Coming to You from the Indigenous Future: Native Women, Speculative Film Shorts, and the Art of the Possible

Storytelling becomes a space where we can escape the gaze of the cage of Empire, even if it is just for a few minutes. . . . Storytelling is an important process for visioning, imagining, and critiquing the social space around us, and ultimately challenging the colonial norms fraught in our daily lives.

(Simpson 34–35)

In the first episode of Joss Whedon’s short-lived but beloved series Firefly, set in 2517, the narrative pivots around the Firefly spaceship landing on a moon to load people and supplies for transport elsewhere in the galaxy—the crew, we find, keeps their bills paid by providing an off-the-books intergalactic delivery service. In the background, as the camera surveys the bustling trading post, the audience sees two Native men in powwow regalia make their way across the screen. Although this Indigenous presence consisted of a brief glimpse that was unrelated to the larger storyline and was effectively a scene of Indians at a trading post, I nevertheless found myself both (embarrassingly) surprised and thrilled to see Whedon portraying a future where we exist five hundred years from now as Native people.¹ This is not to say that I had bought into mainstream narratives that bind Native people and the utility of our knowledges and traditions to a time long past, where Native “disappearance” is configured as always-already inevitable. Rather, it is to underscore that even though Native communities, our governance structures, the complexities of our social engagement, and the variety of our narrative traditions have always incorporated elements of futurity, prophecy, and responsibility-rooted strategies for bringing forth better futures, mainstream narratives represent a profound and pervasive inability to portray Native peoples and our continued existence in the present, let alone to project us forward into any potential futures.

Limited imaginings of the future / writing ourselves into the future

Enjoying science fiction, fantasy, and horror narratives played a much loved and integral part of father-daughter time when I was growing up (and still does), but it became harder and harder, as I got older, to overlook many of the core ideas common across these genres. This was particularly the case with regard to the procolonial, prosupremacy of (certain) humans, proextractive, procapitalist, and promasculinist elements of these narratives that present the natural world and (certain) peoples as needing to be tamed, exploited, civilized, removed, or vanquished. Despite the best efforts of my younger self to tune out these concerns and simply enjoy the family time, wrestling with the overdetermined ways that Indigeneity commonly figures into these genres produced a cognitive dissonance that resulted in some of my earliest (recollectable) experiences with a double consciousness, of sorts (see Du Bois). Indeed, because these genres tend to consistently portray Indigenous peoples, bodies, and epistemes as emblems of prehistory who serve as plot devices, prophets, or pathological killers, the brief representation of “everyday Indians” in this first episode of Firefly stood out as remarkable. By including images of Native people, even for a brief moment, as part of the fabric of an imagined future, the first episode of Firefly immediately diverged from the standard mainstream use of “Indianness” widely implemented across genres.

In spite of my initial excitement, the fact of the matter is that Firefly’s inclusion of Native peoples in this one scene neither foreshadowed an Indian importance to the developing series storyline nor signaled a new way forward for Hollywood portrayals of Native peoples in science fiction.² The relatively recent releases of Avatar and the Twilight series present ample evidence that Hollywood’s Indians are alive and well, however blue and “shape-shifting” they may be in these imaginings. While it is true that we have seen changes in the industry since Indigenous peoples, Native studies scholars, and others began critically engaging and critiquing such portrayals decades and decades ago, much has also stayed the same. More often than not, recent Hollywood portrayals have simply amended the most egregious infractions of the past by changing negative stereotypic portrayals to “positive” ones—as...