Terminal Futurity and Native Ressentiment in the Indigenous Post-Apocalypse

Indigenous post-apocalyptic fiction projects an Indigenous presence into future spaces, attesting to the endurance and survivance of Indigenous peoples and thereby challenging settler myths of erasure. The Indigenous post-apocalypse foregrounds continuity by focusing on how the violences of the future mirror the violences inflicted by settler colonialism in the past and present. In Cherie Dimaline’s Marrow Thieves series and Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon novels, communities of Indigenous survivors are depicted amidst the violence and hostility of the post-apocalyptic landscape. Both authors, as well as other post-apocalyptic writers such as Gerald Vizenor and Stephen Graham Jones, depict the threats to Indigenous characters as not simply external, however, but internal as well. Not all Indigenous characters in the post-apocalypse are able to resist a colonized identity, with some going so far as to privilege settler futurities over Indigenous ones. Instead of Indigenous futurity, these characters embrace colonized futurities, visions of the future that render it as a dead-end, as trapped in what Jones refers to as the “End of the Trail mode.” The means of refuting this type of futurity consist of resisting the settler imaginary’s constructions of Indigeneity, but also in pushing back against Native ressentiment. In this case, ressentiment signifies Indigenous identities formulated as a reaction to settler colonialism, a negative rather than affirmative conception of self. Each of these texts creates future spaces in which Indigenous characters are empowered with agency to refuse terminal futurity’s vision of ressentiment, with some characters fighting to build a communal and resurgent future while others are unable to escape settler colonialism’s pull. In this way, these texts serve as a cautionary tale for Indigenous readers: to survive in the future means actively combatting terminal ideologies which seek to keep Indigenous futurity tethered to a colonial past.