From Colonial Terraforming towards a Planet-Based Solidarity: Indigenous Speculations between Planet Earth and Outer Space

Terraforming has long been one of the most popular concepts in SF and space colonization discourses to think about the necessary territorial changes on other planets to make them livable for human life. More recently, however, terraforming has made the journey from alien environments back to Earth to reflect on how colonialist-capitalist practices have already changed the planet. Anne Stewart conceptualizes the histories and futures of these practices with the term ‘colonial terraforming’ – a praxis which describes the transformation of places to make them habitable only for a particular set of people: European colonial settlers. Thus, terraforming not only changes the land but also can be read as an ontological practices that creates the "ecological genre of the human," as Derek Woods puts it in conversation with Sylvia Wynter. When land provides the “ontological framework for understanding relationships,” as Glen Coulthard frames it in Red Skin, White Masks, what does it mean for Indigenous onto-epistemologies when the ground is shifting, dispossessed, terraformed? This essay critically engages with this question: translating Coulthard and Leanne Simpson’s concept of “place-based solidarity” to a “planet-based solidarity,” I read Indigenous futurist texts as decolonial practices of relating to the land, planets, and the cosmos. After a theoretical engagement with terraforming and its entanglements within current speculative projects of colonizing Mars and dominant narratives of astrocapitalism, I read three short stories that are set against and beyond the extractive logics of colonial modernity: Adam Garnet Jones’s “History of the New World,” jaye simpson’s “The Ark of the Turtle’s Back” (both published in Love After the End, ed. Joshua Whitehead) and Celu Amberstone’s “Refugees” (first published in So Long Been Dreaming, ed. Nalo Hopkinson). Each of these stories is set in a different moment of extraterrestrial exodus: while still on Earth, during the journey in space, and after arrival on an alien planet. Through their speculative interventions in discourses of climate disaster, colonialism, and the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples, I argue that these Indigenous futurist narratives imagine a different cosmic order, marked by a generative refusal of the available scripts of relating to the galaxy.