Indigenous Futurities: Theorizing Futurity in the Past and Present

ABSTRACT Over the past 20 years, a growing number of activists, scholars, writers, and visual artists have engaged with futurism as a framework for representing the lives of Indigenous peoples. Inspired by this hopeful reframing of the past‐present‐future, contributions to this special section of American Anthropologist address the question: How can anthropologists use our unique disciplinary tool kit to craft empowering narratives grounded in Indigenous worldviews and futures? In this introduction to the section, we provide an overview of the concepts of “futurism” and “futurity.” Like their Afrofuturist interlocutors, scholars engaging with Indigenous futurisms challenge a taken‐for‐granted white settler future. Replacing colonial narratives with thriving Indigenous cultures replete with emergent technologies, geographies, and ontologies. Drawing particularly on the work of Grace Dillon, we then outline how the themes of contact, science, slipstream, and apocalypse have been used by contributors to this edited series to re‐narrate the past and project new visions of Native personhood. In drawing together case studies across temporal registers and geographies, this compilation of essays affirms the dynamic pasts, present, and future of Indigenous peoples and contributes to dismantling disciplinary practices grounded in colonial power structures and narratives.