Introduction: Indigenous Futurisms,Bimaashi Biidaas Mose, FlyingandWalking towards You

Abstract

In 2012, the Indigenous science fiction anthology Walking the Clouds challenged critics and artists alike to recognize the qualities lauded in contemporary experimental sf as core elements of ancient Indigenous epistemologies. Walking the Clouds asked critics to recognize the Indigenous origins of sf tropes, and it asked Indigenous artists to write more sf.That call has been answered by an impressive array of new publications, 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.This special issue of Extrapolation brings together ten diverse contributors who extend the praxis of Indigenous Futurisms by drawing our attention to practitioners whose work we may recognize from previous venues, or whose contributions we might be receiving for the first time.The essays collected here explore discoveries, in contrast to the sf template of discovery. Indigenous Futurisms is not about chronicling the many instances of mainstream sf that borrow the victimized noble savage trope in order to relive wild-west fantasies, nor to offer contrition about past injustices, however well mannered. Maanoo. Our colleague John Rieder's 2008 study Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction remains the seminal scholarly redaction of ironic (post)colonial theories that perpetuate the colonial gaze while bearing witness to the Indigenous presence in sf.First in our collection of thought pieces on Indigenous Futurisms, Andrea Hairston challenges us to examine our feelings about ghost phenomena-those uncanny presences that we occasionally feel but cannot rationally categorize. Hairston professes that she is "a futurist speculating on disappeared history." After offering a considered historical record of ghost theories, she makes a satisfying assessment: "Ghosts are an embodiment of invisible forces from a past that hasn't gone anywhere." Set on this path, it is easy to see how contemplation of futurisms is another step in an inevitable direction, especially for peoples whose experience of an Apocalypse Now frustrates their chances of finding "a way out of no way to the future." Using the work of filmmakers Wanuri Kahiu (Kikuyu, Kenya) and Georgina Lightning (Cree, Canada), Hairston illustrates how artists who are haunted by a disappeared past while facing survival in a devastated present can reclaim possible futures through aesthetic creation.Hairston personalizes ghostly encounters as events that take place within the mindscape. Andrew Uzendoski tackles the trope in its most public and recognizable performance for Native American peoples, the Ghost Dance. Focusing on Gerald Vizenor's (Anishinaabe) sf alternate history The Heirs of Columbus, Uzendoski invokes seminal Indigenous Futurisms concepts, including lawful, legal, and intertribal resistance on national and international stages, disinterest in theories that ironically perpetuate the colonial gaze by expending energy on repudiating it, rejection of terminal creeds that make indians the victims of their own devices, and the propensity for Indigenous cultures to innovate and appropriate advanced technologies. In this way, argues Uzendoski, Vizenor is able to transform our focus on a relic of Native pasts into reflection on the sovereignty of "the tribal republic of Ghost Dance."David Higgins widens the Indigenous Futurisms net to capture compatibilities among Vizenor, Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), and Diane Glancy (Cherokee). The concept of survivance is another sine qua non of Indigenous Futurisms, and Higgins provides an informed overview, contextualizing survivance in theories of victimhood. Survivance asserts Native presence and pushes back against the assumption that the only historical identity available to indians in a post-Manifest Destiny world is that of victim. …