The Temporal Imagination of Indigenous Futurisms

Mathias Nilges

College Literature, Volume 50, Number 2-3, Spring-Summer 2023, pp.

432-456 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2023.a902225

For additional information about this article

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THE TEMPORAL IMAGINATION OF
INDIGENOUS FUTURISMS

MATHIAS NILGES

“So much of mainstream science-fiction and fantasy reads like

colonial fantasy, conquering planets, hostile natives, the individual
against the harsh terrain of a distant world,” Rebecca Roanhorse
notes during her remarks as chair of a roundtable on Indigenous
Futurisms published in Strange Horizons (Roanhorse et al. 2017).1
Likewise, David M. Higgins points out that there are a range of
works of criticism, including John Rieder’s 2008 book Colonialism
and the Emergence of Science Fiction, which illustrate that “sf as a recog-
nizable genre emerges from colonial contexts and has always been
historically implicated within the production of imperial imagin-
ings.” In recent years, however, it may seem as though contempo-
rary sf may be charting a different course, leaving behind, at least in
some regards, its historic reliance on colonial fantasies and imperial
imaginings. In fact, as Higgins shows in detail throughout his work,
“contemporary science fiction displays a remarkable fetish for heroic
decolonization narratives” (2016, 51). At first blush, this may seem to
be good news, both for those suffering from the history and contin-
ued presence of colonial domination and for the development of sf
as a cultural genre that has significant impact and influence on the
societies out of which it emerges and that it in turn helps shape.
And yet, the news turns out to be rather grim, for the concept of

COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 50.2–3 Spring–Summer 2023

Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286
© Johns Hopkins University Press and West Chester University 2023
 Mathias Nilges | Essays 433

decolonization itself, in a particularly cynical though ultimately

unsurprising way, has been colonized by white, mainstream culture.
“Mainstream sf narratives have often appropriated the emancipa-
tory momentum of decolonization in order to empower privileged
subjectivities,” Higgins explains, further noting that “science fiction
very often portrays privileged subjects as colonized subalterns” while
“white figures usurp the positions of colored bodies within oppres-
sive regimes of colonial control” (52). But if this is so, if the concept
of decolonization has been woven ever more deeply into the fabric
of contemporary mainstream sf, then what does this mean for our
understanding of the relationship between mainstream sf and Indig-
enous Futurisms? “Indigenous Futurisms,” Roanhorse explains, is “a
term coined by Grace Dillon, who was inspired by the Afrofutur-
isms movement, and encourages Indigenous authors and creators to
speak back to the colonialism tropes so prevalent in science fiction.”
According to Dillon, Indigenous Futurisms do so by “reimagining
space exploration from an non-colonial perspective and reclaiming
our place in an imagined future in space, on earth, and everywhere in
between” (quoted in Roanhorse et al. 2017). In fact, for Dillon, Indig-
enous Futurisms importantly put central aspects of sf to work to
“envision Native futures, Indigenous hopes, and dreams recovered by
rethinking the past in a new framework” (2012, 2). But if the very act
of speaking back against colonial tropes has itself become an aspect
of mainstream sf that cynically distorts the force and significance of
the concept of decolonization while simultaneously serving as a way
to avoid engaging with sf ’s own historical connection to colonialism,
then how may we answer the crucial question that, as Roanhorse
insists, artists and scholars must continue to ask themselves and
answer in new ways: “what makes [Indigenous Futurisms] different
from more mainstream science fiction?” (Roanhorse et al. 2017, 2).
This essay seeks to make a contribution to what must necessarily
be a series of engagements with and answers to this question that
together help us understand not just what Indigenous Futurisms are
but also what they do. It is the latter relation to which I accord par-
ticular significance in what follows. Examining the temporality of
Indigenous Futurisms, for instance, both on an epistemological and
on a formal level, allows us not only to draw one important distinc-
tion between Indigenous Futurisms and what we may understand
as settler futurism, but to also catch one glimpse of the striking
artistic, political, and social possibility of Indigenous Futurisms in
our time. Johnnie Jae—writer, journalist, and founder of A Tribe
434 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 50.2–3 Spring–Summer 2023

Called Geek and self-described “Indigenerd”—argues that Indige-

nous Futurisms are all about imagining possibility but in ways that
she understands as breaking with the history of mainstream science
fiction. Indigenous Futurisms, Jae stresses, imagine “worlds where
the advancement of technology doesn’t disrupt or destroy ecosys-
tems or the balance of power between humans and nature.” And
“even in stories where we are exploring alien worlds,” she adds, “we
think about how we can co-exist with the life forms indigenous to
that world. We think about the ways our cultures, languages, and
everything that makes us who we are can be preserved and how they
can evolve in these new worlds” (Roanhorse et al. 2017, 2). In what
follows, I show that one way to understand this notion of “evolving”
and the particular kind of possibility that Indigenous Futurisms
formulate, along with their particular cultural and political force,
emerges from Indigenous Futurisms’ commitment to decoloniz-
ing the temporal imagination. And yet, to suggest that Indigenous
Futurisms are in part aimed at the decolonization of our temporal
imagination is not to simply suggest that they are about decoloni-
zation and about imagining the future. Things are far more com-
plicated than this—in part because we must take into account the
wave of white romances of decolonization (think James Cameron’s
Avatar) that characterize contemporary mainstream sf. Rather,
one of the most significant aspects of Indigenous Futurisms may
be found in the particular ways in which their speculative workings
and formulation of possibility and indeed hope are bound up with
the radical refusal of the standardized, normative, and linear tem-
porality of colonial domination and capitalist expansion as the only
way to tell time and to know ourselves in this world.
Of course, this is not to disparage or discount the importance
of “simply” imagining a future in Indigenous Futurisms. There is,
really, nothing simple about it. After all, doing so is an important
step in its own right and a significant refusal of the limits that colo-
nial conceptions of time and development impose upon the imagi-
nation of cultures that have historically been denied any notion of
the future other than that of colonial domination. As Darcie Little
Badger, a Lipan Apache writer and scientist, stresses:
imagining a future, period, is a great start. Please, please, please give
me stories that acknowledge we survived the 1800s. I’ve had my fill
of Apaches in Westerns and historical fantasies, which is saying a
lot, since Native American characters, even secondary ones, are so
 Mathias Nilges | Essays 435

rare. Both in and outside fiction, we are pushed to the past tense.
The reality is, many Indigenous cultures in North America survived
an apocalypse. The key word is survived. Any future with us in it,
triumphant and flourishing, is a hopeful one. (quoted in Roanhorse
et al. 2017, 2)
Dillon, too, foregrounds the importance of such an understanding
of the crucial role of the concept of the apocalypse for Indigenous
Futurisms—and also traces in it the same kind of decolonized hope
that Little Badger associates with it:
As Indigenous peoples, we’ve already experienced forms of geno-
cide, including biowarfare, with blankets being contaminated with
smallpox and then handed out as a way to decimate our people. You
can connect this with Vizenor’s notion of survivance—telling sto-
ries to overcome the lived experience of tragedy, dominance, and
victimhood. The important thing is not to be subsumed by those
experiences . . . To me, that is the hope that underlines the reality
of Native apocalypse: you lived through it, so you may know how
to pull together as an Indigenous community through any kind of
crisis. (Dillon and Marques 2021)
It is, thus, important to appreciate the complex work that Indige-
nous Futurisms do in addition to and beyond imagining different
futures, for doing so provides us with one concrete example of what
decolonization may mean in the context of Indigenous Futurisms:
to break the spell and to reject the naturalizing and essentializing
force of the colonial temporal imagination, to remove those limits
that colonialism imposes upon the ability to narrate and thus to
make meaning of the world. In Indigenous Futurisms, temporality
and narrative intersect as crucial aspects of knowing the world and
imagining possibility beyond that which exists. And the latter is not
just a matter of imagining a different future but of imagining the
very act of telling time differently: as a radically divergent way of
conceiving of the world and of refusing the ways in which coloni-
zation, racialization, and mechanisms of othering rely upon and are
perpetuated by a standardized temporal imagination and constrict-
ing idea of futurity.
Dillon associates the beginning of Indigenous Futurisms with
the publication of Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart (1990) and The Heirs
of Columbus (1991). For Dillon, Vizenor’s work may be regarded as
“the lodestar for many theoretical ships,” and “the circle he created
remains open and ever-widening,” encouraging other artists to add
436 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 50.2–3 Spring–Summer 2023

to the growing archive of Indigenous Futurisms (2016, 6). Of course,

Dillon’s own 2012 book Walking the Clouds, the first anthology of
Indigenous science fiction, has significantly furthered the advance
of Indigenous Futurisms. “Walking the Clouds challenged critics and
artists alike to recognize the qualities lauded in contemporary exper-
imental sf as core elements of ancient Indigenous epistemologies,”
Dillon remarks on the success of her work, adding that her book also
“asked critics to recognize the Indigenous origins of sf tropes, and it
asked Indigenous artists to write more sf” (1). Joyously, she observes,
that call has been answered by an impressive array of new publica-
tions, reprints, conference and journal CFPs, fresh sf stories that
renew venerable traditions, old stories retold anew, short films and
media explosions ranging from comic books, video games, board
games, and graphic arts to music and new media conjurations. (Dil-
lon 2016, 1)
And while it may seem like Indigenous Futurisms do not have par-
ticularly long history, Dillon stresses that “Indigenous sf is not so
new—just overlooked, although largely accompanied by an emerging
movement” (Dillon 2012, 2). Thanks to the work of academics like
Dillon and a growing number of exciting, radical Indigenous artists
and writers, Indigenous Futurisms have gained notable momentum
in recent years. Still, as Roanhorse notes, while there is much to cel-
ebrate, Indigenous Futurisms continue to face a variety of obstacles,
not least those that limit their dissemination and impact. “At the . . .
2016 New York Comic Con there were a record number of panels
with diverse speakers and subjects,” Roanhorse points out, “but out
of the hundreds of speakers, not a single Native or First Nations
panelist” (Roanhorse et al. 2017). Faced with continued mechanisms
of exclusion from mainstream culture, mechanisms that maintain
those stereotypes that associate Indigenous culture and identity
more readily with the past than with the future, Indigenous artists
have been working to create their own channels of distribution. In
November of the same year, Roanhorse recalls, “Indigenous Comic
Con was held with two full days of programming about Indigenous
SFF with all-Native and First Nations panelists.” Such events, she
concludes, go a long way in increasing Indigenous Futurisms’ visibil-
ity. After all, she adds, “it’s not like we aren’t here, creating” (Roan-
horse et al. 2017).
Scholars like William Lempert stress the significance of science
fiction for the project of decolonization more widely conceived.
 Mathias Nilges | Essays 437

“With a proclivity for critiquing the present state of affairs as well

as reimagining futures,” Lempert writes, “science fiction is uniquely
positioned to seriously engage” what he describes, following Sandy
Grande, as “red pedagogy,” a form of transformative education of a
settler-colonial society that works through “counterdiscourse” and
“counterpraxis.” In his discussion of Indigenous Futurisms, Lem-
pert foregrounds the importance of imagining the future in Indig-
enous culture. “While sci-fi is clearly not a panacea for addressing
contemporary challenges,” he writes, “if we cannot look toward the
future to imagine new possibilities and solutions for a history . . .
marred with fear, violence, institutional discrimination, and deep-
seated ambivalence, then where else?” (2014, 165). And while this
is no doubt in one sense true and necessary to point out, it is also
important, as Dillon and Little Badger indicate, to highlight the
ability of Indigenous Futurisms to reimagine settler-colonial tem-
porality and of historicity to highlight the complicity between the
dominant temporal imagination and the colonizing imaginary that
strategically restricts and represses competing notions of temporal-
ity, thereby limiting alternative conceptions of futurity and of being
in time. As Alexandra Alter (2020) observes in an article published
in The New York Times, for instance,
As more Indigenous authors break into the genres, there has been
an explosion of novels, comics, graphic novels and short stories from
writers blending sci-fi and fantasy with Native narratives, writing
everything from ‘slipstream’ alternate realities to supernatural hor-
ror to post-apocalyptic stories about environmental collapse. [ . . . ]
Some authors say that sci-fi and fantasy settings allow them to reim-
agine the Native experience in ways that wouldn’t be possible in
realistic fiction. Writing futuristic narratives and building fantasy
worlds provide a measure of freedom to tell stories that feel experi-
mental and innovative, and aren’t weighted down by the legacies of
genocide and colonialism. (Alter 2020)

The turn to genre fiction in Indigenous literature (and indeed in

Indigenous art and culture more widely, as we shall see) that is part of
a larger project of anti-colonial resistance that refuses those forms of
culture and imagination that continue to limit possibilities to speak
to the history and continued experience of settler-colonial oppres-
sion and domination also involves reimagining established concep-
tions of futurity and temporality along with the logic of ubiquitous
genres of mainstream culture to which established conceptions of
438 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 50.2–3 Spring–Summer 2023

time are connected and via which they continue to be normalized

and standardized. One example here is the recent boom in (post)
apocalyptic narratives, a genre that, as we have already begun to
see, is worked out in particularly striking, new ways in contempo-
rary Indigenous culture. After all, as Roanhorse reminds us, echo-
ing both Dillon and Little Badger, for Indigenous peoples the idea
of the apocalypse is grounded in historical reality and not fictional
narratives, since Indigenous peoples have already “survived an
apocalypse.”
A particularly notable contribution to the necessary work to lay
bare the historical and sociopolitical problems bound up with main-
stream culture’s apocalyptic imagination is the “Indigenous Anti-­
Futurist Manifesto” released by members of Indigenous Action.
This manifesto highlights the fundamentally settler-colonial forms
of imagination and temporality that constrain established ways of
conceiving of futurity and, in this way, possibilities for political and
social change, for imagining our relation to each other and to our
planet that the apocalyptic imagination contains. Pointing toward
the limits of the by now well-worn and all too often clichéd notion
that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than that of capi-
talism, a suggestion that has been widely discussed over the course
of the past two decades and that is often centrally associated with
the crisis of futurity that we have been encountering everywhere
in culture and theoretical thought of late, the manifesto’s authors
instead ask: “Why can we imagine the ending of the world, yet not
the ending of colonialism?” “We live the future of a past that is not
our own,” the manifesto’s authors stress, one that “is a history of uto-
pian fantasies and apocalyptic idealization. It is a pathogenic global
social order of imagined futures, built upon genocide, enslavement,
ecocide, and total ruination.” Laying bare the limits of the mille-
narianism and apocalyptic imaginary and indeed desiring structures
that they locate at the heart of contemporary culture, the authors
ask: “What conclusions are to be realized in a world constructed
of bones and empty metaphors? A world of fetishized endings cal-
culated amidst the collective fiction of virulent specters. From reli-
gious tomes to fictionalized scientific entertainment, each imagined
timeline constructed so predictably; beginning, middle, and ulti-
mately, The End” (admin 2020).
In addition to the repressive temporal linearity of this imag-
ination that continues to defend the timeline of European settler
colonialism as the dominant temporal imaginary whose crises are
 Mathias Nilges | Essays 439

represented as tantamount to an apocalyptic ending, it is crucial,

the manifesto stresses, to foreground the generic patterns of the
apocalyptic imagination and the politics and “solutions” that they
imply. For “inevitably in this narrative there’s a protagonist fighting
an Enemy Other . . . and so many are eagerly ready to be the lone
survivors of the ‘zombie apocalypse.’” “But these are interchange-
able metaphors,” the authors argue, since “this zombie/Other, this
apocalypse, these empty metaphors, this linearity, only exist within
the language of nightmares, they are at once part of the apocalyptic
imagination and impulse” (admin 2020). “This way of ‘living,’ or ‘cul-
ture,’” and the forms of imagination and temporality on which it is
founded, they write,

is one of domination that consumes all for its own benefit. It is an

economic and political reordering to fit a reality resting on pillars of
competition, ownership, and control in pursuit of profit and perma-
nent exploitation. It professes “freedom” yet its foundation is set on
lands stolen while its very structure is built by stolen lives. It is this
very “culture” that must always have an Enemy Other, to lay blame,
to lay claim, to affront, enslave and murder. . . . It is the Other who
is sacrificed for an immortal and cancerous continuity. (admin 2020)

The apocalypse, they conclude, “colonizes our imaginations and

destroys our past and future simultaneously.” To the authors of the
manifesto, the linear temporality of the apocalyptic imagination is
the expression of fears that are in turn connected to the desire to
defend and maintain the world that is, the world that settler coloni-
alism has made, while shoring up defenses against worlds that could
be, that were, and that were never allowed to come into being. But
Indigenous artists know all too well that, as the manifesto stresses,
“many worlds have gone before this one” and that the apocalyptic
imagination as it exists in mainstream culture arises from the limi-
tation imposed upon our cultural and temporal imagination by the
history of colonialism, by an imagination that is unable to conceive
of concepts like the apocalypse in ways other than those inherited
from European tradition. Indigenous “traditional histories,” how-
ever, the authors of the manifesto stress, “are tightly woven with
the fabric of the birthing and ending of worlds. Through these
cataclysms we have gained many lessons that have shaped who we
are and how we are to be with one another. Our ways of being are
informed through finding harmony through and from the destruc-
tion of worlds. The Elliptic. Birth. Death. Rebirth” (admin 2020).
440 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 50.2–3 Spring–Summer 2023

We see examples of such conceptions of both genre and temporal-

ity in novels like Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning. Set in a postapocalyp-
tic United States, Trail of Lightning is a horror novel that tells the story
of Maggie Hoskie, whose efforts to protect her Diné community
from monsters that threaten her community and that abduct and kill
women and children contains a passionate, fiery, and psychologically
dexterous engagement with the epidemic of Missing and Murdered
Indigenous Women and Children as well as with contemporary top-
ics like pipeline capitalism and the energy wars waged on Indige-
nous lands. Roanhorse’s story is set in a postapocalyptic Dinétah,
surrounded by and defending itself from the remnants of US society,
which fell in the aftermath of large-scale environmental collapse and
a massive flood that destroyed much of the US (the Big Water), which
was followed by massive social unrest and violent conflicts like “The
Slaughter on the Plains” that “ushered in a heyday of energy grabs, the
oil companies ripping up sacred grounds for their pipelines, the natu-
ral gas companies buying up fee land for fracking . . . literally shaking
the bedrock with their greed” (2018, 22). But, Maggie notes about the
conditions of her present existence, “the Diné had already suffered
their apocalypse”—“This wasn’t our end. This was rebirth” (23). The
fall of the Fifth World and the rise of the Sixth World that structures
the series of novels that begins with Trail of Lightning is represented as
a matter of possibility and renewal (101), and the novel refuses naïve
returns to the postapocalyptic genre. After all, as Maggie puts it in
Storm of Locusts, book two in Roanhorse’s The Sixth World series: “Isn’t
the apocalypse a little ‘been there, done that’?” (2019, 11). Such shifts
of the temporal imagination are intended to allow us to make think-
able possible alternatives to our present and chart paths that lead us
beyond the linearity to which established forms of settler-colonial
thought and the genres that maintain it confine us. Similarly, Dillon
emphasizes the importance of Indigenous Futurisms’ specific tem-
poral imagination, its departure from the temporality of much main-
stream sf, and the crucial work for decolonization that this temporal
imagination carries out. “Everything that’s in the past and the future
is also in the now, but it’s not as simplistic as that,” Dillon explains.
“It’s more like there exists a spiral of intergenerational connections,
so that even if you are in the present you have spirit persons at your
side” she elaborates, adding that
this is very different from the former science fiction model, what
was called “extrapolative fiction.” This word came directly from
 Mathias Nilges | Essays 441

Robert A. Heinlein, who took the idea from mathematical equa-

tions, where you pull something out of the past or the present and
draw this imagined plausible future from one dot to another. This is
an extremely linear concept, too simplistic to allow other forms of
thinking. (Dillon and Marques 2021)

Such complex, nonlinear conceptions of time enable us to reckon

with the self-understanding foregrounded by the authors of the
manifesto and the possibilities that this makes possible. “We are the
dreamers dreamt by our ancestors,” they write; “we have traversed
all time between the breaths of our dreams. We exist at once with
our ancestors and unbirthed generations. Our future is held in our
hands.” But this future is temporally far more complex, as it also
asks us to conceive of the relation between past and future not in
simple linear ways but as an ongoing process of interaction that
restores our attention to the worlds and paths that were abandoned,
that were blocked, that were never charted and yet may inform our
future direction. “It is in the creases of our memories, folded gently
by our ancestors” and in “our collective Dreamtime” that the mani-
festo’s authors locate power and hope, and this notion of temporality
“is Now. Then. Tomorrow. Yesterday.” This conception of temporal-
ity and the development of cultural narratives and genres through
which it may circulate also furnishes us with a new conception of the
anti-colonial imagination, one that, as the manifesto’s authors fore-
ground, “isn’t a subjective reaction to colonial futurisms” but “it is
anti-settler future.” After all, they conclude, “our life cycles are not
linear, our future exists without time. It is a dream, uncolonized”
(admin 2020).

SPECULATION AND FUTURITY BEYOND FUTURISM

Imagining time otherwise, as an act of anti-colonial and postcolo-

nial imagination, is not just a series of cultural attempts to imagine
the future. It is a way of critiquing mainstream ideas of the future—
and these critiques and the speculative mechanisms of Indige-
nous Futurisms via which these critiques operate are not limited
to portrayals of the future. Dillon foregrounds that “Indigenous
Futurisms are not the product of a victimized people’s wishful ame-
lioration of their past, but instead a continuation of a spiritual and
cultural path that remains unbroken by genocide and war.” (2016, 2).
And yet, Dillon stresses, “despite the promise of an unending dance
442 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 50.2–3 Spring–Summer 2023

that carries Native presence forward, it would be an unfortunate

irony to lose care for social justice now by relegating Indigenous
Futurisms exclusively to the future.”(3). There is an important dif-
ference, in other words, between working toward an imagination
that allows for the formulation of a sense of futurity on one hand
and producing stories that imagine the future on the other. Futurity
can here be understood as a category that is aimed at overcoming
the limitations of the existing, and this may happen in a range of
ways, importantly including ways that are directly opposed to the
futuristic imagination of mainstream sf and that refuse the idea of
the future received from the history of colonialism and imperialist
expansion. The futurity of Indigenous Futurisms, in other words, is
not limited to the future.
On June 2, 2019, CBC Radio dedicated an entire episode of its
program “Unreserved” to a celebration of Indigenous cinema (Deer-
child 2019). Of particular significance in this celebration of “50
Years of Indigenous Cinema” is the impact of the work of Abe-
naki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin, one of the most accomplished
documentarians in Canada and one of the most lauded Indigenous
filmmakers in the world. During the show, a range of guests reflect
on the importance of Obomsawin’s work. In a memorable moment
early in the show, Jesse Wente, broadcaster, cultural critic, and first
director of Canada’s Indigenous Screen Office, recalls a particular
experience that to him captures the profound significance of Obom-
sawin’s documentaries in particular. Wente remembers a formative
moment in his childhood: watching one of Obomsawin’s films, Inci-
dent at Restigouche (1984). What struck him in particular, he notes in
his opening remarks, was that the film provided him with an entirely
new, deeply significant experience: he saw for the first time someone
on screen who looked like his grandmother—and, he stresses, this
woman on the screen was talking! Having grown up watching mov-
ies like Star Wars, Wente argues, Obomsawin’s film provided him
with something that the wave of mainstream science fiction films
could not. Being able to see for the first time an Indigenous woman
outside of the Western who had a speaking role provided him not
only with the sense that the industry could truly be different in the
future but that society, too, might change. The force of the experi-
ence and its speculative core and source of futurity thus, for Wente,
emerge not out of a portrayal of a distant, radically different future
but out of a recognition of similarity and kinship. He was able to see
someone who looks and speaks like his grandmother, like him. At
 Mathias Nilges | Essays 443

the same time, inclusions of and the attempt to feature Indigenous

characters or actors in mainstream culture often continues to func-
tion as a mechanism to maintain repressive, uneven temporal devel-
opment that persistently structures our imagination and ultimately
lived reality. Little Badger wanted to write about “young Indigenous
characters in an alternative, magic-filled, contemporary America
because so much fiction featuring Native characters is historical and
feels outdated” (Alter 2020). After all, she elaborates, “a lot of times
when there’s an Apache main character, it takes place in the 1800s.”
The effect is that “it almost feels like in fiction, people think we
didn’t survive, but we did, and we’re still flourishing” (Little Badger,
quoted in Alter 2020).
Indigenous futurity does not only emerge out of a confrontation
with space or the future or the alien other as it does in much main-
stream sf.2 Likewise, Indigenous Futurisms’ futurity is not necessar-
ily a matter of “cognitive estrangement,” of mechanisms that force
the viewer or reader to reexamine the present through strange eyes,
as it is by now canonically associated with Western sf. Instead, it
emerges, for instance, through the confrontation with the all too
familiar, with well-known mechanisms of exclusions and limits that
are imposed upon possibility, and from the possibilities for gradual
transcendence that are opened up in the present. There exists a sig-
nificant tension between realism and speculation that forms an inte-
gral part of Indigenous Futurisms, a tension that illustrates that the
critical categories and the temporal concepts that we associate with
mainstream sf, crucially including the future, futurity, and progress,
do not readily map onto the ontology and function of Indigenous
Futurisms. The ability of Indigenous Futurisms to wrest possibil-
ity from what exists lies as much in what may be (the future) as it
lies in what never was, in what was silenced and repressed, in what
was excluded and foreshortened. More than simply pursuing linear
notions of progress and locating futurity simply in the future, Indig-
enous Futurisms may be more fully understood as a spectrum of
works that seek to reestablish erased or discontinued timelines and
that are aimed at the realization of past possibility that lies dormant
in the present as a different kind of futurity that can be wrested
from the grip of the colonial imagination. The complex temporality
of Indigenous Futurisms models for us ways to transcend the logic
of temporality of mainstream sf that often remains connected to the
histories and temporal imaginary of colonization. Lempert argues
that “imagining cultural and political futures” might be categorized
444 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 50.2–3 Spring–Summer 2023

as “utopian Native sci-fi” (2014, 167). And while this is no doubt cor-
rect and indeed profoundly important, it is also significant to fore-
ground that Indigenous Futurisms take a variety of forms that are
together aimed at emancipation from Western notions of tempo-
rality, progress, and futurity. In this sense, Indigenous Futurisms
may also be understood as forms of temporal and thus cultural and
epistemological decolonization.
For critical engagements with the field, this means that detailed
examinations of Indigenous Futurisms’ temporal imagination must
supplement well-established attention to matters of space, place,
and territory. Dillon seeks to flag this important interconnection by
assigning the term “Native slipstream” a central role in critical dis-
cussions of Indigenous Futurisms. Dillon explains that “‘Native slip-
stream’ came from the fact that there were several ways of thinking
and writing about space-time—not as separate subjects, like ‘now
let’s talk about space’ and ‘now let’s talk about time,’ but rather as
space and time flowing together, like currents in the same naviga-
ble stream.” Additionally, Dillon stresses that she chose the term
“in honor of those much more ancient forms of thinking” and also
“in honor of writers like Anishinaabe Gerald Vizenor and Chero-
kee Diane Glancy” who “were writing way back before computers,
and were among a bunch of artists and authors who couldn’t get
published by mainstream presses because their ideas just seemed so
strange and unusual.” To address this problem, Vizenor and Glancy
created “an exchange of self-publishing called Slipstream Press, bor-
rowing the aeronautical term “slipstream” and then opening it up to
experimental forms of writing”—and, Dillon importantly stresses,
“this was way before Bruce Sterling is said to have coined the term
in the science fiction field” (Dillon and Marques 2021). Scholars like
David Gaertner, Karyn Recollet, and Elizabeth LaPensée have done
important work in this regard, curating material that explores the
spatial and territorial aspect of Indigenous Futurisms.3 David Gaert-
ner’s work in particular explores how the longstanding interest in
matters of land, space, and place in Indigenous literature relate to
the category of cyberspace. We may add to this list of important crit-
ical and creative engagements with Indigenous Futurisms and space
essays like Lou Cornum’s “The Space NDN’s Star Map” (2015) and
Jason Lewis and Skawennati Tricia Fragnito’s “Aboriginal Territories
in Cyberspace” (2010). To date, however, the wide-ranging attention
to this aspect of Indigenous Futurisms has not been matched by
critical examinations of problems of time and temporality. We are
 Mathias Nilges | Essays 445

beginning to see the emergence of notable work, however, such as

Lindsay Catherine Cornum’s discussion of “decolonial deep space”
in which they stress that, along with space, time is a key interest for
Indigenous Futurisms and provides us with a specific understanding
of temporality: “Indigenous Futurism seeks out, understands, and
dwells in non-linear time.” It is, by extension, a particular reimag-
ining of the present that stands at the center of Indigenous Futur-
isms’ temporality: “the past is always-already in the present, as is the
future.” One of the main sites of struggle for Indigenous Futurisms,
Cornum argues, is that of “Indigenous artists, authors, and think-
ers” who seek to “represent these complex, bundled times in a world
dominated by a linear, forward-plodding timeline” (Cornum, n.d.).
I show elsewhere in great detail that the history of colonialism
and capitalist expansion requires and is directly bound up with tem-
poral standardization, with the narrowing of conceptions of tempo-
rality to homogenized, linear time, and with the effort to overwrite
and erase competing, plural forms of temporality, which is to say
with the attempt to erase alternative conceptions of presence and
of being in time (Nilges 2019, 2021). Time is one of the most funda-
mental narratives through which we understand and navigate our
way through our world. Specific conceptions of time afford us par-
ticular ways of making meaning of and shaping the material world.
Far from neutral or timeless, time itself has a history, for specific
ideas of time emerge in relation to and serve to aid the rise of spe-
cific material and sociopolitical structures. Colonization, imperi-
alism, and the rise of capitalism, for instance, are directly bound
up with and rely upon the standardization of a homogenized, uni-
fied, linear form of time, which in turn results in the radical and
repressive narrowing of thought, consciousness, and of possibility.
Furthermore, as I illustrate in a different place in some length, the
idea of contemporaneity is one of the most fundamental markers of
social belonging. Together, the idea of contemporaneity, of being
together in time, and of non-contemporaneity function as crucial
brokers of power and privilege in modern conceptions of sociability,
regulating group membership on the level of our temporal imagi-
nation (Nilges 2021). Just as racialization must be understood as a
process that centrally involves temporalization, colonization must
be understood as a temporal project as much as a territorial one.
Colonization relies centrally on the unification and standardization
of ways of telling and of being in time and of ways of understand-
ing presence. Coding populations as past and noncontemporary
446 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 50.2–3 Spring–Summer 2023

or nonsynchronous functions as one of the basic denials of pres-

ence and futurity that are bound up with and maintain the cultural
mediation of our temporal imagination. Limiting our temporal
imagination and our conception of futurity to the standardized
temporal episteme of Western capitalism and colonial power is
part and parcel of the history of colonial domination. As Lindsay
Catherine Cornum (n.d.) senses as well, the logic of colonialism is
thus not just bound up with matters of space and territory but also
with strategies that regulate and limit our temporal imagination. It
matters greatly for our understanding of the important work that
Indigenous Futurisms do, therefore, that critical examinations
of the problems of space, land, and territory are accompanied by
examinations of what we may describe as Indigenous Futurisms’
attempts at temporal deterritorialization. In other words, Indige-
nous Futurisms explore the dialectical relation between spatial and
geographic and temporal domination. Their effort to decolonize
our temporal imagination may thus be understood as a matter of
the connection of the spatial struggle of deterritorialization to the
plane of our temporal imagination. In this sense, through their
refusal of colonial temporality and reinterpretation and widening
of the standard tropes and forms of mainstream sf, Indigenous
Futurisms offer us new cartographies of temporal thought through
the creation of new genres of the imagination.
The term Indigenous Futurisms is therefore highly complex and
denotes a different kind of futurity than the one we ordinarily asso-
ciate with mainstream sf. Indigenous Futurisms’ futurity is a com-
plex, political, and utopian temporality that refuses the linear forms
of time that underwrite much Western sf along with the colonial
imaginary. In this context, it is important to foreground the impor-
tance of novels like Tracey Lindberg’s Birdie (2015), novels that we
may not readily associate with Indigenous Futurisms but that strik-
ingly highlight the ways in which Indigenous art develops forms of
futurity and speculation through the formal tension between cate-
gories like realism, historical fiction, and speculative fiction. This
formal tension in turn registers the complex set of competing tem-
poralities between Indigenous and colonial time, temporalities that
do not readily map onto Indigenous fiction in the same way that sta-
ble, linear forms of time and progress do not readily lend themselves
to narrativizations of Indigenous history, presence, and notions of
futurity. What this indicates is the need for a broader, more capa-
cious conception of Indigenous Futurisms not limited to the future
 Mathias Nilges | Essays 447

or to the tropes that we have come to expect from mainstream sf.

Novels like Birdie fray the distinction between realism and specula-
tion as it is ordinarily conceived and thereby illustrate the relation
between linear settler-colonial temporality and the erasure of plu-
ral, alternative ways of conceiving of time and temporality. The ease
with which mainstream commentators dismissed the complex form
of temporality that marks Birdie’s narrative structure as simply tedi-
ous and uncomfortable, and the historical carelessness and political
callousness via which colonial conceptions of normalized temporal-
ity are maintained by journalists and readers, forcefully illustrates
the significance and importance of Indigenous art that lays bare
the ongoing colonization of our temporal imagination. Indeed, the
reception of novels like Birdie illustrates the need for Indigenous
Futurisms’ temporal critique of the common, far-from-subtle trans-
position of overtly racist language and imagination onto the plane
of temporality where distinctions between a settler-colonial normal
and the Indigenous Other retain a striking presence.4
We get a particularly forceful sense of the continued relation
between the mechanisms of colonialism’s temporal domination and
the temporal construction of the Indigenous every time mainstream
culture’s attempt to temporally code Indigenous culture fails. One
of the most cynical aspects of state-sponsored and corporate diver-
sity politics is the selectiveness with which cultural toleration oper-
ates. Countless examples illustrate that diversity efforts celebrate
only select aspects of Indigenous culture. Rather, public expressions
of support for Indigenous art and culture tend to privilege specific
kinds of art. The repressive toleration and what we may describe
as the strategic generic or formal confinement of Indigenous art to
those genres and forms that are deemed “acceptable” by settler cul-
ture became particular visible in the context of the 2010 Olympic
Games. Prior to the start of the Vancouver games, The Thunderbird
reported that the Vancouver International Airport, “home to some
of Canada’s greatest aboriginal art and a multi-million-dollar First
Nations art collection,” refused to display “controversial” art when
visitors from across the globe arrived for the 2010 Olympics (Stew-
art 2008). Rita Beiks, curator of the collection, emphasized that she
would like to avoid “confronting” travelers “with work that could be
offensive to them” (quoted in Stewart 2008). For artists like Lawrence
Paul Yuxweluptun, this meant that his work would not be displayed.
Yuxweluptun, described by The Thunderbird as an artist who “docu-
ments the harder edge of being First Nations” is renowned for “his
448 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 50.2–3 Spring–Summer 2023

cynical, anti-colonial work,” which includes “technicolor canvases”

with titles like “Urban Rez,” “Red Man Watching White Man Try-
ing to Fix Hole in Sky,” and “Portrait of a Residential School Child”
(Stewart 2008). Regarding Yuxweluptun’s art, Beiks noted that “he’s
very political,” which means that she and the airport “have to be very
careful about what he does” (quoted in Stewart 2008). Celebrations
of Indigenous culture include the work of artists only insofar as it
remains “uncontroversial” and not “dangerous,” which often means
that the artwork is only afforded a presence and thus inclusion into
the contemporary (as a way of signaling of being together in time) if
it formally and stylistically performs non-contemporaneity—thus,
it is only included into the category of the contemporary inasmuch
as it clearly signals the lack of presence that colonial logic seeks to
associate with Indigenous culture.
The latter point emerges particularly strongly when the repres-
sive and confining nature of toleration cynically yet poignantly
undercuts itself. In September 2017, CBC News reported that inuk-
shuks installed at Toronto’s Pearson airport “angers some Inuit
in Nunavut.” Installed without consulting Indigenous communi-
ties, artists, or scholars, the work, officially titled Three Inussuks, as
CBC News points out, “is not accompanied by any description of
its meaning.” Members of Indigenous communities took to social
media to express their frustration not only with the fact that the
work was installed without consultation but also with the fact that
the inukshuks were, in fact, installed incorrectly. As the CBC News
article notes, the inukshuk is an important symbol of the North
that carries a plurality of symbolic meanings that range from serv-
ing as “symbols of hope” to indicating “an area that should not be
approached or touched.” However, the inukshuks at Pearson, Piita
Irniq, Indigenous artist and a previous commissioner of Nunavut,
points out, have been installed with raised arms, which “signifies an
area where someone was killed or died by suicide.” Inukshuks with
raised arms, Irniq adds, are “very rare and designated as dangerous
places to be avoided” (quoted in CBC News 2017). Robin Smith, com-
munications adviser with the Greater Toronto Airports Authority,
expressed that “the airport was unaware people were unhappy with
the structures.” Smith also laments the failure of the installation,
given that “Toronto Pearson is like a front door to Canada for many
people” (CBC News 2017). The federal government’s unsuccessful
attempt to signal to those travelers a sense of cultural diversity and
 Mathias Nilges | Essays 449

harmony is thus undercut not just by the lack of consultation and

involvement of Indigenous peoples. More significantly, the poignant
error in the installation lays bare the ongoing repressive toleration of
Indigenous art, the inclusion of Indigenous culture only insofar as it
serves as a strategic signal of the hollow diversity politics of a nation
that maintains colonial structures of cultural marginalization, seg-
regation, and instrumentalization. And it is precisely through their
accidental meaningfulness, from the standpoint of settler colonial-
ism that wishes to veil the violence and injustice that it continues
to inflict upon Indigenous populations, that the inukshuks come to
communicate a more profound historical truth. Instead of denot-
ing the friendly sense of Canadian cultural toleration in the present
that should greet those travelers who visit Terminal 1, the incor-
rectly installed inukshuks may be said to fulfill one of the central
strategies of Indigenous Futurisms, which is to demand a different
future by strikingly symbolizing the history of violence and death
and the ongoing presence of structures of exclusion and repressive
cultural compartmentalization that continues to mark the land as a
dangerous one.

FUTURITY AS PRESENCE

Indigenous Futurisms amplify and centrally engage with the strug-

gle of Indigenous art against the compulsion to signal pastness or
romantic timelessness and the forced performance of stereotypical
non-contemporaneity of Indigenous culture and identity in order
to gain a sense of presence. Limited to a deformed version of pres-
ence that depends upon exclusion from the dominant form of being
together in time, Indigenous culture seems confined to a timeless
now, as writers like Sherman Alexie famously note. In his short story
“A Drug Called Tradition,” Alexie writes:
There are things you should learn. Your past is a skeleton walking one
step behind you, and your future is a skeleton walking one step in
front of you. Maybe you don’t wear a watch, but your skeletons do,
and they always know what time it is. Now, these skeletons are made
of memories, dreams, and voices. And they can trap you in the in-­
between, between touching and becoming. . . . What you have to do
is keep moving, keep walking, in step with your skeletons. They ain’t
ever going to leave you, so you don’t have to worry about that. . . .
But, no matter what they do, keep walking, keep moving. And don’t
450 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 50.2–3 Spring–Summer 2023

wear a watch. Hell, Indians never need to wear a watch because your
skeletons will always remind you about the time. See, it is always
now. That’s what Indian time is. The past, the future, all of it is
wrapped up in the now. That’s how it is. We are trapped in the now.
(Alexie 1994, 21–22; emphasis original)
One of the central struggles of Indigenous culture is a multiply tem-
poral one, a struggle that binds a complicated relation to cultural
traditions to the denial of futurity and presence and to the ongoing
exclusion from the contemporary as the precondition for the toler-
ation of Indigenous art through the continuation of the history of
colonial logic and temporality. The timelessness of being stuck in
the now, in a perpetual present without future that Alexie’s story
describes, is bound up with other facets of temporal domination and
exclusion and with denials of futurity. Tradition or the attempt to
revive or extend the past, Alexie’s story emphasizes, is not a simple
process that leads to futurity or that is able to transcend the limita-
tions of the now. And thus, it is crucially important to foreground
the words of Dillon and others that caution us to associate Indige-
nous futurisms simply with narratives of the future or attempt to
recover tradition.
To be sure, critics like Mark Bould stress the important points of
connection between African SF and Indigenous Futurisms that lie
in the ability to “reclaim a past erased and overwritten by European
colonialism” (2014, 10). Similarly, work like that of Andrea Hairston,
which explores Indigenous ghost stories from the standpoint of “a
futurist speculating on disappeared history,” is of the utmost impor-
tance in order to foreground the ways in which Indigenous Futur-
isms may serve to restore repressed aspects of the past to visibility
(quoted in Dillon 2016, 2). However, the process of reclaiming the
past in Indigenous Futurisms is temporally complex and not simply
a matter of carrying tradition forward into the present and future.
It is, rather, a matter of attention to that which was not allowed
to be or those timelines in the past that were erased that need to
be reclaimed as possibility, demands that were silenced, avenues
for liberation that were barred; this is what needs to be reclaimed.
Short stories like Eden Robinson’s “Terminal Avenue” forcefully
register not just the ongoing temporal crisis with which Indigenous
culture is confronted, the experience of being stuck in a perpetual
present without future determined by the time of colonial power,
but also illustrate how time and temporality may be narrated and
imagined otherwise, beyond imaginations of a different future or
 Mathias Nilges | Essays 451

the restoration of a lost past. Robinson’s short story is composed

of fragments temporally and structurally pitted against each other.
Memory clashes with anticipation, history with the future, the
past with the present. The story’s fragments are in turn narrated in
competing tenses. The future, for instance, is given to us in present
tense. In the story’s first fragment, we are presented with the image
of a rocket stopped, inescapably, at the event horizon of a black hole,
a violent image of timelessness that stretches the body of the as­
tronaut into infinity. In the early paragraphs of the story, the past
and present are joined through representations of police brutality
and state violence. Violence is the story’s constant that is bound up
with images of lines and lineages. The state and its violent acts un­
derwrite a linear movement toward a future that is solely coded in
the terms of the present, and the Indigenous subject’s stasis, by con­
trast, frozen in fear and immobilized by violence, is punctuated by
representations of failed movement, by images of Indigenous bodies
diving into empty swimming pools, crashing into the dry concrete,
and by the depictions of the performance of police brutality, sexual­
ized and heavily stylized, that gratify the fetishes of wealthy voyeurs
in the story’s eponymous S&M club “Terminal Avenue” (Robinson
2004, 62–65). “Terminal Avenue” is the tragic story of its young pro­
tagonist, Wil, who wishes to be an astronaut. However, Wil is un­
able to travel through space, only through time, where he continues
to encounter the same condition across timelines: violence. Violence
is what joins the past to the future and what simplifies the complex
timelines in Robinson’s story. Narrated in past tense, fragments that
foreground the experience of violence, perpetually present, pit the
timelessness of the Indigenous against images of police violence and
state repression, seemingly confining possibility and anticipation to
the inevitable, to the final, violent subduing of dissent and resistance
that Wil expects at every moment.
“Terminal Avenue” concludes with a long fragment that blends
past-tense narration of a boat journey with Wil’s father toward a pot­
latch and future time narration of hopeful anticipation of the events
at the potlatch. In the beginning of this final fragment, we see Wil
relishing the memory of the happiness of a brief moment of celebra­
tion and community in hiding from the surveillance of the repressive
state. Gradually, however, Wil’s mind departs from the anticipation
of the happy events of the potlatch toward which he and his par­
ents journey in his memory, and his thoughts interrupt themselves
and circle back to a different moment in this memory’s own complex
452 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 50.2–3 Spring–Summer 2023

narrative and temporal structure. Narrated in present tense, Wil

returns to and suspends himself in a moment of joyful presence “with
his mother resting in his father’s arms when Wil comes back from
the bow and sits beside them,” lingering in a memory of love, of hap-
piness, of kisses and smiles. Wil remembers himself dancing—“sud-
denly, inspired, exuberant” (Robinson 2004, 68–69). This moment
of happiness, Wil knows, will ultimately give way to the events with
which Robinson’s story begins, the violent assault on his father by
police. He recalls “the rules that [his father] is taking, the rules he is
breaking, and the price he will pay.” And yet, he maintains the beauty
of this moment for himself, for it is “the moment he chooses to be
in,” preserving in a perpetual now over which only he has control
the memory of a better life, inhabiting a different present that con-
tains hope and possibility (69). Robinson’s story does not, therefore,
foreground the time of a lost past or tradition nor does it imagine a
utopian future. Rather, it juxtaposes the foreclosed present in which
Wil and his community find themselves with an alternate present,
one pregnant with anticipation and with the possibility not of what
may be as a result of lofty speculation but of what can be possible
by abolishing structures of repression and by making those wishes
for happiness and desires for liberation reality. This does not require
fantastic futurism but something simultaneously more simple and
profound: the defense of love and hope over hatred and violence, the
abolition of structures of domination and repression.
Robinson’s story illustrates the attempt to rethink time, pres-
ence, and futurity beyond the confines of linear colonial time, an
attempt that Alicia Inez Guzmán associates with Indigenous Futur-
isms more generally. In her analysis of the experimental music com-
pilation Indigenous Futurisms Mixtape, collaboratively produced by
Revolutions per Minute (RPM) and Kimiwan Zine, Guzmán empha-
sizes the importance of temporally complex engagements with the
present in Indigenous Futurisms. The aim, she stresses, is to break
colonial constructions of the “Native other” that are always also
temporal in nature: “contemporary Indigenous constructions of
selfhood contrasts longstanding notions of Native peoples as arti-
facts of a bygone past.” In the new forms of temporality that we find
in Indigenous Futurisms, she adds, “the logic of modernity, a teleo-
logical orientation that leaves colonized Others behind, is not via-
ble” (Guzmán 2015). Indigenous Futurisms refuse what Mark Rifkin
describes as “settler time.” “Native peoples occupy a double bind
within dominant settler reckonings of time,” Rifkin writes. “Either
 Mathias Nilges | Essays 453

they are consigned to the past,” he elaborates, “or they are inserted
into a present defined on non-native terms. From this perspective,
Native people(s) do not so much exist within the flow of time as
erupt from it as an anomaly, one usually understood as emanating
from a bygone era” (Rifkin 2017, 7). Indigenous Futurisms may be
understood as such an eruption turned into a radical refusal of the
limitations of colonial temporality and the colonial imagination that
erases other, alternative ways of conceiving of being in time, time-
lines other than that of colonial and Western capitalist progress.
The speculative in Indigenous Futurisms is not simply a matter of
imagining futures, of a “what if” that takes our imagination beyond
the present. Rather, it is temporally more complex, developing a
sense of futurity out of the demand to realize those desires for lib-
eration and justice that have gone unfulfilled and that were silenced
by and excluded from the timeline of colonialism. What if paths
that were previously barred were to be taken? What if past demands
for justice and liberation that were previously silenced were finally
to be heard? Indigenous Futurisms dream a different tomorrow and
engage in critiques of the present by speculating on existing reali-
ties and on past timelines that were interrupted but that may yet be
completed. Thus, the speculation of Indigenous Futurisms contains
an important element of realism that we may describe as Indigenous
Futurisms’ historical consciousness. After all, it was the violence of
colonialism that transformed a desire, demand, or conception of life
and futurity from realism or possibility to speculation or impossibil-
ity. Such denied desires continue to exist in Indigenous Futurisms as
unrealized possibilities that gesture toward forms of presence other
than those recognized and normalized by settler time. Thus, Indig-
enous Futurisms are not just about a different future but crucially
about restoring to presence a repressed aspect of reality. To imagine
a future in which past demands for liberation are finally granted is
notably different from imagining fabulist futures insofar as Indig-
enous Futurisms demand a world that should already be, a world
whose reality was suppressed by colonialism but which lays dormant
as possibility in the present. Indigenous Futurisms offer not simply a
pursuit of the new but a form of futurity that emerges out of a return
to the known, to the past, to reality, and to those possibilities that
were overwritten by colonialism’s temporal imagination.
Indigenous Futurisms register the discomfort, the continued
violence, and the ongoing repression and exclusion that arise from
cultural confinement to repressively tolerated cultural forms and
454 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 50.2–3 Spring–Summer 2023

genres that exist for the colonial power in comfortable exclusion

from the present. Precisely when tradition, art, and culture are gro-
tesquely transformed into tools that, under the guise of celebrations
of culture, diversity, and Indigenous tradition, serve to extend and
maintain colonial power, the answer, Indigenous Futurisms stress,
is not to abandon art but to recognize the power of art and to try
and deploy it otherwise. While one’s own art can be wielded against
one’s own interests, the answer to this problem is to seize the power
of art to shape a different world. As Little Badger stresses, Indige-
nous Futurisms have a crucial role to play in our ability to grapple
with the problems of a present that is plagued by problems both old
(colonialism) and new (the rise of new forms of fascism and climate
change). In such a situation, she concludes, “It’s difficult to overstate
the importance of art, particularly as a world-shaping force” (Roan-
horse et al. 2017). Dillon emphasizes in turn that it is easy to see why
“contemplation of futurisms is another step in an inevitable direc-
tion, especially for peoples whose experience of an Apocalypse Now
frustrates their chances of finding ‘a way out of no way to the future’”
(2016, 2). We may thus understand Indigenous Futurisms as a sym-
bol of survival and a new, powerful form of presence out of which
new, decolonial notions of futurity may emerge. “We have survived
an apocalypse,” Johnnie Jae concludes in her reflection on Indige-
nous Futurisms, which to her is a sign that “with every generation
our future continues to grow more hopeful” (Roanhorse et al. 2017).

NOTES
1
I use the term “Indigenous Futurisms” in its plural form here, following
Grace Dillon’s insistence that this “choice reflects the richness of Indig-
enous communities globally.” In fact, Dillon emphasizes, “it took about
three decades of struggle to get that letter s in there.” “We’re not just one
people, we are peoples,” she elaborates, stressing that their “lands encom-
pass more than one settler notion” and that as a result the term “Indig-
enous futurisms became a political pushing-forward of decolonization”
(Dillon and Marques 2021).
2
Dillon (2012) makes this point in great detail in the section “Contact” of
“Imagining Indigenous Futurisms,” the Introduction to Walking the Clouds.
3
See, for instance, David Gaerter, Karyn Recollet, and Elizabeth
La­Pensée’s collection of works on Indigenous digital spaces and cyber-
space at https://github.com/curateteaching/digitalpedagogy/blob/master/
keywords/indigenous.md.
 Mathias Nilges | Essays 455

4
For a detailed discussion of this point and for a range of specific exam-
ples from Birdie’s reception history, see Chapter 5 of Mathias Nilges’s
(2019) Right-Wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism.

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   . 2021. How to Read a Moment: The American Novel and the Crisis of the
Present. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
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Roanhorse, Rebecca. 2018. Trail of Lightning. New York: Saga.
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MATHIAS NILGES is Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier Uni-

versity, Canada. His most recent books include Right-Wing Culture in
Contemporary Capitalism (2019) and How to Read a Moment: The Amer-
ican Novel and the Crisis of the Present (2021).