One that makes room for stories that celebrate relationship and connection to community, coexistence, and sharing of land and technology, the honoring of caretakers and protectors. Indigenous Futurism asks us to reject these colonial ideas and instead re-imagine space, both outer and inner, from another perspective. Indigenous Futurisms is a term meant to encourage Native, First Nations, and other Indigenous authors and creators to speak back to the colonial tropes of science fiction-those that celebrate the rugged individual, the conquest of foreign worlds, the taming of the final frontier. Grace Dillon (Anishinaabe), inspired by Afro-futurists, coined the term Indigenous Futurisms. We have been, we are, and we always will be.ĭr. It is from this apocalyptic in-between that the Indigenous voices in speculative fiction speak. We stand with one foot always in the darkness that ended our world, and the other in a hope for our future as Indigenous people. To be a Native of North America is to exist in a space where the past and the future mix in a delicate swirl of the here-and-now. In a way, my birth mother’s gifts were symbolic of Indigenous existence. All in all, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s work was what we would call good medicine-a soundtrack of healing and hope. And for Pueblos, a people descended from the master astronomers called the Anasazi/Ancestral Puebloans, a people who once dominated the Southwest United States, it was a particularly poignant title. That last song on the album, “Starwalker,” was a song about the power and resilience of Native people.

There were songs about war, songs about displacement, but also songs about love and travel and Indian cowboys.

The latter gift was a collection of songs: anthems, love ballads, and truth-tellings. It is, in a sense, the stuff of speculative fiction. And then to keep surviving, even thriving, when the world keeps trying to kill you. Surviving Columbus is a primer in the mechanics of apocalypse, documenting the truth of what it means to face the end of the world and survive. The first chronicles our people’s survival of a brutal genocide that began with our first encounter with the Spanish in the early 1500s and continues to this day. The first time I met my birth mother, a woman whose family comes from the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo of Northern New Mexico, she gave me two things: a VHS tape of Surviving Columbus: The Story of the Pueblo People and a CD of the Cree singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie.

Resistance reborn by rebecca roanhorse