Kristina Baudemann "Indigenous Future Imaginaries and the Question of Utopia" (transcript) Indigenous Futures Cluster Presents hosted by Initiative for Indigenous Futures November 2, 2017 Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology Concordia University (Montreal, QC) video available at http://abtec.org/iif/outputs/indigenous-futures-cluster-presents/#baudemann info@abtec.org [pause] 00:14 Jason Lewis: Okay, welcome everybody. Super happy today to welcome Kristina Baudemann, to speak with us about indigenous future imaginaries and the question of utopia. Quick bio. So, Kristina is an instructor and PHD student in the Department of English and American Studies, at the Europa-UniversitŠt Flensburg in Germany. She's contributed to the Extrapolation special issues on Indigenous Futurism and to The Fictions of Stephen Graham Jones: A Critical Companion. In 2014, she was a Fulbright fellow in American Indian Studies Institute at the University of Arizona in Tuscon. Her dissertation project is entitled, "Indigenous North American Futures: Representation and the Future Imaginary in Native America, First Nations and MŽtis Speculative Arts and Literatures." And it was awarded the 2017 Juergen-Sa§e Award for research in Aboriginal studies by the Association of Canadian Studies in German-speaking Countries. 01:13 Jason Lewis: She came to my attention because of the article she wrote in the Extrapolation's special issue, which was a really, I think, well written and very well researched investigation of Indigenous futures, particularly around visual art as well as other parts of it as well. And then she contacted me and asked if she could come and sort of hang out with us for a bit. So she's been with us as a visiting scholar for the last two weeks, after first going to Imaginative for a couple of days, and then coming here and hanging out. So, it's been really fantastic having her around, she kinda came at a good point because as some of you know, we're putting up the AbTeC Retrospective at the Ellen Gallery, that opens up on Saturday. So, it's been great having her part of that mix. We pulled her in to carry things, and help with things and she's been really fantastic, and generally really great to have around as a guest. And her and I have had some really generative conversations actually, for me anyways. Good conversations around these topics. So, I'm really looking forward to the talk she's gonna give today. So, let's all welcome her. [applause] 02:30 Kristina Baudemann: Thank you so much, Jason, for these words. Bonjour. Good afternoon. So, thank you all so much for being here. As you just heard, my name is Kristina Baudemann. I'm a PHD student in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Flensburg in Germany. I'm happy to be here today to talk about Indigenous future imaginaries and the question of Utopia. I'm currently writing my dissertation about Indigenous North American futures. In my project, I consider how indigenous future imaginaries become represented in Native American and First Nation speculative fiction, arts, and digital narratives. As you just heard, I've been a visiting researcher at Obx Lab for experimental media for two weeks now, where I'm observing the fantastic work that is being done here. The Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace Network has kindly agreed to let me speak about my work today, and to present some of the ideas that have come up during the writing of my dissertation. 03:27 KB: Before I start, I would like to acknowledge the indigenous owners and protectors of the land on which Concordia University is located. I would like to pay respect to the Kanien'keh‡:ka Nation that is recognized as the custodians of the lands and waters on which we gather today. I also sincerely want to thank Jason Lewis and Skawennati, for so kindly giving me this platform to speak publicly at Concordia University. I'm indebted to the wonderful people at Obx, who have been so incredibly kind and welcoming, for sharing their knowledge and experiences with me. I'm grateful to be included in the conversation about Indigenous Future Imaginaries. 04:02 KB: So in this talk, I want to do two things. First of all, I would like to explore different terms that have been used to describe indigenous representations of the future, most notably Indigenous Futurism and Indigenous Future Imaginary. And then zoom in on the urgency of the future in indigenous work. We will then look at a particular one of these representations, utopia and related concepts that have yet to be defined in relation to Indigenous Future Imaginaries. 04:34 KB: I like starting off with this image, because I love it so much. Extraterrestrial species are gathering around the historical Tuba City trading posts. Apparently, they have come to trade with the natives of the place, Navajo and Hopi people. Tuba City is located on the outskirts of the Navajo Nation Reservation in Arizona. In this painting though, the Arizona dessert seems to blend with the landscape of Tatooine, Luke Skywalker's home planet from the Star Wars movie franchise. The domes of the spaceport Mos Eisley can be seen in the background. And to the left, in the background, you can see a bantha, a furry beast of burden, native to the planet Tatooine. 05:12 KB: What is this place? Where is it? And why is it so exciting and so fascinating to look at this image? This is Ryan Singer's painting "Tuba City Spaceport," that was done in 2011, it's acrylic on canvas. Ryan Singer is a prolific Navajo artist, who's known for placing sci-fi characters in the Arizona and New Mexico landscapes. He says about his painting that he imagined it as representing a multi-verse. And I quote him here, "And I mention where life on the Navajo reservation, specifically Tuba City, would co-exist with the life on the planet Tatooine, mainly the spaceport Mos Eisley. Hence, the title Tuba City Spaceport." Now Star Wars is set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but Singer's painting seems to map out an image of a future. 06:00 KB: The Navajo trade has extended throughout the universe, and indigenous nations entertain amicable relations with extraterrestrial species. The painting carries a sense of possibility, of openness and futurity that would not be as prevalent without the Sci-Fi characters. In Singer's artworks, the indigenous nations of Arizona and New Mexico can become anything, even intergalactic travellers and traders. The memory of a traditional past is not antithetical to, but it blends smoothly with fantastic visions of the future. When N. Scott Momaday famously described being indigenous as an act of the imagination, he acknowledged the role of creativity in gathering memories of the past and mapping out pathways into the future. Many people have understood Momaday's statement as implying that indigenous people can imagine themselves becoming anything. [background conversation] 07:06 KB: So yeah, many people have understood Momaday's statement as implying that indigenous people can imagine themselves becoming anything, and that the mere act of imagining harvests the power of pushing through horrible times into better futures. In short, that the futures of indigenous people can take any form. And indeed, in the incredible artwork such as Singer's Tuba City Spaceport, indigenous North American artists imagine different versions of the future for themselves and their people across a wide variety of media. These works have come to be referred to as indigenous futurisms. The term is often used synonymously with indigenous science fiction. 07:46 KB: However, in analogy to Afrofuturisms, indigenous futurisms cover a much wider range of representations than science fiction imaginaries. A more appropriate definition might be thus, indigenous-centered speculative stories about the future in any shape, in any medium, including but not limited to indigenous science fiction. One of the earliest contemporary indigenous futurisms is Gerald Vizenor's 1976 novel, "Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart." But the most recent manifestations include Jeff Barnaby's film Rhymes for Young Ghouls, artwork by Ryan Singer, Debra Yepa-Pappan, Joseph Earp, Chief Lady Bird, and Wendy Red Star. This is another Singer. And the music videos of A Tribe Called Red. There's even an indigenous futurisms mix tape carrying the wonderful artwork of Wendy Red Star. 08:44 KB: So what's the difference between indigenous futurisms and indigenous future imaginaries? Indigenous future imaginaries is Jason Lewis' term that refers to the wide range of representations of the future in indigenous cultures. [Transcript substituted by speaker with ÒWith his term Lewis evokes Charles TaylorÕs notion of the Òsocial imaginaryÓ that refers to all the Ôway[s] people ÔimagineÕ their social existence.Õ TaylorÕs social imaginary goes beyond conscious representation and is Òcarried in images, stories, and legendsÓ] In analogy, the indigenous future imaginary might be defined as, all the ways indigenous people imagine their future existence, which may include positive and negative imaginings, speculation, what-if scenarios, extrapolation and prediction. As Jason Lewis puts it, "One can think of the future imaginary as a distinct part of the current social imaginary." And I would add that indigenous future imaginaries are not only carried in images and stories, but they are omnipresent in indigenous North American realities, from the way people talk and think, to the way they conduct politics, business, as well as personal intra and inter-community relationships. 10:03 KB: Indigenous future imaginaries are a part of their realities and go beyond conscious, or even unconscious representation. Indigenous futurisms take the form of literature, film, plays, visual and new media art, even music and music videos. In light of this trans-medial heterogeneity, it might even be appropriate to define indigenous futurisms as speculative stories about the future, but also an analogy to Afrofuturisms as a cultural aesthetic or, as Wikipedia defines indigenous futurisms, as a movement. One might simply say indigenous futurisms do not only carry, but they foreground indigenous future imaginaries. Indigenous futurisms show an awareness of these underlying future imaginaries. They discuss them, they subvert them, they criticize them, mock them, celebrate them, and extend them. Similar to science fiction, indigenous futurisms do not predict the future. But they do make suggestions about how to walk from a colonial past and present to what Sidner Larson calls a better imagined future. 11:18 KB: I want to dig a little deeper into why thinking about the future imaginaries might be such an urgent thing for many indigenous artists. Cherokee fantasy writer Daniel Heath Justice has called the Cherokee people survivors in this post-Apocalyptic frontier. In the course of American Indian removal in the US, the Cherokee people were forced to go on what would later become known as the Cherokee trail of tears, "A brutal thousand-mile trek to the darkening lands of the West where the spirits of the dead reside. The Cherokees were subjected to physical abuse, disease, malnutrition, and dislocation from the lands they had known as home for ages." 11:57 KB: Grace Dillon similarly compares the suffering and loss indigenous people had to endure, and are still enduring, to apocalyptic scenarios, otherwise only seen in science fiction films. And she says, "The Native Apocalypse, if contemplated seriously, has already taken place." This is distinctly different from Western science fiction imaginaries where the apocalypse is speculation. Whether it is a metaphor or in the biblical sense, a revelation of meaning and the end of history, the apocalypse is in the future, it is to come, it is to be hoped for, to be feared. In contrast, native scholars have conceptualized the apocalypse as occupying the past and present. Lawrence Gross accordingly explains, "American Indians, in general, have seen the end of our worlds. There are no Indian cultures in the United States that remain wholly unaffected by the presence of your Americans. In effect, the old world of our ancestors has come to an end." Sidner Larson calls native people "Post-apocalypse people," and with reference to this term, Gross concludes, "Thus, American Indians are living in a post-apocalyptic environment." However, very much unlike characters in movies and TV shows, Indigenous people have learned to live and thrive in their post-apocalyptic environments. 13:18 KB: According to Dillon, according to Larson, to Justice and Gross, human creativity play a major role in that positive act of survival that does not only consist in wandering devastated landscapes and mourning the past, but much more in rebuilding their worlds while holding on to traditional teachings. As Gross says, the fact that Native people are post-apocalypse people does not mean, "That the worldview that previously informed the cultures has also become defunct. It simply means that American Indians are in the process of building new worlds. Worlds that are true to our history, but cognizant of present realities." The experience of witnessing the end of one's world is shared by all people across the globe whose cultures have been broken by colonialism, whose people have been wiped out by genocide, and whose homes and landscapes have turned into war zones, sites of destruction and devastation. The more thoroughly a culture is destroyed, the more thoroughly its future imaginaries are erased. This is I think both a symptom and a tool of the colonial system, to make the colonized believe that they cannot have a future of their own making. 14:27 KB: This is very true for Indigenous people, many of whom have not only had their traditions, but also their stories and languages taken away. Amir Eshel explains, "The sense of a world that closes in like a trap, of a language that diminishes is a fate shared by countless human beings around the globe who face threats to their existence, values, and liberty. Facing a recent traumatic past or imminent destruction, they've struggled with a sense of a world deprived of a future. To prohibit alternative visions of the future as a common means of oppression." As Lyman Tower Sargent suggests, in many Western Christian traditions, dreaming has come to be viewed as sinful, probably because it was subversive and potentially threatening to the established order. He gives an example, he says, "Hankering after better life imperiled my immortal soul. If I suggested that there was a different and better way, I had obviously been corrupted by the devil and would be rapidly dispatched to join him in the afterlife." And I believe that this sentiment is very prevalent even today, even in dominant and privileged white societies, where dreaming is and has been labelled as excessive and harmful to the dreamer's moral integrity. 15:42 KB: If you think about women reading novels in the 18th and 19th century, which was highly frowned upon, to the fear of visions of a different world in the US, when these visions are immediately labelled as communist. Dreaming is a way out of a narrowed reality, not escapism, but a possibility to rebuild. Israeli writer David Grossman considers the power of imagining in order to overcome the presence of a bleak, ruined, post-apocalyptic, or simply a non-existent future. In Grossman's case, this is the experience of losing his son Uri in the second Lebanon War. So, for Grossman, the way out is being an artist, one of many ways, but this is his way. Being a writer. So, he says, "I write and the world does not close in on me, it does not grow smaller, it moves in the direction of what is open, future, possible. I imagine, and the act of imagination revives me. I'm not fossilized or paralyzed in the face of predators, I invent characters. Sometimes I feel as if I'm digging people out of ice in which reality has encased them, I write. I feel the many possibilities that exist in every human situation, and I feel my capacity to choose among them." 16:57 KB: Indigenous writers and artists protect their people from having their worlds close in on them, from having the colonizers' narrative stifle them and diminish their worlds and future imaginaries. Through their creative imagination, they break open these colonial narratives and they reinvent existing representation. From colonial themes, and tropes, and science fiction, to the colonizers' language itself, English, to create Indigenous centered stories. Indeed, Sidner Larson states that, "By imagining, Indigenous people transform their post-apocalyptic cultural landscapes into new worlds." And he says, "The ways in which American Indian people have suffered, survived, and managed to go on, communicated through storytelling, have tremendous potential to affect the future of all mankind." So, here's another example of an Indigenous artist imagining herself in the future. This is a digital collage by Chicago-based artist Debra Yepa-Pappan. She's Jemez Pueblo and Korean. The collage as you can see consists of multiple parts. The teepee and the shape of the woman in the foreground are taken from ethnographic photographs. 18:14 KB: Both the photographs are done by Edward S. Curtis as part of his monumental project to reproduce a precolonial state of indigenous cultures in photography. Curtis, like many of his contemporaries, thought that indigenous people were vanishing, and he lamented the natural law that dictated that, as the weaker species, they should vanish. Yepa-Pappan transports these ethnographic images into the 23rd century of the sci-fi TV show Star Trek. The Starship Enterprise, as you can see, is hovering in the background, and the daughter of American Horse from Curtis's photograph makes the Vulcan greeting of Mr. Spock. And if you look at her ears, she might very well be part Vulcan. 18:55 KB: In this image we see both the past and the future. In colonial discourses, teepees and braids are representational code for the past, for bygone times. However, the sci-fi imagery in the collage is code for the future. Yepa-Pappan put her own face onto the collage, grounding her artwork in contemporary indigenous realities. "Live long and prosper" allows us to imagine many different stories. From an ironic reversion of first contact to a very positive vision of contact as a moment of peace and friendship, but this native and Vulcan girl greeting us and telling us to "live long and prosper." 19:32 KB: In a 2015 interview, Yepa-Pappan talked about the importance of imagining indigenous futures. And I quote her here, "The fact that we can think about the future and realize possibilities in the future is because we are here now in the present. We survived the atrocities brought on by colonizers, settlers, and so on. We shouldn't forget the past in our histories, but it shouldn't allow ourselves to get stuck there. Anything taught in school in regard to American Indians only ever reaches a certain point in history, and that's why there are so many non-natives that believe that Indians don't exist, that we've all been killed off and only exist in the past. We need to move beyond that part in history and show people that we've survived. We're here in the present and thriving and creating some awesome art. It's important for us to look to the future and imagine what it could be like, because that is where our children are destined to go." 20:32 KB: This act of looking into the future and imagining what it could be like might be called utopianism. Lyman Tower Sargent, a prominent scholar in the field of utopian studies, defines utopianism as social dreaming. And surely with their cultures devastated by colonialism, indigenous people have had much need for social dreaming. Some people might even call the work that has come out of OBX created by Skawennati and AbTeC, utopian. After all, utopianism is concerned with devising practices and social and political structures more beneficial to society than the presently existing ones. Or devising practical alterations to existing structures toward a better imagined future. 21:15 KB: This includes creating new forms of representation in order to be able to visually depict such a future. The particular manifestation of utopianism is utopia, which roughly means versions of a better and longer life. There are more particular definitions, but I will get to that in a minute. You might be thinking now, why does this even matter? Obviously, you do not need the term utopia to create meaningful and future-oriented art. However, I believe this is an important issue for the discourse about this art, since the term utopia keeps coming up in critic literature, at conferences, in interview questions and on artist panels. To give you a recent example, in the round table discussion on story telling in VR at the 2017 imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival in Toronto, artistic director Jason Ryle interviewed the artists and film makers behind the project "2167." That is, I quote from the website, "a series of VR installations, virtual reality installations, that imagine life 150 years or seven generations in the future through an indigenous lens." 22:29 KB: The pieces include "The Hand" by film maker Danis Goulet, "Blueberry Pie Under a Martian Sky" by multimedia artist Scott Benesiinaabandan, "Each Branch Determined" by the multimedia artist Collective Post Commodity, "Honour Dance" by artist Kent Monkman, and a teaser of Jeff Barnaby's upcoming virtual reality video game, "Westwind." The setting of Goulet's "The Hand" looks a lot like a waste littered landscape of post-Apocalyptic films. So, Ryle asked Goulet whether her virtual reality was utopian or dystopian, and whether she, and I quote, "weighed this idea of purposely creating a utopia or a dystopia." Goulet answered that she had certainly considered the question, that she had initially meant to render a positive vision of the future, but then, and I quote, "Trump got elected and it was just such a shit time, it was like screw it, I can't do utopian, we need to fight." 23:23 KB: So with this answer Goulet implicitly suggests that dystopia encourages action and resistance, whereas utopia portrays an ideal future which might not be apt to bring about change. Dystopia comes from a place of anger and frustration, but utopia comes from a place of peace and satisfaction, or at the very least a place of hope. This was an excellent question. I was siting in the audience and I had been asking myself the exact same thing. Is it utopia? Is it dystopia? Not only about Goulet's piece but about the entire project. Is the collective vision created with these individual pieces a utopian one? Ever since my friend, a utopian scholar Verena Adamik first explained the concept of utopia to me, I've been stuck on the question of what to do with it with regards to indigenous art. And why would this question even matter? 24:17 KB: I think the question matters because utopia is a concept we like using to make sense of a particular vision of the future that we are presented with, either in film, in a TV show, even in an image or painting. Utopia does not have to be a hopeful vision. It can also be a nightmare-ish one, called negative utopia or dystopia. So dystopia is a particular type of utopia, not actually an antithetical concept. Many works by indigenous artists and writers have been called dystopian. For instance, William Sanders' short story, "When This World is All on Fire," where in a world devastated by man-made climate change, white people, in an ironic reversal of historical roles, are fleeing to native reservations to escape the fires. Jeff Barnaby's short film, "File Under Miscellaneous" has been described as, "set in a dystopian future where natives undergo gruesome surgery to fit into the dominant white culture." And of course, Danis Goulet's "The Hand" has been described as dystopia, among other people, by Goulet herself. 25:23 KB: Now, let me briefly reiterate Grace Dillon's thought that it is almost commonplace to think that the native apocalypse, if contemplated seriously, has already taken place. As Dillon makes clear, this is an essential difference between indigenous futurisms and science fiction imaginaries. In science fiction the apocalypse, meaning in this case, the catastrophic end of the world, is fiction. In indigenous futurisms, the apocalypse is historical reality. Just from seeing their work, I think that indigenous artists and filmmakers are acutely aware of this distinction, especially William Sanders' short story, Danis Goulet's "The Hand," and Postcommodity's "Each Branch Determined," play with the notion that indigenous people are post-apocalypse people, that they have already seen the apocalypse and have adapted and strengthened traditional structures to survive. 26:14 KB: In Sanders' short story, this is the reason native people can endure in a post climate change world without problems, but non-native societies have entirely collapsed and sunken into chaos. Similarly, the native people in "The Hand" are by no means helpless victims as one initially assumes. Rather, they deal with futuristic surveillance technology the same way they have dealt with colonial surveillance and oppression, by enduring and resisting. This suggests that native people are not less fit for the future, but they are actually better fit for the future than non-native societies are. 26:48 KB: In "Each Branch Determined," you immerse yourself in the New Mexican landscape that looks equally dystopian, entirely empty of human life, but littered with mysterious objects that look like remainders of a high-tech civilization, blackened with bush fires that seem to be ravaging the landscape, possibly the site of atomic bomb testing. However, as Raven Chacon explained during the interview session, and I quote him here, "Throughout the virtual reality experience, you see craters in the earth that look like exploded bombs. We wanted to create an ambiguous landscape that perhaps wasn't an accident by an enemy, so it could be, but maybe it wasn't. But instead, an intentional controlled burn, which is something we do in the desert to manage our own lands. Things grow in weird areas, and as invasive species come into the desert, that action becomes more necessary. These craters are perhaps not created from bombings, but instead are kivas, places where you pray." 27:52 KB: Postcommodity's immersion is thus very aware of the audiences' associations of a landscape on fire with catastrophe, as well as people's immediate conclusion that such a landscape could never be inhabited by native people, because according to colonial imaginaries, native people are incapable of adapting, and have no place in a post-technological futuristic environment. The white noise and other disrupting sound effects continuously draw the user's attention to the artificial nature of the landscape, to the fact that it is entirely simulated. These effects enhance the message that, like the New Mexican landscape in the immersion, Postcommodity's virtual reality is itself a controlled artificial environment, controlled by native people. 28:35 KB: With this in mind, you might realize that, strictly speaking, definitions of dystopia do not entirely fit any of the art works. Lucy Sargisson, for instance, states that, "In dystopia, the core wrongs of our reality are identified by the author or artist, and then stretched to a nightmarish extreme. And I cannot say with certainty that the society we get a glimpse of in the hunt is considerable worse than what native people have endured or are enduring." The same is true for "Each Branch Determined." Sanders' short story, Jeff Barnaby's "Rhymes for Young Ghouls," and many other works by native writers and artists that have been called dystopia. Rather than heightening a current trend or a small grievance to a nightmarish extreme, many of the dystopian aspects in these works are metaphors for colonial horrors. By being translated into metaphor, these horrors are extrapolated, and they are emphasized and discussed, but they are not necessarily heightened or exaggerated. 29:44 KB: I'm not saying that these works do not have dystopian themes. And they certainly use a visual aesthetic associated with dystopian representation, but they also dismantle dystopia by suggesting that native people already know how to deal with the end of the world. In these works, dystopia as a narrative paradigm is called into question and is challenged. These fantastic works demonstrate that both utopia and dystopia are a matter of perspective. If we say that a certain work shows dystopia, we need to ask, whose dystopia, and why? With a surprising twist, the craters might be kivas rather than a war zone. "Each Branch Determined" takes up exactly that question and draws our awareness to the fact that when we see dystopia, what we really see is a language of representation. By superimposing white noise and other effects that break the illusion created with the medium, Postcommodity manipulate this representational language. What we initially thought to be a nightmarish world, we gradually come to understand as possibly a better world, one in which indigenous people have full control over their land and over the representation of this land. So, if Postcommodity's immersion can be interpreted as a vision of a better world, could this be utopia? 31:07 KB: Let us zoom out to explore utopia, this overarching concept. Lyman Tower Sargent in a much quoted definition says about utopia that it is, "A non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space." To give you a broader description by the same scholar, "A utopia can be simply a fantasy, it can be a description of a desirable or an undesirable society, an extrapolation, a warning, an alternative to the present, or a model to be achieved. And the intentional community as utopia adds a seventh purpose, to demonstrate that living a better life is possible in the here and now. The utopian views humanity and its future with either hope or alarm. If viewed with hope, the result is usually utopia. If viewed with alarm, the result is usually dystopia. But basically, utopianism is a philosophy of hope, and it is characterized by the transformation of generalized hope into a description of a non-existent society. 32:18 KB: In her book "Fool's Gold?", moving on, Lucy Sargisson has this really handy chart to explain how she and many other scholars understand utopia, and how utopia relates to other concepts. So this chart is slightly different from Lyman Tower Sargent's definition. So at the top you have utopianism that she describes as a human impulse and a tendency. We are dissatisfied with and critical of the present, you engage in contemporary debates, and you desire and imagine alternatives. The particular manifestation of utopianism is utopia. It could be a manifestation in text, in art, or in reality. And then, it branches off into eutopia, or utopia, and dystopia. Both are similar concepts, both are dissatisfied with and critical of the present, both engage in contemporary debates. But eutopia is a desire for a better world, for a better society, and dystopia imagines a worse society. And I should note that a work of art could be both, it could be an eutopia and a dystopia. And it could get even more complicated than that. So this is really, just a very rough chart. 33:38 KB: We have established that many indigenous futurisms are dystopias in some sense of the word, but somehow no one seems to believe that there is such a thing as indigenous utopia, or I should say, eutopia, a positive model of a future indigenous society. Some scholars have hinted, indigenous eutopia would be, could be, possibly a post-colonial utopia. According to these scholars, when the colonist dreams of a better world, this better world includes the absence of the colonizer, and return to the olden days. So, if there was such a thing as eutopia in indigenous literatures and arts, it would be used satirically only, to show that post-colonial utopia is not possible, because colonialism for indigenous people has never been post. The colonizer never left the land, such a departure is hard to imagine. It is hard to imagine what a return to traditional culture would look like if the colonizer did in fact leave the land. 34:35 KB: To say that there is no such thing as a positive Indigenous North American utopia today, or that the term simply does not apply at all, I think is to say that colonialism destroyed Indigenous culture so thoroughly and irrevocably that this destruction is final, and that it, "Resulted in the loss of some of the myths that almost certainly included utopian elements." This is to say that Indigenous utopia, an Indigenous dream of a future, and even of a better life, can only ever be a thing of the past, and that Indigenous patterns of social dreaming has been lost in colonial times. Like Indigenous cultures, Indigenous dreaming is implicitly assumed to have vanished. This also raises the discussion of colonial devastation to the main and only theme Indigenous art could ever have, and blatantly disregards the overwhelming sense of presence, of agency, of hope to be found in so many works by Indigenous authors and artists. 35:36 KB: Lastly, to say that Indigenous people do not have utopian visions of a society radically better or based on a more perfect principle, disregards the work that has come out of AbTeC, the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace Research Network. AbTeC's Scott Benesiinaabandan's work "Blueberry Pie Under a Martian Sky" for instance, envisions virtual reality as a medium for the renewal and the continuation of Indigenous oral stories and traditional scientific teachings. Especially the works entirely constructed in the virtual environment of second life, such as "TimeTravellerª," do not only envision digital space itself as a kind of utopian space, but dreams of a better world can potentially take concrete form. They also show us a particular future Indigenous-centered world, in which many of the problems bothering Indigenous communities today have been resolved. 36:35 KB: AbTeC Island, one of the filming locations for Skawennati's machinima, is a digital space within second life that is Indigenous owned and is entirely controlled by the artists who shape and use it. Despite its limitations one might debate whether AbTeC Island is in fact an Indigenous utopia, a place non-existent in our physical reality that permits users an amount of control and agency that reality does not. However, the most utopian of AbTeC works is, in my opinion, Skawennati's most recent piece, "The Peacemaker Returns," a machinima produced in second life, in collaboration with AbTeC and Obx. The Peacemaker Returns envisions a past, present and future, in which ethical principles from old Iroquois teachings structure interpersonal, communal, as well as global and even intergalactic relationships. 37:31 KB: The principles of respect, unity and peace, with their complex manifestations and social and political practices, are derived from the oral story of Deganawida, The Peacemaker, and his creation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. In The Peacemaker Returns, Skawennati not only envisions a radically better, and better imagined, Indigenous 23rd century future, but also a resolution of urgent problems of our present reality. And a resolution of these problems, of course, through old teachings about how to construct a better world and better communities. Her Machinima isn't an only positive utopia, in my opinion, but it also acknowledges the existence and enduring power of Iroquois utopianism, and envisions a way old teachings can be understood, renewed, and transformed to fit present and future circumstances. 38:24 KB: The Peacemaker Returns was produced for educational purposes, and is aimed at children from ages six to 12. It is utopian because it not only depicts a better present and future, but it was explicitly created to educate viewers, so they would be able to create such a future for themselves. And I quote Lucy Sargisson here, "By asking what's wrong with our world, utopias performs a diagnostic function. They identify core problems with the world around them, and these are often the cornerstones that prop up the entire society." And I would argue that this is exactly what Skawennati's machinima does. 39:00 KB: Lucy Sargisson's statement about the transformative power of any form of utopia, including dystopia, also fits Skawennati's machinima, and she says, "Utopias are radical, in both content and intent. They contain challenges to the roots of contemporary socioeconomic and political systems, and they intend to change the world. This is a bold statement much debated. But I will argue that utopians, people who engage in utopianism, seek to change the world. This does not necessarily mean that Utopia should be realized or are blueprints for the perfect society. But utopians do seek to provoke thought, perhaps with a view to catalyzing action. And having identified core problems and devised a critique, utopias depict contrasting alternatives." 39:50 KB: However, if we want to associate works like The Peacemaker Returns with utopianism, to acknowledge their future-oriented thinking and transformative power, we must also consider that they transform the concept of utopia. After all, similar to science fiction, the most problematic thing about utopia is its historical connection with colonialism. The term "utopia" was famously coined by Thomas More, with his 1516 work "Utopia." Although, of course, the concept of imagining readily better societies is much older than that, as many scholars have pointed out. This work describes a traveller's discovery of the island of Utopia. An imaginary state, where the grievances of More's contemporary society have been resolved. However, this state, as many scholars have pointed out, carries the traits of a colonial society. Not only is the island discovered by a Western explorer, but as Nicole Paul points out, King Utopus first fully colonized the people of Abraxa to found his nation of Utopia. Written only two decades after Columbus' landfall in the Caribbean, More's book, as many scholars have remarked, was inspired by the discovery of the New World and Amerigo Vespucci's and Christopher Columbus' letters about this alleged discovery. 41:12 KB: As Antonis Balasopoulos remarks, "The birth of utopian fiction in the early modern era, is an event not only contemporary with, but also inseparable from the beginnings of overseas colonization. Suggesting that a fundamental relation between utopia and colonialism lies at the very root of the utopian project." To take this a step further, Lyman Tower Sargent explains that North American colonies were conceived as utopia, when he says, "For colonial settlers, one of the motivations was that most basic utopia of all, a full stomach, decent shelter and clothing, and a better future for themselves and their children. This most fundamental utopia has always inspired most immigration and it was basic to settler colonization. Other colonists were driven by the desire to practice their religion freely, or to organize their lives differently, economically, politically, and socially. As such, they were more explicitly utopian in that they wanted to be able to live a specific vision of the good life. Much of the utopianism of colonization was like a sales pitch, plausible but really too good to be true. But the immigrants wanted to be sold something too good to be true, and actively participated in being conned." 42:32 KB: And as Sargent dryly remarks, "The settler colonial utopia was certainly not utopia for the Indigenous population." And he says, "The original inhabitants' idea of the good life inconveniently did not include having their land stolen, being enslaved, and being slaughtered." So settler colonial utopianism, or settler colonial utopias, were Indigenous dystopias. Hence, Sargent's conclusion that, "Utopias written from the point of view of the Indigenous, are frequently dystopian projections of what the settlers and exploiters had presented positively." Hence, also, the idea that there can be no such thing as Indigenous utopia. This close correlation with early American colonization has imbued the concept of utopia with a profoundly Western and settler colonial notion of place. In fact, in an article I'm currently preparing for publication, I even argue that American Indian removal, and the reservations created with it, were framed as utopian projects in colonial discourse. 43:37 KB: Thomas More invented the word "utopia" as a pun. As Fatima Vieira points out, "It can be understood as derived from both ou-topos, "no place," and eu-topia, "the good place." In More's sense of the word, this place is a better version of what we are familiar with, but it can never be real. Control over the topos in utopia, over the place in utopia, is a concept many scholars have considered the essential trait of utopia. So the fact that Indigenous people can still not exert full territorial sovereignty over their lands, has prompted some to believe that there is no such thing as Indigenous utopia. Alternatively, and I find this even more problematic, some scholars have concluded that, since Indigenous people neither own nor control the spaces they inhabit, Indigenous utopia must be located not in physical space, but in time. 44:28 KB: As scholars such as Bill Ashcroft and Corina Kesler in otherwise brilliant and convincing articles have pointed out, because the lands of colonized and post-colonized people have been forever altered, even destroyed, the utopia they crave is a temporal one. It is the past itself. Which I think you can see what is problematic about that. Indigenous North American concepts of land ownership and territorial sovereignty, have not been considered at all in this invention of post-colonial utopia. 45:00 KB: So as a final example... [background conversation] 45:05 KB: As a final example, I want to return to Postcommodity's work Each Branch Determined. This virtual reality, in my opinion, demonstrates a distinctly different sense of topos, of place, and of control over place. With controlled fires, the land is shaped and made inhabitable for the people. Although we do not see human life, traces of human life and human interference are therefore present everywhere in the immersion. Indigenous knowledges and concepts of society and ecology shape the landscape, and allow the user to move deeper and deeper into the immersion, through a kiva you can see here, and into what seems to be the very fabric the virtual reality is made of. 45:45 KB: So what you see then are just colored patterns and three-dimensional shapes. This abstract dimension is understood to be a part of the landscape, while the landscape of course is contained in the virtual reality, which dissolves conventional notions of corporeality and locality. While "Each Branch Determined" does not give us a glimpse of a better future society, this virtual reality, to me, could be seen as contemplating the concept of utopia itself. Because utopia is a space of possibility, of infinite depth, that is wrapped, just like this virtual reality into our physical reality. 46:22 KB: The mere relocation of the New Mexican landscape into virtual space, already suggests that a deconstruction of place is necessary to conceive Indigenous utopia. Grayston has pointed out that the histories of native peoples cannot be forgotten in the rewriting of utopian futures. By emphasizing the importance of history, then hints the term "utopia" must be transformed through a discussion of native histories, to be applied to Indigenous stories about the future. Indigenous future imaginaries inescapably alter the ways in which future worlds and societies, whether Indigenous or not, are represented. 47:04 KB: Utopia is a complex construct with a myriad of different definitions and manifestations, I only really touched on a very limited number of those. But I firmly believe that this concept and the field of utopian studies offer terminologies and theories to understand and describe Indigenous futurisms. And the only thing left for me to say now is that, for the scholarly future, I envision a productive conversation between these two disciplines, and worldwide collaborations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists and activists who are interested in better imagined futures. Thank you. [applause] 47:45 JL: Thank you very much, Kristina. Much to think about. And wanna open it up now for questions or comments. 47:54 KB: Or criticism. [chuckle] [laughter] 48:03 KB: That was very dense. [laughter] 48:07 JL: Well, one thing I was wondering is... Because also in Afrofuturism, there's a conversation about living in the post-apocalypse, right? 48:20 KB: Mm-hmm. 48:20 JL: The apocalypse happened. And I'm just wondering if you've had a chance to think much further about those sort of parallels, and whether it's informative, or where it's informative to think about those parallels, or if you haven't really spent the time on that yet? 48:35 KB: Between Indigenous Futurisms and the post-apocalypse? 48:37 JL: Indigenous Futurisms, Afrofuturisms, and the post-apocalypse, and the idea of living in a post-apocalyptic present actually. 48:46 KB: Do you mean in Indigenous artwork or films? 48:49 JL: No. I'm just wondering if you've spent much time looking at the Afrofuturism stuff. 48:53 KB: Oh. Yeah. Sure. Not much... 48:54 JL: Yeah... 48:55 KB: But I've spent some time. 48:56 JL: So in thinking about... Part of the argument, part of what you're talking about is this relationship between thinking about Indigenous people of having already lived through the apocalypse. So that changing this idea of what both science fiction is and what utopia might be, and just wondering if you see similar things at work within Afrofuturism. 49:16 KB: I think so, and I think Afrofuturist scholars would also say that this is the case. But with Afrofuturisms, it's more slavery and losing their homes basically, or the homes of their ancestors. So there's a lot of... And Indigenous Futurisms is... It doesn't branch off from Afrofuturisms, but that's where the name comes from, I think. And the two are really closely related, and have much to learn from each other too. 49:44 JL: Anybody else? Anything else? 49:46 Audience Member: What would you say Afrofuturism has to learn from Indigenous Futurism? 'Cause I feel like they've been... They've that movement or whatever it is called. So it has been around so much longer, especially if you start... They've been dating it earlier and earlier, I think, its start, to earlier and earlier. 50:03 KB: Sure. But it just would be fun to see works that discuss both of these concepts and make them more inclusive. And there have been a few articles about... That actually discuss both movements at the same time, and it's just... That's an idea of solidarity, I think, that is at the heart of that. Which I don't see in films like "Django Unchained" or something like that, where Indigenous people are just forgotten. But I think... That's what I meant. Not that they can learn from each other, but they have much to gain from their solidarity with each other. 50:40 JL: Well, there's this good... There's a podcast. Is it Eve Tuck who's doing it? I'm trying to remember who it is. They've only done like two or three episodes that's actually looking... It's very much... It's exclusively about Indigenous Futurisms and Afrofuturisms, and bringing them into conversation. But I can't remember what it's called. But it'd be worth checking it out. 51:07 KB: Also what determines Afrofuturisms, as some scholars have said, is race. The question of race as Isiah Lavender III has said for instance. And I've been wondering if that is... Because as John Rieder has said, that this is true for Indigenous Futurisms as well, that the issue is not class, which would be the case for science fiction. A lot of Western science fiction, the issue is class and class struggle. What if the issue is race? But maybe the issues for Indigenous Futurisms is more cultural. I don't know. If the term would then apply, that's what I mean. Like the conversation of these two fields could be really interesting. 51:45 JL: Anything else? Nope? Okay. Thank you very much, Kristina. [applause] [pause] Kristina Baudemann Page 16 of 16