Children of Change, Not Doom: Indigenous Futurist Heroines in YA

Abstract

Recent works by Ambelin Kwaymullina (Palyku), Joseph Bruchac (Abenaki), and Nnedi Okorafor challenge ideas that YA speculative futures must be ethnoculturally monolithic and unavoidably bleak. While their stories share elements with YA dystopia, postcolonial sf and Afrofuturism, they utilize a distinct artistic and theoretical approach called Indigenous futurism that incorporates Native/Indigenous concepts of community, power, and responsibility. From this unique position, their non-Caucasian female leads explore vital questions of choice and purpose, gender, violence, technology, environmental and social consciousness, and even endings and triumph.