We absolutely go for hard science, but when we do science,
we don't just simply do the science. We have ceremony,
we have song, we have drumming, we create inventive,
new words in our language to encompass and adapt to
these ever-evolving ideas. And it's that,
that makes it quite quite different from simply, you know,
picking up a lab coat, working with a beaker. You can have all that.
We have tribal schools that do genetic bioengineering, you know,
but what becomes more important is going back to Aki,
going back to the land, being a part of the land.
Hello. Hi Grace. Hi. Tell us what you, what your story,
a little bit of a quick intro, your story. What do you do? Well,
I'm an Anishinaabe, from several nations,
Garden River nation on the Ontario, Canada side and Bay Mills nation,
uh, in the upper peninsula of Michigan. We Mich love to wander around,
go off to different places, travel all around.
I think that's why science fiction is so appealing to us, uh,
with the possibilities of time travel and other things.
What I really work on though is indigenous futurism,
which was a term that I coined back in 2003.
A lot of people think it's 2012 because that's when I put out the anthology,
"Walking the Clouds:
Indigenous Science Fiction." What I was really interested in
doing is, as an academic you're supposed to write a monograph. You know,
you're supposed to write a book,
analyzing stories or whatever it is,
and it just didn't feel right to me,
it felt like as indigenous people,
we had been doing all kinds of stories that lent itself
very much to science fiction, to the fantastic, to horror,
all of those kinds of things.
So when you first start to think about an anthology, you know,
I guess my first thought is,
is do all the people that you're thinking about putting in there,
do they write things down in English? Do you have to rewrite them?
Do you have to listen to stories and then put the stories down?
How do you get them into the right form?
That's a very interesting question. Um,
because a lot of us of course have been colonized enough that we
have English, at least as a second language.
And one thing that's become a pattern with so many forms of
indigenous futurism is what Helen Haig-Brown, she's Tsilhqot'in, did
a short film called The Cave in 2012,
I'm turning it into English.
It was entirely in Tsilhqot'in with subtitles in English.
And as she talked to me about it, uh,
because she had been given a Lars von Trier experiment, you know,
where you're told to get out of your comfort zone and do something that you
don't normally do. And Helen Haig-Brown,
her mother and her grandmother are known for working with revitalizing language,
creating documentaries of indigenous feminism, things of that nature.
So she turned to me for the science fiction and she was like,
I've been asked to create a science fiction,
and I'm not sure how to go about it. And I didn't want to, you know,
tie her in or give her categories or give her labels.
And so I was just discussing a lot of things that had been happening.
And then she said, oh, oh, I get it.
We're taking the fiction out of science fiction.
And that actually has become a kind of mantra because when we
write stories such as let's say Waubgeshig Rice,
who's Anishinaabe and wrote "Moon of the Crusted Snow" and it's working
very much with climate change with climate crises and then
how as the community, do you respond to that? And in this case,
as we now often experience all the power was out,
there was no way to communicate otherwise, right?
And he writes a story set very much in the future,
but the actions that are done within the community,
such as deciding that as they run out of food,
that there will be hunters that go out and get moose or
buffalo or deer.
And what they do is they bring it back to the community and the ones who are
first served, first taken care of are the elders. They're,
they're given the best parts and they're taken care of.
And then it becomes split up and an important feature of niche
thinking or [inaudible] thinking is that, um,
even with our enemies,
if we have enemies that during a time of crisis there is to be love
and generosity and giving.
And so you actually make a point of going to an enemy after the
elders and giving them your gifts, giving them your money, your rice,
your wild rice, your maple syrup, and other things. Such as in our nations,
which goes very much against federal government of the US or Canada
we are called the pacifist to anarchists.
We actually don't have a hierarchy.
And so we don't have a chief. I mean,
and the process of colonization,
there've been chiefs that have been given to us or tribal councils given to us.
But the people that are recognized in the community, quietly as leaders,
are the ones who stay in the background.
They're the ones that are giving very quietly without
needing acknowledgement and everyone in the community rose up
knowing that. And so they honor and revere that person.
So, you know, this writing, um, that we're talking about,
hasn't that been going on for a thousand years before?
And then you come to this point and you say, well,
now we're going to try and jump into this box that's science,
called science fiction. And do people look at you like, well, geez,
how do I do that? What's the, you know, that, that part, like?
You know that's a beautiful, beautiful question.
And it's actually why I backed away from science fiction
and, uh, followed the tradition of Afrofuturism.
And I want to really give credit to Alondra Nelson,
who now is, you know, a famous person working for President Biden.
Uh, but actually as a scholar and a school activist,
she put together in 2002 a series of scholarly articles
and it had all been started with online social media and
conversations back and forth asking this very question that you're asking,
you know,
are we using a colonizing tool by even investing in
science fiction? Uh,
because much of science fiction is a colonizing tool and about
contact and about what you do with the alien and the other and what are the
techniques that you use to exploit the natural resources, et cetera,
et cetera. I mean,
science fiction in the late 19th century grew right alongside the
industrial revolution and so it took on a lot of those components.
Futurism in the way we mean it is not at all the
Italian fascist art futurism,
so it's really important to recognize that. Afrofuturism,
which started first and was really established in 2002 talks about
stories that are of body soul
and mind.
Now at the time that Afrofuturism started going in
2002, and then I had a tenure track job that Ursula K.
Le Guin very kindly supported me for.
She wanted a native scholar in the science fiction area,
and we loved her dearly and she has passed on now.
What was she like?
Oh my goodness, Ursula. I spent many, many times with her.
She had such a generosity of spirit, such a witty intellect.
There were times in conversations where I'd think back over it and then really
start laughing, you know, cause I had missed, uh, a bit of her wit.
She's written essays, you know, where she grew up with Robert Oppenheimer,
you know,
riding around on the couch and listening to conversations with he and her dad.
But she also had two Indian uncles that stayed with them and it,
she didn't write about it until much later in her life.
She had conversations with me all the time about it,
but those two Indian uncles really,
really impacted her. And excuse me.
You getting, are you getting lost? Did you lose? I,
I keep losing the little, oh, here we go.
When you, when you were with Ursula, did that, um,
ignite your imagination for these, you know,
sort of alternative histories or see, you know,
kind of things did that lead you to the, into this path that you're,
you're so far down into now?
Yes. Maybe better put because when your niche and you,,
I went straight to California, LA,
Hollywood to get schooling and I had never seen a TV.
I had never seen a film. I came from the bush.
Where we had no running water or pipes or electricity
or things like that. So it was really a shock.
And what Ursula was so wonderful at with so many people,
uh, not just myself,
is that she quietly draws you out and gives you
confidence to go forward. In fact,
I had even asked her to write a forward for "Walking the Clouds" and she said to
me, "Oh no, no, Grace, no,
as much as I would love to make sure that you keep it Indigenous voices
centered." And I'm so grateful to her for that now.
Angelica Gorodischer, who is a writer in Argentina,
and Ursula actually translated her stories in English, with help.
She was always doing that.
She was always finding areas around the world globally that
maybe were not in English that could be translated and could get a,
give a sense of in that case, the horrible,
horrible political regime that Angelica lived through, uh,
with all of the disappearing and the fact that even writing something too
bluntly could get you disappeared or thrown in jail.
And so there, science fiction was used as a veil,
as an allegory,
so that you could talk about things in the future about what was really going
on currently, right?
But then they couldn't pull you away from it because you can say, well,
actually, you know, this is an imagined future,
or this is an imagined alternative world.
So there in many places of Latin America that she'd helped out and they were
using it as a veil.
And she actually suggested at one point that science fiction is the
allegory of the 20th century.
When we say science fiction,
is that a way of being able to say things that are uncomfortable from a
human rights perspective?
If you just wrote a story that was a human rights story. If you put it,
if you label it under science fiction,
does that make it easier to say things that make people uncomfortable?
Um, if it could be.
And I also think that almost the label of science fiction has
quietly faded away. John Reader, a very dear friend of mine,
who's just written absolutely wonderful books on, you know,
"is this a genre or what is this"" said and many of us have adopted his way of
thinking. Uh, and he works with Native Hawaiians at the University of Hawaii.
"It's really not a genre.
It's more like it's become a family of resemblances".
And we really picked up on that because the family of resemblances really are
different. Like when you read it as a futuristic text,
that is written from the perspective of someone,
that's the important thing about all the futurism.
It's always written by the author who has that perspective,
who has that culture, who potentially has that language.
Allies can help out by promoting the books and the artwork and other
things,
but it's not really a futurism unless it's written specifically
from,
let's say a Malaysian who is losing their
island, and it's a trans story and they're, they're mutating into coral.
Becoming symbiotic with coral.
And that's an interesting feature because do you
call that science in the sense that Fredric Jameson talked about
hard science. Oh, I should say this. We absolutely go for hard science,
but when we do science,
we don't just simply do the science. We have ceremony,
we have song, we have drumming,
we create inventive new words in our language to
encompass and adapt to these ever-evolving ideas.
And it's that,
that makes it quite quite different from simply
picking up a lab coat, working with a beaker. You can have all that.
We have tribal schools that do genetic bioengineering, you know,
but what becomes more important is going back to Aki,
going back to the land, being a part of the land.
So that's where the land back movements have actually
come from idealists in indigenous futurism.
In class, you know, when kids, young kids come to your school, you know,
they might be looking at a genetic class. Like they want to understand their,
the evolution of their genes going back a thousand years. Right.
And then they come to your class. They don't necessarily know what it is.
They don't know what those genes are.
They don't necessarily know what their culture is.
How does it feel when they realize how important this
is?
It's just as important as at their genes and this is another way of studying
their past, you know, how, do you see a light come on in their faces?
Ah, they becomes so, so excited.
I'm like Cornell West in the sense that he loves to teach
freshmen. And I love to teach freshmen too,
along with my grad courses and other things that I'm doing.
Partially because of what you've just suggested,
which is that they're really grappling with their
identity and kind of wondering,
and often are biracial or tri-racial and
are searching and,
and they thirst they thirst for these images. And,
and what I do is as I give them the history, because that,
that can be pretty, you know, it can wound,
[inaudible] is what we call it. Where you have this open wound,
that as you hear things and take things in your wound starts
opening, right. And how do you heal that wound?
And so the way I heal the wound is by giving them all these stories in
the future, because part of it is like, let's say for students from Kuwait,
we have a lot of international students from Syria, Kuwait,
uh, just all over.
And what they end up doing is they end up getting inspired
to write their own stories, because this is always an option,
is not just to listen and take in stories and analyze and talk about it,
but to create their own.
And currently there's a Kuwait poetry circle that is now
worldwide.
And many of my students from my class became so excited about
all the futurisms, where you have spirit, body, soul,
and mind.
And you can talk about those things as opposed to a cyberpunk in the 1980s,
it was all about mind versus body and how can we
upload our minds and how can we get away from our meat and our flesh
and our bodies.
And in some ways I think futurism was a really wonderful
reaction to that displacement of body and
emotion and feeling and taste and smell and
all of the things that are a part of our lives, right, and,
and it allowed opportunities to open up in that kind of way.
Grace, this has been incredible. You know, I just,
for those of you watching or listening, there's one thing it, it strikes me as,
as you're talking and for me, the way I'm interpreting a lot of this,
I love this word, futurism.
I do love the idea that you write your story and maybe you
write your story, which has some healing in it that maybe it takes you to the,
a future you want.
And so you're both to the beginning of the conversation,
you look at the past where you are now and what do I, where am I going?
And it feels like there's a common thread there that is incredibly powerful and
that everybody has the story and everybody has the right to claim their story
and their future. That's kind of what I'm taking away from this.
So it's been remarkable to listen to you and to where,
you know, people should, should look at your work. We'll link to, you know,
some of your ideas, your book, you're anthology, what you're doing.
And we encourage people to kind of really find out about this incredible work
that you're actually doing alongside all of these great people.
It's incredibly inspiring.
Thank you for taking the time with us today. It was really a pleasure.
Oh, thank you very much.