“More Than We Were Programmed to Be”

This article argues that The Wild Robot offers an updated version of the Indigenous creation story “Skywoman Falling,” a foundational story of interspecies reciprocity and care that functioned for millennia as a blueprint for Native peoples’ relationships with Mother Earth. In the story, a lone woman falls from the heavens toward a water-bound planet, the first human to arrive as a cosmic immigrant to our natural world. In The Wild Robot, this story is retold in the wake of various ecological catastrophes that have torn asunder the innate communion between humans and non-human life on the planet. Now, Skywoman is replaced by a consumer-oriented AI, Rozzum-7134 (or Roz), who unexpectedly finds herself stranded on a pristine island of animals living in disharmony as they struggle with food scarcity and isolation. Roz must reconstitute the bonds between members of the animal kingdom through ingenious and inventive forms of play, reciprocity, and mothering.