Reimagining our history with Indigenous futurisms

Indigenous Speakers Series invites Chelsea Vowel to share Indigenous perspectives on how to reflect on the past to create better futures. By Sieara Miller Office of Indigenous Relations What can Indigenous futurisms do for us? This was one of the central questions guiding Chelsea Vowel's hopeful and humour-filled presentation, âniskôhôcikan, Like a String of Beads: Indigenous Futurisms. Vowel's presentation was part of the Indigenous Speakers Series organized by Indigenous and settler faculty, staff and students from the Waterloo Indigenous Student Centre (WISC), the Office of Indigenous Relations, the Dean of Arts Office, and the departments of History and Communication Arts. The event was held on February 08 in the Theatre of the Arts inside the Modern Languages building, with approximately 150 attending in person and 180tuned in virtually via livestream.  A recording is now available on the Faculty of Art's Youtube channel. Chelsea Vowel Indigenous futurisms, a term coined by Grace Dillon and indebted to Afrofuturism, seeks to describe a movement of art, literature, games, and other forms of media that express Indigenous perspectives on the future, present and past. Indigenous futurisms allow us to reimagine the past and present while also offering hope to our futures, rejecting apocalyptic settler fantasies.