A story set in the future is never really about the future. It takes something true now — a fear, an injustice, a hope — and pushes it forward so you can see it clearly. For a long time, popular stories either left Indigenous people out of the future entirely or pictured them as vanishing. Indigenous futurism answers that by imagining First Nations, Métis and Inuit people, languages and knowledge very much present in the future, and by using the future to look hard at history. The questions these stories ask are sharp: what happens if the past repeats, what knowledge helps a community survive collapse, and who gets to imagine what comes next?
What Indigenous futurism is
The term Indigenous futurisms is closely associated with Anishinaabe scholar Grace Dillon, who edited Walking the Clouds (2012), an anthology of Indigenous science fiction. Speculative fiction is the umbrella term for stories built on a 'what if': science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic stories, and fantasy. Several Indigenous writers and critics have pointed out that many Indigenous communities have already lived through world-ending loss — of land, of lives, of ways of living — so an apocalypse is not only something imagined. That idea gives many of these stories a distinctive angle: collapse is not the end of the story, and survival draws on knowledge and relationships that were kept.
| Detail | The Marrow Thieves | Moon of the Crusted Snow |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Cherie Dimaline, a Métis writer from the Georgian Bay Métis community in Ontario | Waubgeshig Rice, an Anishinaabe writer from Wasauksing First Nation in Ontario |
| Published | 2017; winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for young people's literature (text) | 2018 |
| Premise | In a future damaged by climate disaster, most people have lost the ability to dream. Indigenous people, whose bone marrow is believed to hold that ability, are hunted and taken to facilities called schools. | As winter sets in, a remote northern Anishinaabe community loses power and contact with the south, and must decide how to survive as supplies run low and outsiders arrive. |
| Whose story | Frenchie, a Métis teenager travelling north with a small group that becomes a chosen family | Evan Whitesky, a young man in the community trying to provide for his family |
| What the future comments on | The new schools deliberately echo residential schools; a colonial pattern of taking from Indigenous people repeats in a new form | The community has survived the end of a world before, and draws on land-based knowledge, language and collective decisions |
How imagined futures comment on the past and present
- Echo. A future institution or event mirrors a historical one. When The Marrow Thieves calls its harvesting facilities schools, readers who know the history of residential schools feel the connection immediately.
- Reversal. The collapse hits the dominant society, while an Indigenous community draws on knowledge it held onto. Moon of the Crusted Snow turns the usual disaster story around by centring a community that has faced catastrophe before.
- Continuity. Characters carry language, stories and relationships into the future, which is itself a claim that these things will last.
- Warning. Present-day concerns such as climate change and resource extraction are extended forward to show where they could lead.
- Possibility. Simply imagining Indigenous futures pushes back against old stories that pictured Indigenous peoples as belonging only to the past.
Themes: language, land and community
| Theme | What to look for | Questions to ask |
|---|---|---|
| Language | Words from an Indigenous language, who speaks it fluently, who is learning, what happens when it is used | Is language treated as something threatened, something that protects, or both? Who holds it, and how is it passed on? |
| Land | Hunting, travel, seasons, knowing a place, the relationship between people and particular lands and waters | What knowledge of the land helps characters survive? What does losing access to land cost them? |
| Community | Elders and youth, chosen families, how decisions are made, how outsiders are treated | Does survival depend on one hero or on the group? What holds the community together under pressure? |
Reflecting on your reading strategies
Speculative fiction asks readers to work differently. The world has its own rules, which are revealed gradually. There may be invented terms, unexplained history, and a narrator who knows things the reader does not yet know. Reflecting on your reading strategies — sometimes called metacognition, or thinking about your thinking — means noticing what you did when the reading got hard, judging whether it worked, and deciding what to do next time. This is a skill that transfers to every difficult text you will read.
- Before reading: What do I already know about the genre, the author and the history the story might draw on? What do I predict?
- During reading: Where did I get confused? Did I reread, keep a list of the world's rules, check a glossary, or push on to see if it became clear?
- Tracking the world: Am I noting each new rule, term and piece of history as it appears, so the world gets clearer instead of more confusing?
- Noticing connections: When did something in the future remind me of a real historical event or a present-day issue? Did I stop to note it?
- After reading: Which strategy helped most? Which did not? What will I do differently with the next challenging text?