“Slipping Futures: Native Slipstream, Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians, and Predictive Processing”

Native Slipstream, a term first used by Gerald Vizenor, is a narrative technique that that “infuses stories with time travel, alternate realities and multiverses, and alternative histories,” allowing narratives to explore “time as pasts, presents, and futures that flow together like currents in a navigable stream” and that offer “nonlinear thinking about space-time” (Dillion 3). Stephe Graham Jones’s (Blackfeet) The Only Good Indians (2020) deploys this technique in order to resolve the injustices of settler colonialism in the past and present through the projection of parts of the narrative into the future. By emphasizing Native Slipstream, I argue that Jones is able to slip seamlessly through various timelines without the usual narrative markers meant to moor a reader in a specific line of diachronic and narrative causality. Through this slipstream, Jones reveals hidden possibilities within the models of the world the narrative embodies and creates, thereby disrupting the calcification of the injustices of settler colonialism in possible futures and leaving space for alterity and possibility.