0:00
We absolutely go for hard science, but when we do science,
0:04
we don't just simply do the science. We have ceremony,
0:09
we have song, we have drumming, we create inventive,
0:14
new words in our language to encompass and adapt to
0:18
these ever-evolving ideas. And it's that,
0:23
that makes it quite quite different from simply, you know,
0:28
picking up a lab coat, working with a beaker. You can have all that.
0:31
We have tribal schools that do genetic bioengineering, you know,
0:35
but what becomes more important is going back to Aki,
0:39
going back to the land, being a part of the land.
0:55
Hello. Hi Grace. Hi. Tell us what you, what your story,
0:56
a little bit of a quick intro, your story. What do you do? Well,
0:59
I'm an Anishinaabe, from several nations,
1:02
Garden River nation on the Ontario, Canada side and Bay Mills nation,
1:08
uh, in the upper peninsula of Michigan. We Mich love to wander around,
1:12
go off to different places, travel all around.
1:15
I think that's why science fiction is so appealing to us, uh,
1:20
with the possibilities of time travel and other things.
1:23
What I really work on though is indigenous futurism,
1:27
which was a term that I coined back in 2003.
1:31
A lot of people think it's 2012 because that's when I put out the anthology,
1:36
"Walking the Clouds:
1:37
Indigenous Science Fiction." What I was really interested in
1:41
doing is, as an academic you're supposed to write a monograph. You know,
1:45
you're supposed to write a book,
1:47
analyzing stories or whatever it is,
1:51
and it just didn't feel right to me,
1:54
it felt like as indigenous people,
1:57
we had been doing all kinds of stories that lent itself
2:01
very much to science fiction, to the fantastic, to horror,
2:09
all of those kinds of things.
2:11
So when you first start to think about an anthology, you know,
2:14
I guess my first thought is,
2:15
is do all the people that you're thinking about putting in there,
2:18
do they write things down in English? Do you have to rewrite them?
2:22
Do you have to listen to stories and then put the stories down?
2:25
How do you get them into the right form?
2:27
That's a very interesting question. Um,
2:30
because a lot of us of course have been colonized enough that we
2:35
have English, at least as a second language.
2:37
And one thing that's become a pattern with so many forms of
2:42
indigenous futurism is what Helen Haig-Brown, she's Tsilhqot'in, did
2:46
a short film called The Cave in 2012,
2:50
I'm turning it into English.
2:52
It was entirely in Tsilhqot'in with subtitles in English.
2:56
And as she talked to me about it, uh,
2:59
because she had been given a Lars von Trier experiment, you know,
3:03
where you're told to get out of your comfort zone and do something that you
3:07
don't normally do. And Helen Haig-Brown,
3:10
her mother and her grandmother are known for working with revitalizing language,
3:15
creating documentaries of indigenous feminism, things of that nature.
3:19
So she turned to me for the science fiction and she was like,
3:22
I've been asked to create a science fiction,
3:27
and I'm not sure how to go about it. And I didn't want to, you know,
3:31
tie her in or give her categories or give her labels.
3:34
And so I was just discussing a lot of things that had been happening.
3:38
And then she said, oh, oh, I get it.
3:41
We're taking the fiction out of science fiction.
3:44
And that actually has become a kind of mantra because when we
3:49
write stories such as let's say Waubgeshig Rice,
3:54
who's Anishinaabe and wrote "Moon of the Crusted Snow" and it's working
3:59
very much with climate change with climate crises and then
4:04
how as the community, do you respond to that? And in this case,
4:07
as we now often experience all the power was out,
4:10
there was no way to communicate otherwise, right?
4:15
And he writes a story set very much in the future,
4:18
but the actions that are done within the community,
4:21
such as deciding that as they run out of food,
4:25
that there will be hunters that go out and get moose or
4:29
buffalo or deer.
4:32
And what they do is they bring it back to the community and the ones who are
4:36
first served, first taken care of are the elders. They're,
4:41
they're given the best parts and they're taken care of.
4:44
And then it becomes split up and an important feature of niche
4:49
thinking or [inaudible] thinking is that, um,
4:53
even with our enemies,
4:55
if we have enemies that during a time of crisis there is to be love
5:00
and generosity and giving.
5:01
And so you actually make a point of going to an enemy after the
5:06
elders and giving them your gifts, giving them your money, your rice,
5:12
your wild rice, your maple syrup, and other things. Such as in our nations,
5:17
which goes very much against federal government of the US or Canada
5:22
we are called the pacifist to anarchists.
5:26
We actually don't have a hierarchy.
5:31
And so we don't have a chief. I mean,
5:34
and the process of colonization,
5:36
there've been chiefs that have been given to us or tribal councils given to us.
5:41
But the people that are recognized in the community, quietly as leaders,
5:46
are the ones who stay in the background.
5:48
They're the ones that are giving very quietly without
5:53
needing acknowledgement and everyone in the community rose up
5:57
knowing that. And so they honor and revere that person.
6:01
So, you know, this writing, um, that we're talking about,
6:06
hasn't that been going on for a thousand years before?
6:10
And then you come to this point and you say, well,
6:13
now we're going to try and jump into this box that's science,
6:17
called science fiction. And do people look at you like, well, geez,
6:20
how do I do that? What's the, you know, that, that part, like?
6:24
You know that's a beautiful, beautiful question.
6:26
And it's actually why I backed away from science fiction
6:31
and, uh, followed the tradition of Afrofuturism.
6:35
And I want to really give credit to Alondra Nelson,
6:39
who now is, you know, a famous person working for President Biden.
6:46
Uh, but actually as a scholar and a school activist,
6:49
she put together in 2002 a series of scholarly articles
6:54
and it had all been started with online social media and
6:59
conversations back and forth asking this very question that you're asking,
7:04
you know,
7:04
are we using a colonizing tool by even investing in
7:09
science fiction? Uh,
7:10
because much of science fiction is a colonizing tool and about
7:15
contact and about what you do with the alien and the other and what are the
7:19
techniques that you use to exploit the natural resources, et cetera,
7:23
et cetera. I mean,
7:26
science fiction in the late 19th century grew right alongside the
7:31
industrial revolution and so it took on a lot of those components.
7:35
Futurism in the way we mean it is not at all the
7:40
Italian fascist art futurism,
7:43
so it's really important to recognize that. Afrofuturism,
7:47
which started first and was really established in 2002 talks about
7:52
stories that are of body soul
7:57
and mind.
7:58
Now at the time that Afrofuturism started going in
8:02
2002, and then I had a tenure track job that Ursula K.
8:05
Le Guin very kindly supported me for.
8:08
She wanted a native scholar in the science fiction area,
8:12
and we loved her dearly and she has passed on now.
8:16
What was she like?
8:17
Oh my goodness, Ursula. I spent many, many times with her.
8:23
She had such a generosity of spirit, such a witty intellect.
8:32
There were times in conversations where I'd think back over it and then really
8:36
start laughing, you know, cause I had missed, uh, a bit of her wit.
8:38
She's written essays, you know, where she grew up with Robert Oppenheimer,
8:43
you know,
8:44
riding around on the couch and listening to conversations with he and her dad.
8:48
But she also had two Indian uncles that stayed with them and it,
8:54
she didn't write about it until much later in her life.
8:57
She had conversations with me all the time about it,
8:59
but those two Indian uncles really,
9:03
really impacted her. And excuse me.
9:06
You getting, are you getting lost? Did you lose? I,
9:11
I keep losing the little, oh, here we go.
9:14
When you, when you were with Ursula, did that, um,
9:18
ignite your imagination for these, you know,
9:22
sort of alternative histories or see, you know,
9:25
kind of things did that lead you to the, into this path that you're,
9:29
you're so far down into now?
9:31
Yes. Maybe better put because when your niche and you,,
9:36
I went straight to California, LA,
9:39
Hollywood to get schooling and I had never seen a TV.
9:44
I had never seen a film. I came from the bush.
9:51
Where we had no running water or pipes or electricity
9:56
or things like that. So it was really a shock.
10:00
And what Ursula was so wonderful at with so many people,
10:05
uh, not just myself,
10:07
is that she quietly draws you out and gives you
10:11
confidence to go forward. In fact,
10:14
I had even asked her to write a forward for "Walking the Clouds" and she said to
10:18
me, "Oh no, no, Grace, no,
10:20
as much as I would love to make sure that you keep it Indigenous voices
10:25
centered." And I'm so grateful to her for that now.
10:30
Angelica Gorodischer, who is a writer in Argentina,
10:34
and Ursula actually translated her stories in English, with help.
10:39
She was always doing that.
10:40
She was always finding areas around the world globally that
10:45
maybe were not in English that could be translated and could get a,
10:49
give a sense of in that case, the horrible,
10:52
horrible political regime that Angelica lived through, uh,
10:56
with all of the disappearing and the fact that even writing something too
11:00
bluntly could get you disappeared or thrown in jail.
11:05
And so there, science fiction was used as a veil,
11:09
as an allegory,
11:11
so that you could talk about things in the future about what was really going
11:16
on currently, right?
11:18
But then they couldn't pull you away from it because you can say, well,
11:22
actually, you know, this is an imagined future,
11:25
or this is an imagined alternative world.
11:28
So there in many places of Latin America that she'd helped out and they were
11:32
using it as a veil.
11:34
And she actually suggested at one point that science fiction is the
11:38
allegory of the 20th century.
11:41
When we say science fiction,
11:43
is that a way of being able to say things that are uncomfortable from a
11:48
human rights perspective?
11:49
If you just wrote a story that was a human rights story. If you put it,
11:53
if you label it under science fiction,
11:55
does that make it easier to say things that make people uncomfortable?
12:00
Um, if it could be.
12:03
And I also think that almost the label of science fiction has
12:07
quietly faded away. John Reader, a very dear friend of mine,
12:12
who's just written absolutely wonderful books on, you know,
12:15
"is this a genre or what is this"" said and many of us have adopted his way of
12:20
thinking. Uh, and he works with Native Hawaiians at the University of Hawaii.
12:24
"It's really not a genre.
12:26
It's more like it's become a family of resemblances".
12:31
And we really picked up on that because the family of resemblances really are
12:36
different. Like when you read it as a futuristic text,
12:39
that is written from the perspective of someone,
12:42
that's the important thing about all the futurism.
12:45
It's always written by the author who has that perspective,
12:50
who has that culture, who potentially has that language.
12:53
Allies can help out by promoting the books and the artwork and other
12:58
things,
12:58
but it's not really a futurism unless it's written specifically
13:03
from,
13:04
let's say a Malaysian who is losing their
13:08
island, and it's a trans story and they're, they're mutating into coral.
13:16
Becoming symbiotic with coral.
13:18
And that's an interesting feature because do you
13:23
call that science in the sense that Fredric Jameson talked about
13:28
hard science. Oh, I should say this. We absolutely go for hard science,
13:32
but when we do science,
13:35
we don't just simply do the science. We have ceremony,
13:39
we have song, we have drumming,
13:42
we create inventive new words in our language to
13:46
encompass and adapt to these ever-evolving ideas.
13:51
And it's that,
13:53
that makes it quite quite different from simply
13:58
picking up a lab coat, working with a beaker. You can have all that.
14:02
We have tribal schools that do genetic bioengineering, you know,
14:06
but what becomes more important is going back to Aki,
14:10
going back to the land, being a part of the land.
14:14
So that's where the land back movements have actually
14:19
come from idealists in indigenous futurism.
14:23
In class, you know, when kids, young kids come to your school, you know,
14:27
they might be looking at a genetic class. Like they want to understand their,
14:32
the evolution of their genes going back a thousand years. Right.
14:36
And then they come to your class. They don't necessarily know what it is.
14:39
They don't know what those genes are.
14:41
They don't necessarily know what their culture is.
14:43
How does it feel when they realize how important this
14:48
is?
14:49
It's just as important as at their genes and this is another way of studying
14:54
their past, you know, how, do you see a light come on in their faces?
14:59
Ah, they becomes so, so excited.
15:03
I'm like Cornell West in the sense that he loves to teach
15:07
freshmen. And I love to teach freshmen too,
15:10
along with my grad courses and other things that I'm doing.
15:13
Partially because of what you've just suggested,
15:17
which is that they're really grappling with their
15:21
identity and kind of wondering,
15:24
and often are biracial or tri-racial and
15:29
are searching and,
15:30
and they thirst they thirst for these images. And,
15:35
and what I do is as I give them the history, because that,
15:39
that can be pretty, you know, it can wound,
15:43
[inaudible] is what we call it. Where you have this open wound,
15:47
that as you hear things and take things in your wound starts
15:52
opening, right. And how do you heal that wound?
15:55
And so the way I heal the wound is by giving them all these stories in
16:00
the future, because part of it is like, let's say for students from Kuwait,
16:05
we have a lot of international students from Syria, Kuwait,
16:10
uh, just all over.
16:12
And what they end up doing is they end up getting inspired
16:18
to write their own stories, because this is always an option,
16:21
is not just to listen and take in stories and analyze and talk about it,
16:26
but to create their own.
16:28
And currently there's a Kuwait poetry circle that is now
16:33
worldwide.
16:34
And many of my students from my class became so excited about
16:39
all the futurisms, where you have spirit, body, soul,
16:43
and mind.
16:44
And you can talk about those things as opposed to a cyberpunk in the 1980s,
16:50
it was all about mind versus body and how can we
16:54
upload our minds and how can we get away from our meat and our flesh
16:59
and our bodies.
17:01
And in some ways I think futurism was a really wonderful
17:05
reaction to that displacement of body and
17:10
emotion and feeling and taste and smell and
17:15
all of the things that are a part of our lives, right, and,
17:20
and it allowed opportunities to open up in that kind of way.
17:25
Grace, this has been incredible. You know, I just,
17:28
for those of you watching or listening, there's one thing it, it strikes me as,
17:33
as you're talking and for me, the way I'm interpreting a lot of this,
17:36
I love this word, futurism.
17:38
I do love the idea that you write your story and maybe you
17:43
write your story, which has some healing in it that maybe it takes you to the,
17:47
a future you want.
17:48
And so you're both to the beginning of the conversation,
17:52
you look at the past where you are now and what do I, where am I going?
17:56
And it feels like there's a common thread there that is incredibly powerful and
18:01
that everybody has the story and everybody has the right to claim their story
18:05
and their future. That's kind of what I'm taking away from this.
18:09
So it's been remarkable to listen to you and to where,
18:14
you know, people should, should look at your work. We'll link to, you know,
18:18
some of your ideas, your book, you're anthology, what you're doing.
18:21
And we encourage people to kind of really find out about this incredible work
18:26
that you're actually doing alongside all of these great people.
18:30
It's incredibly inspiring.
18:32
Thank you for taking the time with us today. It was really a pleasure.
18:35
Oh, thank you very much.