Future history: Indigenous Futurisms in North American Visual Arts

World Art is delighted to have brought this special issue of the journal to fruition, its subject Indigenous Futurisms. As defined by Anishinaabe scholar Grace Dillon in Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, Indigenous Futurisms uses the images, ideology, and themes in science fiction to envision a future from a Native (Indigenous) perspective and create a newly valid ‘ … way to renew, recover, and extend First Nations peoples’ voices and traditions’ (Dillon 2012, 1–2). This is an emerging and topical field which spans the historic arts of Indigenous North America, as well as graphic, performance and digital art, the producers of which engage in a dialogue with scholars in this volume through the visual essays and reproduced work.

The impetus for this special issue was the panel ‘“The Force Will Be With You …  Always”: Science Fiction Imagery in Contemporary Native American Art’ held at the Native American Art Studies Association biennial conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma (USA) in 2017. Many of the authors and some of the artists in this issue presented at that session, creating a sense of the exciting and robust scholarly work that it augured. Chaired by Suzanne Newman Fricke, the panel discussed questions of production and reception of new works in this field, and the manner in which science fiction intersects with Indigenous worldviews, and plays with different types of temporality which question the hardened notions of ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’ often invoked in the art-historical and anthropological appraisal of Indigenous North American art and material culture.

The African-American science fiction writer Octavia Butler (1998a) wrote that her covenant with science fiction was that she could not write about anything that could not actually happen. As Yvonne Tiger remarked in the 2017 session, and discusses in this issue, if the standard narrative of science fiction involves a hypothetical apocalypse, for Indigenous peoples this is recognizably real and personal. Colonial history on the American continent shows that apocalyptic events of human making, involving conflicts over natural resources un-protected by treaty rights, with dystopian consequences, are not only the stuff of fiction but are part of the lived histories and presents of Indigenous communities. Jason Edward Lewis (Concordia University Professor of Computation Arts and co-director of the Initiative for Indigenous Futures) argues for the importance of an Indigenous voice in science fiction observing that

popular science fiction has historically been the province of Euro-American writers, it tends to reflect a particular set of imperial and colonial biases and prejudices. One consequence of this lineage is the fact that recognizable descendants of Indigenous people do not often appear in the settler future imaginary, nor does one see any indication of Indigenous culture as having survived into the seventh generation and beyond (Lewis 2016, 37).

Indigenous Futurisms are part of a larger trend to disrupt and diversify the frames of reference of speculative fiction with writers such as Cixin Liu, Marlon James and Louise Erdrich influentially entering the fray. As Tiger also remarks, it re-positions Indigenous agency as regards worn and colonial representations of ‘discovery’. Indigenous Futurism proposes its central characters on the other side of the vessel: manning the ship rather than waiting on the shores.

In Parables of the Talents, Butler (1998b) wrote ‘To Survive/Let the Past/Teach You’. She further commented in ‘Devil Girls From Mars: Why I Write Science Fiction’ (1998a) that of the three categories of science fiction (as identified by Robert A. Heinlein) – the ‘what-if’; the ‘if-only’; and the ‘if-this-goes-on’ – she enduringly chose to write within the ‘if-this-goes-on’ category. Ohkay Owingeh/African-American writer Rebecca Roanhorse’s (a recent winner of the Hugo Prize for short story writing in the science fiction field) first novel Trail of Lightning (now set a series) renews and intertwines the ‘what-if’ and ‘if-this-goes-on’. Set in Dinetah, after the fifth mass extinction and the great flood, the protagonist Maggie Hosker is a monster hunter. The world as described is familiar to all those who know this area of the American Southwest. The protagonists inhabit the sixth world, a world of re-emergence of the Diyin-Dine’ or the Holy People, from whom the Dine’ can receive the lessons for a proper life. Roanhorse’s work lends further emphasis to Dillon’s view that ‘Indigenous futurisms are narratives of biskaabiiyang, an Anishinaabemowin word connoting the process of ‘returning to ourselves,’ which involves discovering how personally one is affected by colonization, discarding the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovering ancestral traditions in order to adapt in our post-Native Apocalypse world’ (Dillon 2012, 10). Indigenous Futurisms propose the enduring relevance of Indigenous thought, artistic practice and expression; they reconfigure the relationship between past, present and future presenting the relationship between these temporalities as entangled, compacted or cyclical, but emphatically not linear. Indigenous Futurisms also demonstrate how artistic practice can re-iterate the value Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, while framing new ways of tackling, and reckoning with, questions of colonialism, conquest, genocide, racism, misogyny, and environmental catastrophe, in the past and in the future, natural and man-made.

This special issue is especially timely. The Native American Art Studies Association Conference followed and preceded a series of exhibitions of contemporary work framed by the ideas of Indigenous Futurisms. Shows such as Low-Rez: Native American Lowbrow Art at Eggman and Walrus Gallery curated by America Meredith in 2012 in Santa Fe; In the Spirit at the Washington State History Museum in 2014; Indigenous Futurism: Transcending the Past, Present and Future held in 2017–8 at the National Gallery of Canada and Live Long and Prosper’: Science Fiction in Contemporary Indigenous Art exhibited at the New Mexico State University Art Museum (2018–9) and transferring to the Museum of Contemporary Native American Art in Santa Fe in 2020 show an arc of increasing appreciation in galleries and museums. Of those contemporary artists featured in these exhibitions, some, whose work might be considered essential to any consideration of the field, are illustrated and discussed within this issue in the articles but equally through the short format of the interspersed visual essays. Through these different means this issue bring the work of artist such as Sonny Assu, Andy Everson, Suzanne Kite, Shelley Niro, Virgil Ortiz, Ryan Singer, Hoka Skenandore, Skawennati, Jeffrey Veregge, Rory Wakemup and Debra Yepa-Pappan to the reader. These various expressions may not, as yet, have entered or reached into the permanent collections of prestigious national collections, but if art history is itself to learn from the cyclical pattern of things, it is that new art forms will inevitably percolate into the slightly slower moving institutions from other more agile spaces. As Indigenous Futurism shows us, it is just a matter of time, and as the journal goes to press, we anticipate more exhibitions in the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, C.N. Gorman Museum, Davis and the National Museum of the American Indian, New York. The spaces of experimentation, performance, of graphic novels and popular culture, of shared communal participation, over time, come to influence the spaces of more static value(s).

In ‘The Rule of Names,’ science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin observed that ‘ … the name is the thing …  and the truename [sic] is the true thing’ (Le Guin 1964). Naming this genre has allowed it to become a distinct entity with shared beliefs and diverse iterations. It is an experimental and emerging field, and for these reasons many of the essays are written by emerging scholars in discussion with the artists whose work they feature. For example, the essay by Kristina Baudemann and Suzanne Kite is notable as a series of interventions framed around Kite’s work Listener. The visual artwork in this evolving field is rich and varied. It was therefore important that this journal issue call attention to this richness and diversity by being well illustrated, with seven of short visual essays on specific artists and their work punctuating the longer articles to allow a glimpse of the full range of the forms and expressions to be seen and appreciated. Color images additional to those normally appearing in the printed special issue are included thanks to subvention provided by the publications funds of the curatorial department of the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, Leiden, the Netherlands.

Heiltsuk artist Shawn Hunt argued that ‘If I just talk about old myths, I am partially responsible for killing culture. New iconography is about not just Native issues but human issues; it is helping to propel the culture forward’ (Thom 2009, 3). This special journal issue is a mark in the sand which aims to bring this exciting, innovative, performative, popular and political artwork to an international audience. World Art presents these Indigenous visions of the future to argue that such a future has the potential to be ‘ … bright. Its stars shine with new offerings.’ (Dillon 2016, 6)