Indigenous futurisms

Cross-regionalIndigenous arts & imaginationFiction & imagined futures

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Quick overview

Indigenous futurisms are creative ways Indigenous artists and writers imagine futures in which their peoples, languages, and knowledge continue and transform.

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In depth

The plural matters. Indigenous futurisms bring distinct peoples and works into conversation; they do not describe one shared Indigenous future. The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts describes science-fiction-inspired Native art that joins future imagination with language, oral history, and ways of life.

Presence beyond the colonial ending

Who is allowed a future in a story? Indigenous futurisms place living peoples in futures of their own making, rather than confining them to the past or using them as symbols in someone else’s adventure. That can mean space travel, altered landscapes, new technologies, or a transformed present. The point is not that every artist must be hopeful or use the same genre. It is that Indigenous presence and decision-making do not end where colonial stories expect them to end.

Sources for this section: Exhibition account · IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts ↗ · Indigenous Futurisms exhibition and works · IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts ↗ · Grace Dillon conversation · e-flux Journal ↗

Continuity can be inventive

The Museum of Contemporary Native Arts account links futuristic Native art with language revival, oral histories, Indigenous science, and cosmology. This is not a claim that every traditional teaching should be made public or turned into a science-fiction device. Artists choose what to carry, transform, or withhold. Some work reworks familiar genre forms; other work makes new forms from local histories and relations. A future can be modern and Indigenous without treating cultural continuity as a museum exhibit.

Many nations, many futures

A single label helps readers find a field, but it can also blur the differences among Diné, Anishinaabe, Māori, and many other creators. The museum publication focuses on Native American art; wider uses of the plural term involve additional places and debates. Readers should identify the artist, community, and specific work before drawing conclusions about its ideas. The Atlas uses this entry as a doorway and does not turn any one fictional future into a claim about all Indigenous knowledge.

Sources for this section: Ambelin Kwaymullina's Indigenous Futurisms and AI · Australian National University ↗ · Indigenous Futurisms exhibition and works · IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts ↗ · Grace Dillon conversation · e-flux Journal ↗

Imagination as a present action

Futurist art can be a way to examine present questions: who controls land, which languages children inherit, who designs technology, and what relationships survive displacement. The museum account also notes that some post-apocalyptic imagery speaks to harms already experienced by Indigenous communities. That observation makes easy celebration insufficient. A careful reading asks what a particular work protects or challenges and lets its makers name the stakes. Future imagination becomes a form of cultural and political presence now.

Sources for this section: Exhibition account · IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts ↗ · Indigenous Futurisms exhibition and works · IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts ↗

Categories begin with makers

Anishinaabe scholar Grace L. Dillon describes categories as invitations to listen rather than boxes fixed in advance. In her 2021 conversation with Pedro Neves Marques, she explains that she first asked writers how they defined science and what they found science-fictional in their work. The categories in her anthology grew from those voices; she calls them flexible and acknowledges that other writers were not included. Her discussion ranges across technology, environmental justice, and relations with more-than-human beings. That account gives readers a concrete way to approach a broad label: begin with what particular makers say their work is doing. A reading category can help people find a work without requiring it to stand for every nation. Dillon’s account concerns her own anthology and intellectual practice, rather than a final definition that overrides other artists’ choices.

Sources for this section: Grace Dillon conversation · e-flux Journal ↗

Ambelin Kwaymullina's painted future

In 2024 the Australian National University presented Indigenous Futurisms and AI, a series of paintings by Palyku writer and artist Ambelin Kwaymullina. She explained one image as a vision of Aboriginal knowledge ways joining other ways of knowing to make sustainable technologies. That is a named artist's proposal, not permission to generalize an Indigenous theory of artificial intelligence. It also gives the category a material artwork and a setting on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country, rather than leaving it as a vague slogan about survival. Anishinaabe scholar Grace Dillon's 2021 conversation on Indigenous futurisms provides a different voice and medium. Bringing them into dialogue can reveal shared questions about technology and land without claiming that their nations or works are interchangeable. The article should retain the plural: artists select what is public, what remains held by communities, and what kind of future their story or artwork can responsibly imagine.

Sources for this section: Grace Dillon on Indigenous futurisms · Portland State University ↗ · Ambelin Kwaymullina's Indigenous Futurisms and AI · Australian National University ↗

Two works use different tools for the future

At the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts’ Indigenous Futurisms exhibition, Cochiti Pueblo artist Virgil Ortiz showed Venutian Soldiers, an installation of mixed-media outfits and video. The museum also listed Íŋyaŋ Iyé (Telling Rock), a 2019 work by Kite, an Oglala Lakota artist, and Devin Ronneberg, described there as of Okinawan and Native Hawaiian descent. Its materials include song, circuitry, processors, and machine-learning decisions. These are concrete artworks, not evidence that every Indigenous nation shares one account of technology. The exhibition description links Native futures with cosmology, science, and tribal oral histories, but each maker chooses a different form. We should not infer what an artist intended beyond the public description. The examples instead invite questions about who designs technical systems, who controls stories about the future, and how materials carry cultural meaning without reducing a work to an illustration of a theory.

Sources for this section: Indigenous Futurisms exhibition and works · IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts ↗

Distilled highlights

Short ideas for orientation; the article and sources provide context.

Continuing presenceIndigenous peoples belong in imagined futures.

Plural futuresNo one work speaks for all nations.

Living languageA future can carry language in new forms.

Creative continuityInheritance and invention can meet.

Specific makersName artists and their communities.

Present stakesFuture stories can address current land and power.