Dthe future means decolonizing science fiction.

“Historically, SF has tended to disregard the varieties of space-time thinking of traditional societies, and it may still narrate the atrocities of colonialism as ‘adventure stories,’” writes Grace Dillon in the introduction to Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction.

In the white science fiction canon, indigeneity tends to show up in a couple of ways. In space operas, some planetary cultures (human or humanoid) are transparent, if not always coherent, analogues for Indigenous cultures on Earth. In an episode of the podcast Métis in Space, hosts Molly Swain and Chelsea Vowel explore the tropes about imperialism and civilization that crop up in the movie adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic novel Dune, for example.

Less often, there might be a human on a spaceship or non-Earth planet who has vaguely Indigenous ancestry and customs. When the writers of Star Trek: Voyager created the character of Chakotay, they didn’t bother to specify his ancestry for the longest time, as he gradually accumulated a mish-mash of invented traditions. When they set out to write an Indigenous character in space, they started by severing him from any actual land or culture on Earth, leaving him with the stoicism and mysticism a white audience would find unthreatening.

Contrast that with the vision of the future in Little Badger’s “Né łe”: “The Diné orbiter, a spool of residential and industry modules rotating around a zero-grav core, was sovereign Navajo territory, completely inhabited by Nation citizens and their guests.”

“Land-based does not have to mean land-locked,” writes Lou Catherine Cornum in the gorgeous essay, The Space NDN’s Star Map. “Indigenous futurism seeks to challenge notions of what constitutes advanced technology and consequently advanced civilizations.”

Justice says Indigenous writers are “pushing against the binaries that have been imposed on us. Because the binaries always have us at a deficit. In a binary of savage versus civilized, we’re always rendered savage. In a binary of modern versus primitive, we’re always put in the primitive.”

The very idea of Indigenous futurism can seem jarring to white people because of this notion that Indigenous people are, as Justice puts it, “museum pieces.”

All of the tropes of interplanetary science fiction — including the very words we use when we write about the “colonization” of other planets, or the “final frontier” — are rooted in colonial notions of how humans interact with peoples and with territory.

“These are not theoretical concerns,” says Justice. “Colonialism is not a theoretical concern. The colonization of Mars and what that means — not a theoretical concern. We know what that means. All these things have real-life parallels and we can help give guidance as to why certain things are profoundly dangerous to the people and to the land. It’s just about others listening to that and paying attention.”

In Gerry William’s novel The Black Ship, first published in 1994 and recently republished in an expanded edition, the protagonist is a genocide survivor adopted into another culture. “All stories are traditional,” it begins. “This one happens maybe a long time ago, maybe now, maybe not yet.” It’s a novel that plays with time, that reminds us that the same story — the violent theft of children from their families — has happened over and over, across the generations. Setting a familiar story in an unfamiliar place and time can jolt readers out of their prejudices.