriters, an annual Wikipedia edit-a-thon and reading series that celebrates Indigenous authors; his article on the project received the 2026 Beatrice Medicine Award for Scholarship in American Indian Studies. His community-based work includes Threads of Resistance / Threads of Change, a collaboration with the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs to create a public digital gallery of political T-shirts from the UBCIC archives, guided by Indigenous data sovereignty. He is a past President of the Indigenous Literary Studies Association and Associate Editor at BC Studies.

Gaertner teaches Indigenous literatures, digital storytelling, and critical approaches to AI. He supervises graduate work on Indigenous digital media, speculative fiction, and representation.

Selected Publications

• The Theatre of Regret: Art, Literature, and the Politics of Reconciliation in Canada. UBC Press, 2020.
• with Melissa Haberl. “Recoding Relations: Dispatches from the Symposium for Indigenous New Media.” Critical Inquiry (In the Moment), January 21, 2020.
• Recoding Relations: A Four-Part Podcast Series on Indigenous New Media (Producer), 2019.
• Soykeyihta: The Poetry of Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe. Selected with an introduction by David Gaertner. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018.
• with Sophie McCall, Deanna Reder, Gabrielle Hill, eds. Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Literature From Turtle Island. Wilfred Laurier UP, 2017.
• with Elizabeth Lapenseé and Karyn Recollet. “Indigenous.” Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities. Eds. Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, Katherine D. Harris, and Jentery Sayers. Modern Language Association, 2020.
• “A Landless Territory: How Do We Articulate Cyberspace within the context of Indigenous Studies?” Learn, Teach, Challenge: Approaches to Indigenous Literatures in the 21st Century. Eds. Linda Morra & Deanna Reder. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier UP. 493-498.
• “Indigenous in Cyberspace: CyberPowWow, God’s Lake Narrows and the Challenges of Creating Indigenous Territory in Cyberspace.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 39.4 (2015): 55-78.
• “‘Something in between’: Monkey Beach and the Haisla Return of the Repressed.” Canadian Literature 225 (Summer, 2015): 47-65.