The Future Imaginary in Indigenous North American Arts and Literatures

Kristina Baudemann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367754822
• eBook ISBN: 9781000529890
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Native American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the future in Indigenous North American speculative literature and digital arts. Asking how different Indigenous works imagine the future and how they negotiate settler colonial visions of what is to come, the chapters illustrate that the future is not an immutable entity but a malleable textual/digital product that can function as both a colonial tool and a catalyst for decolonization. Central to this study is the development of a methodology that helps unearth the signifying structures producing the future in selected works by Darcie Little Badger, Gerald Vizenor, Stephen Graham Jones, Skawennati, Danis Goulet, Scott Benesiinaabandan, Postcommodity, Kite, Jeff Barnaby, and Ryan Singer. Drawing on Jason Lewis's "future imaginary" as the theoretical core, the book describes the various forms of textual representation and virtual simulation through which notions of Indigenous continuation are expressed in literary and new media works. Arguing that Indigenous authors and artists apply the aesthetics of the future as a strategy in their works, the volume conceptualizes its multimedia corpus as a continuously growing archive of, and for, Indigenous futures.

1 Introduction“Turning our backs on Mars” – futures seen through the window of an Indigenous starship

DOI: 10.4324/9781003162629-1

In Darcie Little Badger’s short story “Né łe!” (2016), veterinarian Dottie King abandons her plans to begin a new life on Mars. Instead of joining the settlement of “the red frontier” (67) – advertised as both a space adventure and an amazing job opportunity – King considers making use of her training on the “Diné Orbiter” (68), the sovereign Diné nation starship that is less polished than the newer starships and less predictable. As King’s ex-girlfriend Addie puts it, “[t]he gravity’s unreliable. Sometimes, it’s like walking on the moon, and other times, you’re fifty kilograms heavier than you should be” (69). The future on the Diné Orbiter seems riskier than choosing the well-trodden path of emigrating to Mars, and King, who is Lipan Apache, is unsure whether she “belong[s] there” (75). Nevertheless, it is the longing for a Diné starship pilot named Cora and the certainty of being needed on Orbiter Diné that prompt King to consider changing the course of her future (with a little help from the trickster, an epileptic husky puppy named Conan). Asked to choose between different narratives of what her life might be like, King opts for Indigenous territory.

Little Badger’s story is a part of Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time (2016), a collection of Indigenous two-spirit science fiction short stories that narrate the budding romance between King and Cora. As my tentative reading demonstrates, “Né łe!” may also be read as a metanarrative comment on the writing of an Indigenous future. The story of the two Indigenous women who, “[h]and in hand … turned [their] backs on Mars” (76) to seek futures of their own encourages us to imagine fantastic worlds beyond the familiar colonial narratives of Martian explorations and space frontiers. Little Badger’s protagonist, although she is hesitant about Orbiter Diné, seems to feel drawn to an Indigenous place – whether on Earth or in space – that promises a life among people who hold familiar worldviews and look back on the same colonial history. Most importantly, of course, the Diné Orbiter is where Cora is going – and where Dottie King therefore wants to go also. With her short story, Little Badger not only writes an Indigenous LGBTQ2 love story into the shared canon of familiar science fictional futures. She also encourages us to consider why an Indigenous writer might want to “turn her back on Mars”: the planet is metaphorical of the Western desire to begin a new life in space, but the adventure narrative of settling the red frontier does not seem to fit Dottie King. Instead, Little Badger lets her protagonist choose an alternative model of a future – less polished, less predictable, but more meaningful to King. With “Né łe!,” Little Badger conjures the possibility of writing an Indigenous future, and she demonstrates what such an act of writing might look like: she disassembles the familiar narrative of interplanetary travel and emigration to Mars to tell the story of her Indigenous characters.

Little Badger – who is Lipan Apache like Dottie King – moreover emphasizes that the Apache vet and the Diné pilot can dream a common future while nevertheless being mindful of their cultural differences. Little Badger thus affirms solidarity with other Indigenous writers. Her story seems to express the urgency of developing alternative models of the future from as many different Indigenous perspectives as possible, since, as Little Badger expresses elsewhere, “[a]ny future with us in it, triumphant and flourishing, is a hopeful one” (Roanhorse et al., “Indigenous Futurisms Roundtable”). As Dottie King puts it, this path is better taken together than alone: “home did not comfort me. I ached for company” (75).

This study is interested in the alternative models of the future hinted at in Little Badger’s “Né łe!” The transformative potential of the Indigenous works that, like Little Badger’s short story, imagine the future from an Indigenous perspective, was first acknowledged by Anishinaabe scholar Grace Dillon. With her seminal anthology of Indigenous science fiction, Walking the Clouds (2012), Dillon traced an emerging trend, or “movement” (Medak-Saltzman 144; Dillon, “Introduction” 6), within Indigenous North American literatures and arts of telling stories about the future. A steadily growing number of authors, bloggers, and visual, digital, and sound artists use the term made popular with Dillon’s anthology, “Indigenous Futurisms” (“Imagining” 1), to describe Indigenous expressions of the fantastic and science fictional.

As my short excursus into Little Badger’s story hints, creative works abound that imagine Indigenous people in times to come. They encompass a wide range of genres and styles, from film, music, and painting to narratives told in virtual reality (VR). To list only a few: Jeff Barnaby’s (Mi’gMaq) short film File Under Miscellaneous (2010) portrays a pivotal moment in the life of a Mi’gMaq in a cyberpunk metropolis; Nanobah Becker’s (Diné) film The 6th World (2012) depicts a female Diné astronaut bringing life to Mars; Danis Goulet’s (Cree/Métis) short film Wakening (2013) follows the Cree trickster character Weesakechak through a coming world in ruins; Lisa Jackson’s (Anishinaabe) immersive VR Biidaaban: First Light (2018) maps out “a future version of Toronto that has been reclaimed by nature” (Johnson, “Anishinaabe”); Skawennati’s (Kanien’kehá:ka) series TimeTraveller™ (2008–13) was filmed in the virtual world of Second Life and features a Kanien’kehá:ka gamer from the twenty-second century; the Indigenous VR project 2167 (2017) allows users to explore Canada and New Mexico 150 years in the future through the culturally inflected lens of such artists as Goulet and Scott Benesiinaabandan (Anishinaabe). Painters, multimedia artists, and photographers visualize the cultures, knowledges, and arts and crafts of coming Indigenous generations. Among them are Heather Campbell (Inuit), Warren Cariou (Métis), Andy Everson (K’ómoks), Steven Paul Judd (Kiowa/Choctaw), Elizabeth LaPensée (Anishinaabe), Kaleikulaakeliiokalani Makua (Native Hawaiian), Nicole Neidhardt (Diné), Wendy Red Star (Crow), Ryan Singer (Diné), Jeffrey Veregge (S’Klallam), Rory Wakemup (Bois Forte Ojibwe), and Debra Yepa-Pappan (Jemez Pueblo/Korean). Elisa Harkins (Cherokee) and the music collective A Tribe Called Red explore the future of traditional beats in their electronic compositions and videos. In her piece Listener (2018), performance artist Kite (Oglala Lakota) approaches coming time through technology and Lakota epistemologies.

The attempt to draw up an incomplete list of Indigenous Futurisms reveals the gradual formation of a heterogeneous canon across the past three decades, including, in its earlier formative stages, Gerald Vizenor’s (Anishinaabe) petromodern dystopia Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1978, 1990), Misha’s (Métis) cyberpunk novel Red Spider, White Web (1990), Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s (Coast Salish/Okanagan) immersive VR Inherent Rights, Vision Rights (1992), and the Indigenous pop-cultural art of the 1990s. Among the latter are Ron Noganosh’s (Anishinaabe) and Shelley Niro’s (Kanien’kehá:ka) Star Trek-themed works, such as Noganosh’s sculpture Will the Turtle be Unbroken? (1990) and Niro’s photograph series Final Frontier (1992). Indigenous works that speak about the future have been receiving increasing attention and public acknowledgment: Rebecca Roanhorse’s (Ohkay Owingeh) “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™” (2017) received both the Nebula and Hugo Awards in the category Best Short Story of the Year. Other written works include Sherman Alexie’s (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene) Flight (2007), Cherie Dimaline’s (Métis) The Marrow Thieves (2017), Blake Hausman’s (Cherokee) Riding the Trail of Tears (2011), Brian K. Hudson’s (Cherokee) “Digital Medicine” (2016), Stephen Graham Jones’s The Fast Red Road, a Plainsong (2000), Roanhorse’s Sixth World series (since 2018) and Race to the Sun (2020), Eden Robinson’s (Haisla/Heiltsuk) “Terminal Avenue” (2004), Drew Hayden Taylor’s (Anishinaabe) Toronto at Dreamer’s Rock (1990) and Take Us to Your Chief (2016), and Joshua Whitehead’s (Oji-Cree) full-metal indigiqueer (2017).¹ Most of these works portray near or far futures, and many draw on the well-known visual and narrative themes and tropes of science fiction (sf). Most importantly, like Little Badger’s “Né łe!,” all of them foreground the future as a theme: the question of how the hypothetical scenarios of coming times relate to Indigenous people’s existence in a colonial past and present looms large over computer-simulated landscapes, post-apocalyptic rubble, space frontiers, and the hive-like structures of cyberpunk cities.

Not surprisingly, then, Indigenous Futurisms convey a sense of conflict that runs deeper than the plot level. Beyond impending intergalactic crises, the rivalry of post-apocalyptic societies, and the imminent danger of environmental catastrophe, these works deal with conflicting narratives. As my reading of “Né łe!” demonstrates, Indigenous Futurisms perform acts of re-imagining that can only be understood if the stories commonly told about what lies ahead are considered to have been warped and be in dire need of repairing. New media artist and scholar Jason Edward Lewis (Cherokee/Native Hawaiian/Samoan) has introduced the term “future imaginary” (“Brief” 37) to describe the common ideas a culture or society holds about its future, and he registers an absence of Indigenous people that is ingrained in the logic of North American discourses:

The paucity of lndigenous people in the future imaginary is troubling. The future imaginary influences how a culture thinks about its future. The settler culture’s future rarely includes Indigenous people, and, when it does, it involves a lazy extrapolation of the imaginary Indian – an individual from a culture frozen in time three hundred years ago and whose main redeeming qualities are to provide a shorthand for the primitive, the natural, and the lost. If Indigenous people are not present in the future, one wonders why the settler culture need concern itself with what happens to us now. We will, after all, be gone soon enough.

(“Preparations” 233)

Lewis hints at mechanisms of erasure that deny Indigenous people to actively shape ideas about the future course of human history and about technological, scientific, and artistic developments. Within Western discourses, visions of the future intersect what Patrick Wolfe has termed the colonial “logic of elimination” (Wolfe, “Settler” 387): in order to justify past and present acts of suppression, the metanarratives of settler colonial cultures systematically write the colonized out of their future imaginary. Indigenous North American artists and authors reject narratives that would deny their right to signify the future, an idea that is key to the study at hand.

The starting point for this book is the assumption that Indigenous writers, artists, designers, and scholars contest the colonial erasure of Indigenous presence in their work by carving out a space in allegedly all-encompassing metanarratives to mediate their own ideas about what lies ahead. They perform acts of re-writing that draw the attention of audience and readership to the processes of colonial erasure and highlight the significance of Indigenous future imaginaries, a plural that references the co-existence of multiple networks of signification with different, and differing, ways of anticipating.

For my analyses, I decided to focus on the cultural archives of the future in Indigenous literatures and new media arts. Next to theoretical negotiations of the term future imaginary, I look at the novels of Gerald Vizenor and Stephen Graham Jones, as well as at the artwork produced by, and in collaboration with, the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace research and arts collective AbTeC and its so-called Initiative for Indigenous Futures (IIF). Since I am not an Indigenous person, this study should not and, indeed, cannot attempt a typology of Indigenous imaginaries of coming times. Mindful of non-Indigenous enunciation as “continuing usurpation of indigenous space” (Wolfe, Settler 3), I can only shed light on the anatomy of narrative processes in moments of an Indigenous-authored disrupting and re-forging of connections, of over-writing, dis-simulating, remediating, and juxtaposing.

Central to my inquiry is the understanding within Indigenous, postcolonial, and transnational American studies that representation is premised on discursive agency. Processes of signification involve what Donna Haraway terms “access to the power to signify” (2214), which Native people have been historically denied as various scholars have documented (cf., e.g., Scott Richard Lyons’s X-Marks or Philip Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places). Control over representation within North American colonial systems not only involves literacy in English but is contingent on the speakers already inhabiting a privileged position in terms of their ethnicity, culture, and narrative traditions. The systematic removal of Indigenous people from positions of power over their representations includes a denial of the right to signify the future, which means the right to feature in narratives of times to come as well as center their own ideas about what lies ahead in Indigenous worldviews. Ideological formations, from Manifest Destiny to Social Darwinism, and notions of alleged “vanishment” (Gidley 280), primitivity, and the general “belatedness” (Bhabha, Location 340) of the colonized exclude the idea of Indigenous people in the future. The “cultural genocide” (TRC 1) practiced in Canadian residential schools and U.S. American Indian boarding schools as well as eugenics programs, the Sixties Scoop, and “Millennium Scoop” (Beaucage qtd. in Hunt), and similar “genocidal moments” (Moses qtd. in Wolfe, “Settler” 403) have been targeting Indigenous future imaginaries through the systematic erosion of Indigenous families, communal structures, languages, and storytelling practices.² The aggressive assimilationist politics in Canada and the U.S., as well as the more passive acceptance of the disappearance of Indigenous people as “a tenet of natural law, which favored the strong and eliminated the weak” (King, Inconvenient 60) ensured that they would not feature in North America’s imaginings of coming times. As AbTeC’s Jason Lewis concludes, “the systems and structures that are being used to construct this future are being made for, or really … in spite of, us instead of with us” (“Future”). Little Badger’s protagonist Dottie Kin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: “Turning our backs on Mars” – futures seen through the window of an Indigenous starship
• 2 Futureanalysis: Toward a critical paradigm
• 3 Apocryphal futures: Indigenous and other archives
• PART I (Un)Writing the futureTextual imaginaries
• PART II (Dis)Simulating the futureImaginaries in cyberspace
• Index