Our Favourite Things: Visual Cultures of Indigenous Futurisms

What are some of your favourite GUTS reads from the past six years? We’re asking our readers to share their top picks with us as we get ready to wrap things up with one last issue in the new year. Here, Nasreen Rajani and Faith Paré write about Lindsay Nixon’s “Visual Cultures of Indigenous Futurisms,” a piece on Indigenous artists making work about displacement, decolonization, and resurgence:

“There are so many great GUTS pieces, but one in particular I want to mention is the piece by Lindsay Nixon on Visual Cultures of Indigenous Futurisms. I’ve been teaching a 4th year undergraduate course, ‘Media, Race and Ethnicity’ and this is one of our course readings under futurisms. The class always engage with this piece as it’s well-written for a wide audience that doesn’t know a whole lot about Indigeneity in Canada and the role of a future imaginary.” – Nasreen Rajani

“As an Black queer emerging writer living in what feels like so-called end times, I was deeply inspired by Lindsay Nixon’s incredible ‘Visual Cultures of Indigenous Futurisms,’ an essay I revisit again and again in my own research and making. Lindsay’s survey demands how those of us on unceded territories can support Indigenous artists and communities envisioning sovereignty in ‘the dystopian now.’ Their piece also sparked my own creative preoccupation of how Afro- and Indigenous futurisms can imagine and advocate for each other’s survival together, in solidarity—both in art and in organizing.” – Faith Paré


from “Visual Cultures of Indigenous Futurisms

“The future imaginary and its catalogue of science fictive imageries affords Indigenous artists a creative space to respond to the dystopian now, grounding their cultural resurgence in contextual and relational practices. Indigenous artists have no problem portraying possible undesirable futures wherein colonial capitalist greed has resulted in the subjugation of life within all creation, because these narratives are evocative of our known realities. We have realized the apocalypse now, and we are living in a dystopian settler-occupied oligarchy fuelled by resource extraction and environmental contamination, completely alternative to our traditional ways of being and knowing.”

If GUTS has made an impact on you over the years, please consider making a donation to help us make our final issue the best one yet. All donations will go towards paying our contributing writers and artists.


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