Abstract
This paper looks at the Indigenous Futurisms movement, specifically literature, and the ways that it can serve as a tool resistance for Indigenous Women. By creating stories within the movement, Indigenous Women are actively resisting a dominant patriarchal society that has tried for centuries to destroy them. The writing, publishing, and reading of these stories reaffirms the power and presence of Indigenous women in the past, present, and future when they are so often seen as museum props, relics of the past. Indigenous Futurisms is important for how it reworks and interrogates literary tropes of the SciFi genre. In my essay I analyze the ways that Science Fiction hiders and helps Indigenous writers - giving them space for imaginative creation but also profiting from stories that eerily echo that harsh colonization of Indigenous peoples. I look at Indigenous Futurisms as being made up of waves, with different texts defining the ideas of the movement at that time. The two texts I look at in this paper represent different waves of the genre: Celu Amberstone’s short story “Refugees” would make up the first wave while Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse makes up the second and current wave. Indigenous Futurism literature by women is about creating, healing, and resisting. These stories assert an Indigenous presence in the present and future.