The other, what he called “de-colonial,” thinks past today’s status quo and conflict. One form, anti-colonialism, challenges the status quo and takes on how things are. In the past, as today, Deloria explained, there are two major forms of resistance to colonialism.
I’m here as a historian who’s thinking about someone from the ’30s,” he said to laughter.ĭeloria’s aunt, who went by her pen name Mary Sully, was a futurist of her day, exploring modernism in her transformative and often deeply political three-panel “personality prints” of public figures that she made from the 1920s through the mid-1940s. “I’m not here as a person who thinks about the future. So the solutions are already there for being able to consider what’s going to happen seven generations down the line.”ĭeloria, who is Dakota, offered a historical perspective on native arts and futurism through his book Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract, which reexamines the art of his great aunt Susan “Susie” Mabel Deloria. “But to me what’s important about futures is that these ideas-indigenous ideas of futures, Lakota ideas of futures-are already built into our epistemologies, ontologies. That’s now a pan-Indian, shared concept,” said Kite, who is Oglala Lakota. “A common saying in our communities is you always want to plan seven generations ahead.
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It’s this moment, she says, where native people are saying “yes, we actually know how to deal with climate change and shifting conditions of land and animals and plants.”Īnother panelist, the visual and performance artist Kite, introduced the concept of the seventh generation principle to the conversation. “What is interesting to think about Indigenous Futurisms is all futures require us now,” she said.
So the solutions are already there for being able to consider what’s going to happen seven generations down the line.”ĭuncan, who is of Ojibwe, French and Scottish descent, said she also sees the power of Indigenous Futurisms when it comes to topics like climate resilience. That’s now a pan-Indian, shared concept,” visual and performance artist Kite said. “In art you can sketch the line and erase the line but there will always be some residue of that action.” “We were interested in the act of erasure and resistance and the ways in which that resistance looks different in different contexts,” she said. Over the course of the evening, the three panelists responded to the question by discussing specific artistic projects, representations, and explorations.Īja Couchois Duncan, writer and librettist for the new experimental opera Sweet Land, said that challenging erasure was on her mind when she was writing Sweet Land with fellow librettist Douglas Kearney. She kicked off the evening’s discussion by asking: “What is your idea of Indigenous Futurisms?” “Not just a present,” Deloria emphasized, “but a future.”ĭeloria was responding to a question from event moderator Manuela Well-Off-Man, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, which is based in Santa Fe. If the goal of settler-colonialism is the removal and erasure of Indigenous peoples, the historian said, then one of the most powerful weapons to counter erasure is the creation of powerful visions of a future for native people.
Deloria during a Zócalo event entitled “ How Are Native American Artists Envisioning the Future?” and held at Cross Campus in downtown Los Angeles last night.ĭeloria said that this deep interest in the future is unsurprising. Over the last 50 years, futurity has become an important theme among native people and artists, said Harvard historian Philip J.
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