Indigenous Futurities in Curriculum

SPECIAL ISSUE with an exercise that brings our ancestors and us together as we engage our thinking and action around Indigenous futurities in curriculum.We ask, "What land or water do you carry with you today?Who do you bring with you?" 1 I (Hollie) carry with me, Tsoodzi.This is one of the sacred mountains of the Din that is located between Gallup and Albuquerque, New Mexico.My mother and matrilineal line is from an area west of Tsoodzi.I bring Tsoodzi with me because it represents home.When I travel from Pennsylvania to home, it is the first thing I look for to let me know I am near.The sacred mountains of the Din orient the people and provide direction.They have existed before our human existence and continue to guide us.The mountains are one representation that we can look to, to know that Din futurity has already been set in motion, the knowledge, tools, and instructions have already been set out for us.I (Leilani) carry with me my homelands in Cirniq (Chignik) and my sister's homelands in Falasteen (Palestine)-places that are connected through our relationship with one another and through remembrance, inheritance, and imagination.Cirniq is a place and community I was able to reconnect with as an adoptee through acts of remembering and imagining.Several lines from a poem by Koyukon Athabascan poet Mary TallMountain (2005)-"I tell you now.You can go home again" (p.13)-sparked a feeling, a memory, a hope, and ultimately, a future in which I was reconnected to the place my ancestors have always known, a place our grandmother left to attend a Baptist Mission school, a place colonialism sought to sever me from unsuccessfully.Carrying Cirniq with me reminds me that our histories, our imaginations, and the work we do in the present to realize the futures we want to be a part of are all vital to Indigenous futurity work.My sister has yet to visit Cirniq, but that future is already present in the stories and photos I share with her, and she will remember them when she returns.Because I am writing amidst genocide, I also carry with me Falasteen, a place my sister Lena both remembers and imagines, a place her grandmother was violently dispossessed from at the age of 8, a place that also exists in LA because she carries her roots and memories with her.Her existence and steadfastness are the seeds of presence and resistance that will realize her right of return in the future.Her determination, embodied by so W