Nilges - The Temporal Imagination of Indigenous Futurisms
Nilges - The Temporal Imagination of Indigenous Futurisms
Nilges - The Temporal Imagination of Indigenous Futurisms
Mathias Nilges
MATHIAS NILGES
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
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
FUTURITY AS PRESENCE
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
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
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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