Lisa Jackson’s (Anishinaabe) virtual 3D art installation, Biidaaban: First Light, places users in a dystopic Toronto/tkaronto, wherein the streets are empty and vegetation overruns empty buildings and deserted streets. Participants immersed in the world of Biidaaban are directly confronted with a future where the epicentre of Canada, which is to say Toronto, is stripped of the signifiers of settler colonial wealth and capital and its presumed permanency: cathedrals crumble, automobiles sit idle and rusting, the sky peaceful and absent the congestion, traffic, and air pollution of the nearby Lester B. Pearson International Airport. And yet, among the ruin, nestled in the rubble, standing on rooftops, are Indigenous peoples. This paper will extend and expand upon these ideas as well as my existing research on countermapping and speculative Indigenous futurities and their relationship to popular engagements with contemporary social and ecological challenges. This project examines how different populations stake particular claims to the future (through and in both time and space), and the political, existential, epistemological, and ontological ramifications of these claims. This work is interested and attentive to the ways in which Indigenous peoples are often written out of the futures that are imagined in mainstream speculative and science fiction texts and maps, while also remaining as spectral, disavowed presence in these spaces. In response, this paper foregrounds Indigenous futurisms, the otherwise worlds they propose, and the radical futurities they cultivate, while grappling with the present colonial conditions that we must contend with in order to make these futurities vibrant realities.
Dallas Hunt (Cree) is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia whose research interests are in Indigenous studies, urban studies, environmental justice, and radical pedagogy. He hails from the Swan River First Nation in Treaty Eight Territory in Northern Alberta, Canada.
The Livingmaps Seminar Series has two more events this year (further details will be posted on our website/social media):
Mappings of Literary Nightscapes in Venice between/beyond Texts and Materialities | Giuseppe Tomasella | 23rd October 2024 6pm UK online
Cartographic Media and Art Practice: New Forms of Counter-Mapping | Emilio Vavarella | November 2024 online – date tbc
