Featured image: Kali Spitzer, “An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance,” 2019 (installation view).
Emily Riddle argues that, in their actions every day, queer and trans Indigenous peoples enact a different kind of governance, one seldom talked about but which represents a powerful political force. Just as queer and trans Indigenous peoples enact a different kind of governance, I argue that the queer enacts a different kind of futurism. A queer Indigenous project holds that we need to transform relationalities before we can move past any form of identity or symbolic order. What if we embraced nuance, difference and deviance as an anti-colonial ontology, embracing shared separation, exposing the void and admitting things are already unmade. Could this be a relational turn—no grandeur project or mission, just an intention to be together in our separation, in a way that isn’t part of a neoliberal design? The queer Indigenous future emerges from this relational offering: not simply as any aesthetic depiction of Indigenous peoples in the futures—a formation of Indigenous futurism based on identity politics and participation in the symbolic order—but as an ethical protocol, a way of relating and a vision of possible and otherwise worlds.
Jas M. Morgan 