Visions After Empire in Literary Indigenous Futurism When considering the relationship of dreams to indigenous cultures, its prominence within metaphysical and cultural histories typically comes to mind. Observably, this association results in a tendency to correlate visions with an archaic past, or near-extinct “old ways” which challenge assimilation narratives common in popular culture. As a genre, indigenous futurism utilizes elements of speculative science fiction, such as post-apocalyptic prospects and inventive technologies, to examine the fortitude of indigeneity in the face of colonization. While Rebecca Roanhorse’s “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience” transforms dream fasting into a commodity for tourist colonizers, the dreams of Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (TMT) catalyze native persecution, yet also an assertion of identity. In effect, by redefining the significance of the dream, both works bridge the gap between legacies of indigeneity and the modern myth of native invisibility found in mainstream conventional fiction. Western obsession with stereotypical depictions of indigeneity projects native identity as something from a bygone era, tailoring prior conceptions to colonizer assumptions and discounting the continued existence of native peoples altogether. For example, David Treuer observed “the Indians people imagine… are much more active, much more present, than the Indians in real life” resulting in what he terms “Indian Silence” within the media (11). Unfortunately, this fallacy of native invisibility often determines the representation of native peoples in entertainment broadcasting or publication. As the non-Native content creators assume native communities no longer exist or remain disconnected from modern society, native depictions can otherize and alienate real native audiences. Established print and television sources typically fail to represent native populations accurately, if at all, but these mediums BECK 2 require amassed networks of connections and communications. As a result, many Indigenous artists cannot effectively use such outlets to combat their misrepresentation, while the widely accessible Internet presents an inexpensive alternative where native individuals, or tribes, can quickly distribute their work “at a fraction of the cost.” What’s more, the Internet’s less permanent publication allows for evolution, adaptation, and collaboration without the intervention of media “gatekeepers” (Lewis & Fragnito). Accordingly, many Native creators have migrated to digital methods to embody and propagate their creative visions. This relationship between technology and native people translates to the themes of contemporary Native literature, specifically, a genre of speculative science fiction called indigenous futurism. This comes in response to the previously mentioned mistaken idea that native peoples’ indigeneity inherently derives from romanticized depictions of native life which exist in a bubble of a former era, and that one can only exist in the modern world at the expense of this identity (Gaertner). The genre directly contests conceptions of Indian Silence by placing indigenous protagonists at the forefront of society’s technological revolution, rather than furthering what Alicia Guzman refers to as “longstanding notions of Native peoples as artifacts of a bygone past.” She explains, “the present is understood through the prism of the past and future, ” meaning indigenous futurism enables native visibility via projection into the potential futures of our own society (Guzman). This cements an active native presence in the age of modernity. In addition, the otherworldly settings characteristic of the genre force readers, in imagining possible futures, to also consider the past. As such, the genre allows for a reconciliation of traditional histories with the post-colonial indigeneity of the modern-day. BECK 3 Despite advancing strides in contemporary Indigenous representation in the media, the colonizer mindset persists in upholding a dichotomy in which native people can solely present as assimilated and modernized, or a fetishized version of tribal identity. For this reason, indigenous communities may capitalize on Western tourism’s appetite for the exotic and unfamiliar as a way to make a living while retaining their culture. Since the 1980s, the indigenous cultures of North America have become “increasingly on show” for white-dominated “ethnic tourism” (Hollishead 44). Within many indigenous religions, dreams represent a mechanism for insight and introspection. Oftentimes, the validity ascribed to visions both alienates and intrigues Western audiences (Goulet 172). Particularly, a ritualistic practice known as “dream fasting” features a “supervised vision quest… under the guidance of an experienced elder” (Irwin 98). Settler Vacationists covet this psychic experience, providing anyone native perceived as an “elder” with a means of survival, whether or not their audience believes in, or has respect for, their customs. “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience,” a cautionary tale about the risks of commodifying sacred traditions to profit off the settler state, fully desanctifies the vision quest. Set in the near future, a tourism company offers buyers the opportunity to inhabit native consciousness using virtual reality technology also known as Vision Quest. This establishes the story as “Native slipstream,” a subgenre of indigenous futurism infused with “time travel, alternate realities and multiverses, and alternative histories” (Dillon 3). By regenerating a native ritual into a commodified brand title, Roanhorse illustrates the sacrifices native people must endure in order to exist while surviving the wounds of Empire. Historically “the settler wants to be made indigenous, even if only through disguise, or other forms of playing Indian,” and because of the pod mechanisms present in the tale, cultural appropriation reaches new levels of BECK 4 realism which appeal to commercial consumers (Tuck & Yang 8). Protagonist Jesse Turnblatt operates under the name “Jesse Trueblood” in order to appeal to westerners’ assumptions. Jesse claims he must appear as “the right kind of Indian,” yet Jesse works off of television clichés to produce “the approximation of a peyote experience.” He muses: “(You’ve never actually tried peyote, but you did smoke your share of weed during that one year at Arizona State, and who’s going to call you on the difference?)” in order to demonstrate that his buyers do not desire his authenticity or respect his indigenous identity, but rather wish to consume that which appeals to their own stereotypical misconceptions (Roanhorse 2017). The story’s second-person point of view offers readers an experience mirroring that of the colonizer clientele. That is, by transmitting the reader into Trueblood’s position, Roanhorse’s medium parallels the plot of her work. Audiences embody Jesse in producing vision quests grounded in apocryphal fantasy, compelling the reader to consider their own complicity in upholding Indian Silence and stereotypes or appropriations. Thus, the nature of the piece connects Indigenous futures to the present day, preventing their erasure from the modern era and the eras to come. Furthermore, this aside illustrates Jesse's disconnection from his cultural heritage as a result of forced assimilation practices. Jesse himself, in falsifying what an “authentic” experience would consist of for his job, loses sight of what it means to actually be an Indigenous person. Rather than garnering knowledge of his ancestral history, Jesse must study distorted expectations of colonizer culture in order to find acceptance. Likewise, because we encounter the narrative from Jesse’s perspective, the parenthetical allows a glimpse into his private psychosis. This enables readers to examine the effects of imperial invasion Jesse has internalized; he himself is no longer aware of the distinction between the real and falsified. Larissa Behrendt notes, North BECK 5 American settlers harbor “a spiritual hunger that capitalistic fetishism cannot seem to satiate,” attracting them to indigenous religiosity (256). Jesse himself wonders if his client, a Caucasian he dubs “White Wolf,” has economized to procure “this once-in-a-lifetime Indian Experience™” because “he’s desperate, looking for a purpose in his own shitty world and thinking Indians have all the answers” (Roanhorse 2017). The description of Jesse’s position invokes the language of Western enterprise. Again, Roanhorse portrays Trueblood’s indoctrination into a mercantile system that exploits his identity for profit. The settler state has repackaged a ceremony integral to native religious practices as trademarked merchandise. This warrants its obtaining of revenue from the tourists whom those same figures have deprived of a metaphysical purpose. Therefore, the author’s characterization of Jesse’s interiority reveals the internal confusion incited by a society which denies native and non-native members spiritual satisfaction. In continuation, this theme of parallelism between the socioeconomic and racialized environment of Trueblood’s reality and that of the reader features in the final scene. Trueblood confronts White Wolf for usurping his race, job, home, and wife, receiving an ominous response: ‘Did you ever think,” he says, his voice thoughtful, his head tilted to study you like a strange foreign body, “that maybe this is my experience, and you’re the tourist here?” “This is my house,” you protest, but you’re not sure you believe it now… Nausea rolls over you. That same stretching sensation you get when you Relocate out of an Experience. Whiplash, and then … You let go.” (Roanhorse 2017). Here, the manipulation of the material world presents the impact of non-native majorities annexing sacred practices under the guise of reciprocal exchange. White Wolf offers first BECK 6 financial, then emotional sustenance, but ultimately enacts a permanent end to Jesse’s prosperity. Roanhorse states native people “stand with one foot always in the darkness that ended our world, and the other in a hope for our future” (2018, 131). Though White Wolf implies Jesse will never truly belong in western society, the ambiguity of the final lines projects multiple possibilities. As argued by Handler and Linnikin, “to refer to the past... implies that one is located in the present, that one is distanced or apart from the object constructed” (Wiget 259). While the story takes place in the near future, the readers must always exist in their present day, always in the aftermath of the indigenous history Roanhorse recalls as the catalyst for the future events. The text’s indentations imply a visual distancing from the previously mesmerizing narrative. By ending on an exit, the reader reenters the present having undergone an altering experience. This means they must reflect upon their own role in the current state of Indigenous life and livelihood. As a result, the story ensures the continued visibility of indigenous peoples but allows the audience to adjust to the future, having warned against the perils of capitalistic appropriation. In a similar fashion, TMT chronicles the gruesome Western usurpation of native spiritualism for their own gains. Dimaline’s futuristic dystopia presents our world ravaged by the pollution and hubris of the settler state, causing everyone but native peoples to lose their ability to dream. The resulting pandemonium pits races against one another when the Canadian government declares Indigenous bone marrow the ritualistic cure for their subconscious affliction, the ultimate commercialization of Native bodies at their very cores. Like that of Roanhorse’s Vision Quest, Dimaline’s aboriginal populations become sought after for their connection to dreams, striking up a system of payment, kidnapping, and bartering for their souls. Indeed, Miigwans, father figure to protagonist teen, Frenchie, says about his lost husband: “he BECK 7 felt he had value as a poet… and he did. But he overestimated how long that would last. And how quickly people would forget the art in the Indian and instead see only the commodity” (Dimaline 100). This exemplifies a further progression of the native objectification present in “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience;” despite Isaac’s (Miig’s husband’s) desire to project himself to the world as something more, a poet, a scholar, a critical thinker, a creative, imperial society continues to see him as defined by his nativeness. If the bone marrow itself holds a spiritual ability to dream found only in native bodies, the settler state’s claim of this organic component as a panacea transgresses beyond White Wolf’s theft of Jesse’s hypothetical life. They actively ignore “the art in the Indian” in favor of what they can gain, in this case, by violating his autonomy to literally strip his body and absorb his indigeneity for themselves. Furthermore, the author’s description of Isaac typifies just one example of her efforts to present her characters as more than the generalization often applied to fictional representations of Native people and lives. Unlike Jesse Trueblood, who internalizes a faux conception of indigeneity as his defining characteristic, Dimaline takes care to craft the roles of her narrative in ways which both respect, and build upon, their status native individuals. For example, nightmares about the losses of his family plague Frenchie throughout his young life within the tale. However, giving into the whims of his child companion, Riri, enables him to surpass his memories of trauma inflicted by their bodily colonizers: “The more I described my brother, my parents, our makeshift community before Dad left with the Council, the more I remembered, like the way my uncle jigged to heavy metal. Instead of dreaming their tragic forms, I recreated them as living, laughing people in the cool red confines of RiRi’s tent as she drifted off” (Dimaline 43). Here, Frenchie’s reminiscing humanizes him, and his family, as more than one aspect his BECK 8 entire society has chosen to fixate on and identify him by. Additionally, Frenchie notes in his musings that Riri has fallen asleep. This creates an assertion of his independence; Frenchie reinterprets the way society views his family and himself for no one but himself. While his situation may make it seem as though his people are nothing more than their blood, bone, and traditions, Frenchie sees them as people like any other, with passions and personalities as well. Just as Frenchie redefines nativeness outside of societal stereotypes or expectations, so does the author encourage her audience to do the same. “Dimaline sees perhaps Indigenous people, but above all else, she reflects the humanness of Frenchie into the hope that we are all multifaceted people with the capacity for dreaming,” meaning TMT depicts a desire for readers in reality to reconsider the ways in which they may understand native identity (Crow 30-31). As discussed prior, “depictions of Native peoples as primitive or uncivilized are one of the reasons [their] nationhood is difficult to accept or understand” (Reese 389). Therefore, in providing readers with fully recognized, complex, representations, the figures TMT advance beyond the limitations of past depictions centered around inaccurate examples of indigenous ways of being. Consequently, this acceptance of a greater selfhood facilitates an indigenous empowerment within Frenchie’s assembled “tribe” which leads them to the means of overpowering the white government’s control using their dreams. This plot twist succeeds as it inherently relies on an underestimation of Minverva’s indigeneity, allowing her to use her capture as a means of combating her settler-oppression. In creating an elder figure whose strength stems from an oral culture which “should have been tossed away as things change and ‘progress,’” Dimaline emphasizes the “transformative power of ancestral knowledge” (Crow 27). TMT directly portrays this in having Minvera’s native language serve as the element which BECK 9 weaponizes her ability to dream: “And there were words: words in the language that the conductor couldn’t process, words the Cardinals couldn’t bear, words the wires couldn’t transfer. As it turns out, every dream Minerva had ever dreamed was in the language” (Dimaline 173). The passage presents the event through a catalog of description, with a repetition of “words” throughout, emphasizing the might in language both narratively and visually to the audience via the written medium. In addition, by having the solution explicitly lie in Minerva’s ability to dream, “Dimaline.. intricately connect[s] dreaming with their character’s fate… emphasiz[ing] the link between stories and dreams as integral parts of Indigenous knowledge and Identity” (Ruwoldt 205). Since the Canadian colonizers had not thought to program their machines for languages other than English, Minerva can dismantle their system with the power of her cultural birthright, one they tried to deprive her people of in the first residential schools. Her rebellion represents a legitimized native person fighting her oppressors through her refusal to let them destroy her ability to dream. Unlike Roanhorse’s story about a man who has lost all sight of what it means to be native, Minerva’s confident indigeneity inspires a revolt within her people against their settler-oppression. Therefore, in finally overcoming the population-wide fear driving the native characters’ actions throughout the novel, Frenchie’s family forges a new era. Using various tactics, Rebecca Roanhorse and Cherie Dimaline respond to the Western commercialization of dreams, an important cultural facet of indigenous identity, through speculative storylines. The enveloping second person thriller “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience” advocates our rejection of native tourism which acquiesces to settler misrepresentations of indigenous culture, and TMT’s capitalistic system of marketed native dreams creates an analogy for native invisibility and persecution after Western colonization. As a BECK 10 result, the personality of Roanhorse’s Jesse Trueblood, formed upon a stereotypical foundation, encourages readers to reevaluate their own behaviors in order to prevent a total degradation of indigeneity, while Dimaline’s characters assume an active role in their world as fully recognized and many-sided individuals rather than indigenous tribal cliches. All in all, both authors utilize the indigenous futurism genre to project alternative forms of native existence alongside the settler state within postcolonial society. BECK 11 Works Cited Behrendt, Larissa. "In Your Dreams: Cultural Appropriation, Popular Culture and Colonialism." Law Text Culture, Vol. 4, HeinOnline, 2018, pp. 256-279. Crow, Sena. Radical Imaginings: indigenous futurisms and the Decolonizing Possibilities of Contemporary Indigenous Fiction. 2019. Seattle University, Senior Honors Thesis, SeattleU Scholarworks. Dillon, Grace L. "Imagining indigenous futurisms." Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, edited by Grace L. Dillion, Sun Tracks: An American Indian Literary Series, Vol. 69, edited by Ofelia Zepeda (and Committee), The University of Arizona Press, 2012, pp. 1-14. Dimaline, Cherie. “The Marrow Thieves.” Cormorant Books Inc., 2017. Goulet, Jean-Guy. DREAMS AND VISIONS IN INDIGENOUS LIFEWORLDS: AN EXPERIENTIAL APPROACH. Department of Anthropology, The University of Calgary, Alberta Canada, 2020, pp. 171-198. Gaertner, David. “‘What’s a story like you doing in a place like this?’: Cyberspace and indigenous futurism.” Novel Alliances: Allied Perspectives on Literature, Art, and New Media, novelalliances.com, 2015. Guzman, Alicia Inez. "indigenous futurisms” from “Dialogues.” InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, BECK 12 IVC.rochester.edu, 2015. 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Sturgis and Jason Sizemore. Uncanny Magazine, Issue 99, Aug. 2017. Roanhorse, Rebecca. “Postcards From the Apocalypse.” Uncanny Magazine, Issue 20, Jan/Feb 2018, pp. 131-136. Ruwoldt, Lena. (Feb. 2017). Dreams and Nightmares in First Nations Fiction: Inaugural dissertation for obtaining the academic degree of a doctor of philosophy (Dr. phil.) At the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Greifswald. (Doctoral Dissertation). The University of Greifswald, Germany. Treuer, David. Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual. Graywolf Press, 2006, pp. 3-27. BECK 13 Tuck, Eve and Yang, Wayne K. “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40. Wiget, Andrew. “Identity, Voice, and Authority: Artist-Audience Relations in Native American Literature.” World Literature Today, vol. 66, no. 2, 1992, pp. 258–263. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40148129.