Reddit tumblr war11/7/2023 ![]() He calls it “the comedy of deflation,” and anyone who has spent any time on the reservation will recognize it immediately. Dan Taipua wrote an article for The Spinoff arguing that the humor in the movie often functioned as a decolonial tool. It is full of moments of decidedly Indigenous humor. Thor: Ragnorak, the most recent offering of the Marvel franchise, is directed by Māori director Taika Waititi. I can’t believe you’re alive! I saw you die. They were humans, which makes the atrocities they committed that much worse. Zombies.”īut, of course, the miners and priests and other California invaders weren’t zombies. And there were more of them then there was of you. They were hungry for your scalp and your head. “In effect, for a long time in California, if you were an Indian person walking around, something or someone might just try to kill you. Cutcha Risling Baldy (Hupa, Yurok and Karuk) talks about the elements of the invasion and settlement of California in terms she likens to the AMC TV series The Walking Dead, arguing that the Mission System and the California Gold Rush were nothing short of “zombies running around trying to kill Indians.” It’s a compelling argument when you realize that the miners of the Gold Rush would organize militias and stage “Indian hunting days.” The militias were paid 25 cents a scalp and $5 a head, and in 18 alone, the state of California paid out close to one million dollars for the killing of Indians: It challenges the dominant narrative, so, for example, the landing of Columbus is no longer the discovery of the New World celebrated in children’s songs and on national holidays, but the start of an earth-shattering zombie apocalypse. Indigenous Futurism rewrites the past to reimagine the present. What if I told you that there had been a zombie apocalypse? What if I told you that you were the zombies? That is not to say that the past is ignored, but rather that it is folded into the present, which is folded into the future-a philosophical wormhole that renders the very definitions of time and space fluid in the imagination. It dares to let Indigenous creators define themselves and their world not just as speaking back to colonialism, but as existing in their own right. Indigenous Futurism also advocates for the sovereign. 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. ![]()
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