Indigenous Futurism As Self-Care For The Imagination

by nicole lefthand

Photo source Pixabay

Let’s go back, way back…to 1999. The ending of the twentieth century was a big deal in American media and conscience. The Y2K technological worries lent a sense of doom to the anticipation of a new age. The 2000s represented the future. And here we were, about to enter the future and wondering if we could take our past with us. Would all our technological advances cease to work in this new era? Y2K wasn’t just a term for the overhyped computer issues of media speculation but also embodied cultural anxiety about societal progress.

After all, progress as a cornerstone of post-industrial Western thought is only measured linearly. In 1999, we wondered if we had made enough progress technologically – because technology represented the future – to really be ready for our anticipated reality of galactic travel, flying cars, ultra-modern Fifth Element outfits, bionic body parts and Star Wars-esque epic drama.

As it turned out, we didn’t need to be ready. We were already the future.

Photo from Science Service Program, 1972

Now, here we are, twenty plus years later grappling with the same questions. Indigenous peoples across the world are at the forefront of tying the past and future together as we reach the tipping point of cultural continuity and basic survival. What can we take with us? What do we want to take with us? How do we pack our living time capsule of knowledge, language, traditions, ceremony, love, and teachings? And how do we pack trauma? Ideally, we could leave all trauma behind but inevitably it always finds its way into our metaphorical luggage. So how do we pack trauma to ensure it doesn’t poison everything else? So that it holds a place of usefulness in teaching lessons, values, and gratitude?

The importance of self-care is often emphasized in the face of these big questions. As we take time to nurture our bodies, emotions, spirits, and mental health, may we remember we are not acting in a vacuum. Our own health and care affect our families and communities. The self isn’t limited to just one individual, one body but rather is personified as the collective self, the global self. Indigenous self-care means we care for ourselves as part of the organism known as Earth. Self-care and the care of our entire planet are synonymous.

Globalization brings goods from thousands of miles away to our doors; it also brings news from across the world and a consciousness of where we are as a planet. We are beginning to feel the hangover of the industrial revolution. We are acutely aware of the overuse of our planet’s resources and the massive economic and cultural restructuring it will take to end and heal that.

Photo Credit JR Korpa, Unsplash

When we wake up in the morning and pray, there are people we’ve never met on the other side of the world making the same prayers. The concerns that often occupy our thoughts are likely not much different than worries found in communities around the world. Even our animal relatives experience the stresses of loss, worry, parenting, cheating spouses, and getting their basic needs met. They have social connections and structures just as complex as ours; and they keep going, just like us.

Futurism in pop culture strongly influenced our ideas about the twenty-first century. Some of the projections were fantastical. Many posed serious questions about what value systems would inform our increasingly complex and infrastructurally advanced world. The basis of imaginings about the “world after” rests on the fact that it will be the world inherited by future generations. The resources and structures of their world will likely have been put in place by today’s societies. Fascination with the future has much more to do with the implications of the present reality because imaginings of the decades or centuries ahead are reflections of the consequences of the past and present.  

Mainstream science fictions spin narratives of interplanetary colonization: the conquest of the new New World. Indigenous Futurism occupies a space that stretches beyond clapping back at neocolonialism. It imbues our self-concept with the freedom to dream. Our ancestors dreamed and prayed us into existence. Families are dreaming and praying their children and grandchildren into being. Thoughts and words are the real superpower of the future. Decades of genocidal efforts have not blown out the flame of imagination in our youth. Intergenerational knowledge will not be lost indefinitely; it will be discovered again.  

So when we think of the future, may we think of it with optimism. May we be comfortable with our responsibility in creating the narrative we want; and, may we also enjoy a sense of security and faith in our own ability to ensure health and longevity in our legacy. Rather than asking what can be brought with us from the past, what can we bring back from the future to the present? What is the role of futurism if we are already the future? It is the privilege of dreaming. We won’t let anyone take our dreams away because we are the heroes of our own journeys.