It was in the second year of my MFA (late 2015 to mid 2016) that I discovered Octavia E. Butler. Octavia’s work was different from science fiction I was familiar with like that of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert or mainstream space wars sagas with laser-toting spaceships. A futuristic world, as told by a black writer, was very refreshing and a window to see and imagine future scenarios and redefine my own practice. As an indigenous artist interested in sociopolitical issues, I always wanted to work with indigeneity and the indigenous movement passed down from our ancestors but was not sure how to approach it. Octavia’s storytelling inspired me to imagine and speculate my own indigenous community in future timelines. Although I was aware of Afrofuturism, it was Octavia Butler whose writings made me appreciate the genre.

“Afrofuturism is an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation,” writes Ytasha L. Womack, an author, filmmaker and Afrofuturist, in her book AFROFUTURISM, The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (2013). This intersection was the place and space I was looking for to weave my community’s storytelling and indigeneity, with my love of science and science fiction. Womack adds:

Whether through literature, visual arts, music, or grassroots organizing, Afrofuturists redefine culture and notions of blackness for today and the future. Both an artistic aesthetic and a framework for critical theory, Afrofuturism combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs. In some cases, it’s a total reenvisioning of the past and speculation about the future rife with cultural critiques.

I began incorporating science fiction and indigenous elements in my artworks – mainly digital art and sound works – using our indigenous Yakthung (Limbu) scripts, songs and symbols. I even designed a mothership based on the Silamsakma, a commonly used ritualistic object that is unanimously accepted as a symbol of identity among our Yakthung community.  Without knowing, I was touching upon another movement of creative practice that draws on Afrofuturism – Indigenous Futurisms, a term coined by Anishinaabe professor Grace Dillon. In an interview with Rosanna Deerchild, Grace describes Indigenous Futurisms as:

[an] area where Indigenous writers can create thought experiment in scientific sense and centre Indigenous people within that world, as Helen Haig-Brown who is from the Tsilhqot’in Nation and has created the film ?E?anx (The Cave) in her own language, she has called it taking the fiction out of science fiction and in the process of that sharing the values and ethics that connected to science, which is ceremony, singing, dancing, all forms of art along with growing plants, developing medicines, creating space rockets.

IIndigenous Futurisms gives indigenous writers, artists, filmmakers and other creative practitioners the space to imagine and carry out thought experiments and see themselves in the future, practicing indigenous knowledge and ideas along with science and technology. Like Afrofuturism, it shifts the narrative from the colonised, oppressed and marginalised to representation, progress and liberation, from tokenism to leadership, from ‘vanishing races’ to hyper-advanced nations.

Indigenous Futurisms has strong roots and presence in Turtle Island (North America) and is expanding to many indigenous nations around the world. Unlike in Turtle Island, indigenous creatives in Nepal do not have much to draw from in terms of futuristic and speculative art and literature, let alone created from an indigenous perspective. As an indigenous artist imagining futures, I found Indigenous Futurisms and Afrofuturism very inspiring.   

Paying homage to Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurisms, I have recently started to call my practice incorporating indigeneity with science, speculative fiction, fantasy and sci-fi elements as Adivasi Futurisms – not as a separate entity but nurtured and inspired by Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurisms. Adivasi is a Nepalese word for indigenous, which is also widely used in the Indian sub-continent. Among many names, we mostly use Adivasi Janajati for indigenous nationalities in Nepal. So, for me, Adivasi Futurisms could be a space where Adivasi artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers can imagine and speculate future scenarios from their perspectives, where their communities have agency, technology, sovereignty and also their indigenous knowledge, language, culture, ethics and storytelling still intact – of course with upgraded codes. It could be an intersection where futures without or dealing with ways to de-link and dismantle brahminical patriarchal casteism and racism – that have been detrimental to Adivasis, Dalits, Madhesis, women and queer people in the region – can be imagined.

Adivasi Futurisms is a critical framework to analyse, explore, engage with and address the past and current struggles of Adivasi Janajatis and their connections with the land through creative practice. It imagines a future where indigenous values of the land and nature, as living entities and inseparable from communities, are upheld and practised. In this future, the values of collectivity, co-existence, and compassion prevail over individualism and personal gain. So, Adivasi Futurisms is anti-colonial, anti-caste, anti-racist and anti-capitalist by default.

Ytasha proposes that “any sci-fi fan, comic book geek, fantasy reader, Trekker, or science fair winner who ever wondered why black people are minimised in pop culture depictions of the future, conspicuously absent from the history of science, or marginalised in the roster of past inventors and then actually set out to do something about it could arguably qualify as an Afrofuturist as well.” (Womack, 2013). Likewise, any writers, artists and accomplices actively trying to carve out and create spaces for Adivasi futures could possibly qualify as an Adivasi Futurists.

Amidst the current capitalist neoliberal worldview of nation states, where indigenous people are seen as an obstacle to progress, we have been making our voices louder in recent decades, may it be in Dakota, Amazon, Kathmandu or in our Yakthung territories like in Mukkumlung. We are challenging the Western and colonial idea of ‘development’. In times like these, spaces like Adivasi Futurisms could be a portal to re-view and re-define progress and dissolve the idea of nation states. In contrary to colonialist narratives of indigenous people as ‘primitive’, Adivasi Futurisms could be a space to re-imagine ourselves as not only the storytellers of the past but also creators of interplanetary and interstellar civilisations of the future.

In the future, Adivasis, Dalits, Madhesis, Indigenous, Blacks and all currently marginalised people will have formed constellations of knowledge, science, and culture connected by empathy, kinship and shared interests of cosmic exploration. The current nation states that were built on foundations like greed and exploitation will give way to something new and just. And should there be any remnants of colonial, brahminical, racial, patriarchal and capitalistic retrograding entities, they will be met with appropriate responses.

–Miksam’s Dream, p.227

2020 version here