Knowing Tomorrow 2.0: Native North American Archives of Futurity
Final Report Abstract
Our project has been situated at the disciplinary crossroads between the fields of American Literatures and Cultures, Indigenous Studies, and Museum Studies, with the objective of exploring Indigenous North American manifestations of temporality and futurity across various cultural genres. Whereas Indigenous American cultures have long been displaced into nostalgic obsolescence through images of the past, Native American and First Nations artists, curators, writers, and designers operationalize alternative points of access to temporality and history, especially through present and future imaginaries. From pre-contact prophecies to contemporary Indigenous video games, writers, artists, and curators such as Gerald Vizenor, Elizabeth LaPensée, Skawennati, and Danis Goulet have contributed to a vast corpus of Indigenous futurity that defies colonial temporality, empowers alternative modes of knowledge, envisions sustainable societies and thus harbors highly relevant cultural capital for designs of a global future, especially in times of trans/national shifts, social division, and climate change. This field has proven extremely vibrant, dynamic, and prolific, with a constantly expanding corpus of primary materials. Recent literary examples, including Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of a Living God (2017), Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018), Darcie Little Badger’s Elatsoe (2020) and A Snake Falls to Earth (2021), and Chelsea Vowels’s Buffalo is the New Buffalo (2022), as well as Indigenous film, performing arts, visual arts, museums, and video games provide a rich field of further potential inquiry. Our analyses have focused particularly on two under-researched, yet highly relevant sites for the production of meanings: digital media and museum spaces. We have read these sites as ‘archives’ of Indigenous futures, i.e., as material and semantic structures that are able to embed and communicate Indigenous realities within and across cultural boundaries while simultaneously foregrounding Indigenous knowledges. The most prominent results, for us, have been the insights: a) that digital and museum spaces are dynamic sites not only for the storage and communication of Indigenous futurities, but for their very production. We conceptualize them as archives, i.e., as material and semantic structures that are able to embed and communicate Indigenous realities within and across cultural boundaries while simultaneously foregrounding Indigenous knowledges; b) that representations of Indigenous futurities may be understood as variations of traditional thinking, which fully integrate the temporal dimensions of past, present, and future, and sidestep the (Western) pitfall of a binary logic that separates tradition from modernity; and c) that beyond "speculative literatures” or "science fiction,” literary and cultural studies need more inclusive terminologies to represent the diversity of alternative futurities. Indigenouscentered approaches to futurity (such as the Anishinaabe concept of biskaabiiyang, or, "returning to ourselves”) thus deeply unsettle conventional categories of genre. The most unexpected and severe turn in our project was caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and its massive consequences, which forced us to cancel planned conferences and research trips, but which we were able to fend off by an intermission of the project. After this pause, we have been able to regroup and resume, to reorganize one archival stay, and to conclude the project with a large international symposium as originally planned. Albeit no longer funded, the project will radiate into further research activities, such as the publication of a follow-up volume, as well as a more detailed exploration of the many further potential alleys of inquiry into transatlantic, trans-Indigenous, and global futurities.
Publications
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Fragmentary transmissions: on the poetics, practice, and futurism of Listener. World Art, 9(2), 183-203.
Kite, Suzanne & Baudemann, Kristina
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"The People Shall Continue”: Native American Museums as Archives of Futurity. Anglia, 138(3), 494-518.
Däwes, Birgit
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The Future Imaginary in Indigenous North American Arts and Literatures. (2021, 12, 7). American Geophysical Union (AGU).
Baudemann, Kristina
