Imaginary Worlds - Indigenous Futurisms

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

From TV and film to novels and video games, the artistic movement of Indigenous Futurisms has been gaining momentum and breaking cultural barriers. I talk with professor and author Grace Dillon, filmmaker Danis Goulet, fiction writer Stephen Graham Jones, and visual artist Virgil Ortiz about what defines a work of indigenous futurism and why telling stories about werewolves, spirits, A.I., and time travelers can be an act of resistance. This episode is sponsored by Mr Ballen Podcast and D&Tea. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This film is a prequel, which takes place in the 18th century. One of the alien predators lands in the Great Plains and he meets his match in a Comanche teenage girl. I've never seen anything like it. I'm not frightened by a bear. It's not a bear. Prey was a huge hit for the streaming service Hulu and the movie was widely praised for its cultural sensitivity. The producer and most of the cast are indigenous to North America. But Prey isn't just part of an action franchise. It reflects a larger artistic movement called Indigenous Futurisms, which tells stories about indigenous people using science fiction and fantasy. And in the last several years, there's been a big increase in indigenous futurisms, not just TV and film, but also novels, comic books, video games,

even works of fine art. You can also see the influence of indigenous futurism in the new movie Black Panther Wakanda Forever. The antagonist in that film comes from a high-tech underwater kingdom that's based on ancient Mesoamerican cultures. Who are you? I have many names. My people call me Ah-Ku-Kun-Kan. But my enemies call me Namor. Grace Dillon is a professor of Indigenous Nation Studies at Portland State University. Her heritage goes back to the Anishinaabe tribes along the Great Lakes. And she doesn't think that a movie like Baconda Forever can count as an Indigenous futurism.

It's not Indigenous futurisms unless it is told by Native people, produced by Native people. by Native people, produced by Native people, that's the first really important feature, is that Indigenous futurisms are not written by allies. Grace is an expert on this subject since she coined the term Indigenous futurisms in the early 2000s. It all started when her friend, the late novelist Ursula K. Le Guin, encouraged her to become more of an advocate.

She was the one that actually really encouraged me because she was saying, you know, Grace, there's no voice about indigenous science fiction, indigenous writings. The term was intended to be a nod towards Afrofuturism, but then Grace decided to make it plural. I first said Indigenous Futurism and then quickly turned it to Futurisms, largely to support our three-decade fight in the United Nations

to be called Indigenous Peoples with an S rather than just Indigenous People. Grace also wanted the term to be a beacon for Indigenous writers who might stay away from science fiction because the genre in the U.S. had evolved from Westerns, where cowboys and Indians were reimagined as white space explorers and hostile aliens. Cowboys and Indians were reimagined as white space explorers and hostile aliens. There were such stereotypical and horrible depictions in science fiction about Native peoples that there were a lot of Native and Indigenous writers that would just stay away from that.

It was such a subtle or colonial kind of medium that that was hard to get over. Some indigenous futurisms have tropes that I think of as futuristic, but I've noticed that a lot of these stories are more like magic realism, where there's an element of surrealism in the real world, or there's kind of a folding over of time between the past, present, and future. For instance, the show Reservation Dogs has gotten massive critical acclaim. The main characters are teenagers on a modern-day reservation in Oklahoma. The show is pretty grounded in the real world, except spirits and folklore characters appear sometimes,

and they're treated in a very matter-of-fact way. Like in this scene, the spirit of a warrior who died in the 19th century is trying to give advice to a teenage kid named Bear, whether he wants it or not. What are you doing here? What are you doing here? Laura's grandma is dying. Oh, I know, I know. That's why I'm here. I gotta take her to orientation. That's why I'm here. I gotta take her to orientation. But what are you doing here?

I have to be here for my friend. Oh, young warrior, that's good. You're here for your friend. That's good. Does she know that? I mean, I assume so. I'm here. Ah, yes, that old Indian saying, I'm here, that should be good enough. You should know exactly how I feel without me even saying anything.

Man. Dennis Goulet is a Cree Matisse filmmaker based in Canada. She directed that episode, which actually has two different spirit characters in it. And when she first read the script like i don't even think i blinked on like in reading that like it doesn't even um strike me as separate from the stuff that is happening you know to the people that are still alive and i think the show deals with especially the spirit um that keeps returning to bear the character to like give him advice and things

like that is definitely playing with the trope of like sort of like the spirit helper that is always treated in Hollywood in a very earnest way. And then, you know, the flute starts to play and the eagle starts to come out. And us in the indigenous community, of course, have been making fun of this stuff for years. And so now Sirlin Harjo, the show's creator, is like making fun of it for real in his show and subverting that trope. And yet the spirit helper, there's something legitimate in, you know, the advice that's needed and also in having these relationships to our ancestors, which is something in our community that is held in a very high regard. Grace Dillon says the way that Reservation Dogs presents religious or folklore characters as just being part of life might be difficult for non-Native audiences to understand. But she's okay with that.

What you're doing is you're playing your truths and your strengths, knowing that there are certain audiences that are going to back away and become more comfortable with just viewing it as magical or superstition or, in other words, not real. or, in other words, not real. Although, as Grace likes to say, they're indigenous peoples, not people, with a single belief system. Stephen Graham Jones is a member of the Blackfoot Nation, and he's a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. He writes a lot of speculative fiction,

in novels, short stories, and comic books. And he says at speaking events, non-Native people sometimes ask him about the connection between indigenous beliefs and supernatural stories. They're basically saying, because or if you subscribe to these things we call myths, which is an insult in itself, does that mean that you're more open to reality being the kind of plastic it needs to be for science fiction, fantasy, and horror? You know, and it's the reason that I found it kind of an awkward question is because it presupposes things about the writer. You know, the person that they're asking the questions of.

They're saying, because you are American Indian, you automatically subscribe to this belief system or that belief system or whatever. In fact, he likes to work in more conventional genres like sci-fi and horror so he can put indigenous characters in the forefront. I feel like it's a way of centering us instead of marginalizing us, if that makes sense. I mean, to me, it's not necessarily about story patterns. It's not necessarily about our presence in a made up future or anything like that. The fact that we're still around, putting words on paper, telling stories, telling jokes, that itself, to me, is an act of resistance, you know, and to me, that's kind of at the core of what Indigenous Fut futurisms is. It's not letting someone else tell stories which are probably going to be informed by some colonial myth-making apparatus, you know, that wants to steamroll us and get rid of us.

We're standing up and using our voice and making people laugh, making people cry, making people scared. In talking with these creators, I wanted to know how indigenous futurisms are expressed differently in different media. What kind of stories can they tell in film versus literature or visual arts? And why is it important to work in speculative fiction instead of realistic fiction?

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And I know that when the movie Get Out came out into the world, I feel like it just opened up creative possibilities for so many other communities to talk about our lived experience, but in a way that could be really even just like fun or, you know, just more open or inviting. Dennis had already been exploring Indigenous futurisms in her 2013 short film, which is called Awakening. The story takes place in a futuristic, dystopian Toronto. I had the idea actually to tell a story about classic Cree characters from the oral storytelling tradition. And in my culture, they're referred to as Wisagichak and Witego. And one is a trickster and the other is a cannibalistic being. And as soon as you're dealing with supernatural characters, you're kind of in a sort of fantasy genre.

But I also thought that they were always treated as though they were things of the past, like relics or like quaint folkloric characters. And I wanted to sort of introduce them as characters that had gravity and presence. In her film, the character Wisagichak is portrayed as a lone commando. She liberates hostages in an abandoned theater as they're being hunted by Witego,

who's portrayed as a mysterious hybrid animal who speaks in the Cree language. I have journeyed far to see you, Witego. who is portrayed as a mysterious hybrid animal who speaks in the Cree language. On top of a stone wall, a dying citizen. The occupiers, they tricked you into going. This is no palace. This is your prison. In 2021, Dennis expanded on these themes in a feature film called Night Raiders, which had the largest budget for any Indigenous film in Canadian history. Her goal for Night Raiders was to use science fiction to explore the impact of real history, the residential school system in Canada. For over 100 years, going all the way up

to the 1990s, the Canadian government removed Indigenous children from their families and forced them to attend schools, which indoctrinated them into white culture, often using brutal methods. In Knight Raiders, a version of these schools exists in a dystopian North America. You have a child at the academy? She was taken in the fall. You know, with Knight Raiders, it's like I just, on a very basic level, wanted to explore that impact and to show that in a way that presented a fresh entry point into the material because it is so heavy and it is so hard to contend with. So what the future system allowed for, or the future setting, it allowed for us to kind of be

in a new space at which to look at this all from. And then also on the world building side, like that part was really fun and exciting. And it's like I created a timeline that went sort of 35 years into the future and it projected the outcome of every election, you know, the US election. And it like imagined a far right uprising that would lead to a civil war in North America

and that the movie was set in a post-Civil War period. Like all those world-building elements and working with the VFX teams to kind of like, you know, create the moments where you get a sense of the outside world was really exciting. She also enjoyed playing with sci-fi tropes in a new way. Like in this futuristic society, there are swarms of flying drones. And in the Cree language, there's an embedded system of things that are referred to in the language as animate or inanimate. Very simply in the language, rocks are referred to as animate. So you refer to them as a living thing.

And I found that conceptually really interesting. And also that drones are actually made of rocks and minerals. So how might we regard drones or artificial robots and computers and things like that? And so one of her characters has an innate understanding of drones. She can speak to them and understand them telepathically. Some folks might watch Knight Raiders and sort of feel like one of the characters has kind of like sort of magical powers or like maybe there's a magical realism element. But I don't I wouldn't actually frame it that way at all. I think she is a communicator in the same way that my family, many people in my family who grew up on the land who are trappers and hunters, including my dad, know how to call to animals. And I think that if you can call to an animal, you could also call to an AI being in a way. So that mode of communication to me wasn't magic.

It's a very cruel skill set that someone has. Forward. Down. And the genre of post-apocalyptic films takes on a different perspective with Indigenous peoples because in real life, the present day is their post-apocalyptic future. I found that idea in sort of like when I did research into Indigenous futurism, this idea that we've already survived the apocalypse really interesting because I think it gives, you know, Indigenous artists like a different way of coming at the apocalypse. And I think, you know, in a colonial mindset, you're fearing, you know,

the invasion, whether it's like the alien invasion or, you know, the impending apocalypse or whatever doom is going to happen. But from an Indigenous perspective, if that doom has already happened, then, you know, you might think that we are better equipped to deal with that when it happens. And, you know, in terms of like climate catastrophe, you know, it's like, what can we look at from Indigenous worldviews and values that could help us in the situation that we all find ourselves in, whether we're indigenous or not. The climate crisis comes up in a lot of indigenous futurisms, like in the novel The Bird is Gone by Stephen Graham Jones. In the story, Congress passes a law to protect endangered species in the Great Plains and unintentionally gives the land back to the tribes who were there first, creating a sovereign nation within the borders of the United States. After that... All the natives in America dive to the Great Plains, which is kind of weird in itself because

not everybody is a Plains Indian, you know? But each chapter pretty much starts with authenticity. How do you decide who is Indian? This is a big issue in real life. There have been a lot of instances of people claiming to have indigenous ancestry, but they're either frauds or they believe family stories that turn out to be false, or their indigenous heritage is a small percentage of their DNA. And there's a debate whether to accept these people into tribal communities.

In fact, different tribes have different levels of, quote, blood quantum that a person needs to be accepted into the tribe, which is controversial as well, because the origin of blood quantum laws goes back to the U.S. government. Stephen thinks this is a very rich topic to explore in fiction. We can't go by blood quantum. It seems like every method or means we use to establish who we are is in some way flawed. I mean, I prefer the community acceptance way.

If your community accepts you, you're Indian. It doesn't matter about blood or language or any of that. That was something that I was trying to come at head on, and the bird is gone. It's also a theme in his 2016 novel, Mongrels. Mongrels is a family of werewolves trying to make it in the southeast of America. They live down there because there's no snow, so their footprints won't lead back to their front door, so the villagers won't come massacre them. In this world of mongrels, the issues these marginalized werewolves keep facing in their daily existence, which is they're not battling vampires. They're not fighting Nazis. None of

that. They're just trying to pass the loan application down at the used car lot. They're trying to make rent that month, and it keeps on not happening. They're all Native issues to me. His inspiration for mongrels actually came from the graphic novel Mouse by Art Spiegelman. In that comic book, Spiegelman tells the story of Holocaust survivors using animals instead of people. So the Jews are depicted as mice, the Germans are cats, the French are frogs. Native Americans don't appear in the story. But Stephen wondered if Spiegelman would have drawn them as wolves, since that's how so many non-native people imagine them.

That's just like every truck stop in America, which you've seen, of course, where all the blankets and t-shirts are half of a noble Indian and the other half is a wolf face, you know, that kind of stuff. Yeah. So tell me more about the metaphor of the werewolf. How did you have fun with kind of the lore and genre of a werewolf story and making that a story of indigenous futurism? I guess, first of all, you can't get bitten. You can't get infected into being a werewolf in my version of it. You have to be born with the blood, you know, which hopefully that doesn't mean I'm arguing blood quantum, but there's a hurricane going on in this little family of werewolves

in their human form are in a store trying to stock up so they can ride this storm out. And the sister, it's a sister, a brother, and then their nephew. And the sister is going after her brother because he was dating a blonde woman. And she's wondering what kind of werewolf is she going to turn into, like a golden retriever werewolf? That's not going to be right. What she's doing is she's expressing the same racism that you see a lot in Indian country, the same racism that you see a lot in Indian country, both of people who aren't Indian and also of anyone who marries outside of Indian America. You know, it's considered it can be considered like watering your blood down or not helping promote your people and all that stuff.

And there's a lot of that and mongrels for sure. A lot of worrying about who is the most werewolf, you know, and how do you be the most werewolf? Stephen says, when it comes to indigenous futurisms in the publishing industry, there are a lot of similarities to what happened with Get Out in the film industry. In the last several years, Black writers have found success using speculative fiction to explore systemic racism, and that opened the door for genre writers in other marginalized communities. The first novel of indigenous futurism to become a big commercial hit was Rebecca Roanhorse's book Trail of Lightning in 2018. It was about an

indigenous woman who slays monsters in a dystopian future. That book went straight to the reader. It didn't slow down to say, I'm going to wait for permission. I'm going to wait for validation. I'm going to wait for people to say, this is good. It just went straight to the readers and everybody started reading it. And I think that's how we should do it. We should never wait for permission to run out on the narrow branches. We should just go there thinking it's going to hold us, you know? Well, what do you mean by running out on the narrow branches? I think that the marketplace or the critical establishment, or both in tandem, not really consciously, want to keep Native writers close to the trunk of literature, as I think about it.

Like, if literature is a tree, then close to the trunk is where the realist fiction is, the stories that don't require werewolves or spaceships or any of that. But out on the branches are where the variables have been introduced, the fantastic stuff, the werewolves, the spaceships, the zombies. And I feel like so many of us now, we're tired of telling those realist stories, or maybe we never did it in the first place, really. This genre stuff isn't just idle entertainment. It's actually in dialogue with the world, you know? And I think we are in a good moment for that. And hopefully this moment is sustained. That's my dream. that. And hopefully this moment is sustained. That's my dream.

There has also been an influx of indigenous futurisms in the world of fine arts. And there's one visual artist whose work I can't stop thinking about, Virgil Ortiz. Virgil works in 2D mediums like photography and digital compositions, but he's best known for creating pottery, sculptures, and costumes. All of his work ties back to a single science fiction story that he created called Revolt 1680-2180. Virgil is part of the Cochiti Pueblo community. And in 1680, there was a rebellion against Spanish occupation, and they managed to keep the Spanish out of New Mexico for over a decade. So in his storyline, Cochiti Pueblo people from the 22nd century travel back in time to that uprising in the 17th century. Virgil came up with this premise when he was a teenager,

and he's never wavered from it. Every work of art he creates is part of that world building. Although he says clay is the material that he feels most connected to, because clay has been a storytelling tool in his community for a long time. It turns out that I made up my mind when I was 15 to dedicate my life to clay, to capture a timeline in history, what our people did in the 1800s. Of all the people that were coming into our area they made caricatures of them in clay and they that's how they documented a timeline so

I was like that fits in perfectly with what um I feel I was I was born to do here on this um this timeline in this dimension I was curious to talk with him about the costumes he creates for his time traveling characters the costumes are worn by his time-traveling characters. The costumes are worn by models in his digital compositions, and they're displayed in art galleries. And the costumes look like they could be in a Marvel movie, with spiked helmets and weapons, zigzagging cyberpunk patterns, and Matrix-like coats. Yeah, I feel like I'm very lucky to be able to work in different mediums and I try to learn every medium that I can and get my hands on and all of it turns into tools to help me tell the story and to really like learn how to do photoshop and of course I can't go to like party city or

halloween spirit store to buy their costumes because they never existed so you know I turned to youtube to learn how to foam fabricate the costumes. I learned how to sew, first of all, just for fashion, because I couldn't afford the fashions that I seen in magazines, but now to create costumes from them and understand the whole idea of designing costuming and like the whole, you know, a stage or a scene in a movie, all of these different types of mediums help me do it. Virgil has a team of five to 20 people working for him, depending on the scale of each piece.

Although his creative process relies very much on gut instinct. It might be ancestral memory, because that reflects back to my clay works, is because like our Cochiti colors are black, white, and red. So we have a very limited color palette and to be able to use black and white and spot coloring a red, it's timeless. So whether if you look at something that our people made from the late 1800s, it still looks brand new. It looks futuristic. Well, tell me the story of 1680, 2180. What's the premise of the story? Like, you know, give me the, as they say in Hollywood, give me the

elevator pitch. Right. I know we're still working on that. So I don't know if I can talk about it too much, but because I'm moving to Los Angeles here in December or January to do that exactly. Oh, wow. But a lot of the characters that are in my script are, such as like the aeronauts or the recon watchmen, they're coming back from 2180 to present time or historic times. And what they're doing is to collect shards of pottery, our designs, our songs, our ceremonies, take them back to 2180, store them, protect them, so that when we get to that timeline, everything is still intact.

We still have all our traditions going on. I usually think of fine arts and pop culture as being opposite ends of a cultural spectrum. But Virgil doesn't see it that way. He's on a mission, moving from one venue to another, trying to find the biggest audience possible, whether it's in a museum or a multiplex. I mean, it goes along with all the different, the big studios like DC, Marvel, Disney,

all these people that are doing it now, like Avengers and all that. So yeah, I can't wait to, you know, I'm going as big as I can, you know, a whole saga. Like taking down the huge storyline and then breaking them down into characters. Let's say it's like Mandalorian or Obi-Wan or, you know, all these specific background of all the different characters to break them down into TV streaming movies. That is all on the table now of how we're going to release everything. He even has molds for toys and action figures ready to go.

Like I have the master molds for them. I have the ideas for them. So when we move into a huge deal that will be coming, like I have all the master molds for everything. So then we move into licensing. He told me he's doing a lot to prepare for this move to Los Angeles, from finding screenwriters to making sure that his intellectual property rights are protected. But he's also thinking about what made him fall in love with sci-fi in the first place. I remember just going back to when I was six years old when I seen the first Star Wars movie.

Anything that was sci-fi on TV as well, like old school Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica, I immediately learned every character, where they came from, how they dressed, what kind of ships they drove. And it was just really, I guess, just the fantasy part of storytelling. I don't know, it just really stuck with me. So I said, oh, cool, I could use this type of storytelling to actually just get like the attention of the next generation's minds. And that's what prompted me to really start to develop a whole storyline about it. That's really interesting too, because you think about like anything you learn in history class, it's like, oh, we're going to get tested on this. And then when the test is done,

you forget about it. But then when it comes to sci-fi and fantasy, we have this obsessive knowledge of like, you know, we certainly know the history of if it's Star Wars, you know, or you can even quote the movies. And so it's a kind of way of taking this kind of difficult history and putting it in the guise of something that people generally are pretty obsessive about. Right. Nobody wants to talk about the genocide that happened to our people, the bloodshed, all the colonization of all the Pueblo lands here in New Mexico. But if you do have a storyline, a whole feature involving futurism into it, that helps a lot. And that's what I've been doing, like with all my art shows, my gallery shows, my museum shows, is to introduce that whole storyline. And that was my prayer to

begin with was to have people talk about our history using art. Everyone I spoke with talked about indigenous futurisms as a way to express their ideas and find a larger audience. But I think indigenous futurisms are also good for the genre as a whole. Fantasy worlds can be anything we want, but big companies keep rehashing the same ideas, which can lead to creative staleness. As a fan of fantasy genres,

a shift in perspective can bring me into a world that I had never imagined, and it can make the world around me seem like a place I've never seen before. That's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Virgil Ortiz, Grace Dillon, Dennis Goulet, and Stephen Graham-Jones, who has one more thing to add about indigenous futurisms. I'm so happy for spellcheck because I can never spell indigenous right the first time. Me too. Actually, me too. Used to, we were all just Indian. I can spell Indian and then we were all native for a while. I can spell native, but indigenous, man, that takes like all my fingers and most of my concentration. The E in the I. I always forget where the E in the I go in the middle. Me too.

Me too. Also, thank you to the listeners who have suggested this topic over the years most recently benjamin schultz figueroa my assistant producer is stephanie billman you can follow the show on twitter facebook and instagram where i put a slideshow of virgil's artwork if you'd like to advertise on imaginary worlds let us know at contact at imaginary worlds podcast.org and i'll put you in touch with our ad coordinator. The best way to support the show is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you get either free Imaginary World stickers, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has a full-length

interviews of every guest in every episode. You can also get access to an ad-free version of the show through Patreon, and you can buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts. You can learn more about the show and subscribe to our newsletter at imaginaryworldspodcast.org.