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== Grace Dillon and Pedro Neves Marques (2021) Taking the Fiction Out of Science Fiction: A Conversation about Indigenous Futurisms. e-flux Journal, Issue #120, September 2021. (Available: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/120/417043/taking-the-fiction-out-of-science-fiction-a-conversation-about-indigenous-futurisms/  ==

* Grace Dillon bio: Grace Dillon is an Anishinaabe cultural critic, professor in Indigenous Nations Studies at Portland State University, and a key figure in contemporary conversations about Indigenous Futurisms. Anchored in analyses of science fiction, her work spans literary sources, film, and popular culture. Her edited anthology Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012) has become an invaluable guide to the growing field of Indigenous Futurisms and its many ramifications in studies and debates about race, gender, geography, science, and the notion of temporality itself. In this sense, Indigenous Futurisms—in the plural, as Dillon reminds us in this interview—encompass Indigenous perspectives on science fiction, speculative storytelling, and world-building through literary, cinematic, and other artistic forms, emphasizing both the colonial role of science and technology and its decolonial uses in affirming Indigenous sovereignty and creativity.
* "For its part, “Contact” was and remains a decolonizing feature of many Indigenous stories because, of course, contact is such a big topic in science fiction, especially in the form of contact with alien peoples. For us Native Americans and/or Indigenous peoples throughout all the Americas—South, Central, and North—contact carries political reverberations. Take these myths that talk about Indigenous peoples having visions or prophecies about white people coming and making contact. " (Dillon 2021)
* "What I love about current Indigenous Futurisms and how they’re changing is that they aren’t constrained by this binary between Western science and Indigenous or non-Western science. One example is Nalo Hopkinson’s novel The New Moon’s Arms (2007), set in the Caribbean. There’s this scene close to the end of the book, after the characters have suffered all of this environmental and extractivist injustice, where the grandmother is passing on her traditional ways of knowledge to her grandson but, since he goes to school, they’re actually teaching each other. “Intergenerational” doesn’t imply a hierarchical, top-down elders’ passing of knowledge only. It’s more of an exchange of ideas." (Dillon 2021)
* "As Indigenous peoples, we’ve already experienced forms of genocide, including biowarfare, with blankets being contaminated with smallpox and then handed out as a way to decimate our people. You can connect this with Vizenor’s notion of survivance—telling stories to overcome the lived experience of tragedy, dominance, and victimhood. The important thing is not to be subsumed by those experiences. In Waubgeshig Rice’s novel Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018), you have an Indigenous community where all of a sudden the power is cut off and there’s no internet or any connection to the outside world. To help everyone survive, what the community does is return to traditional protocols: if anyone hunts a caribou or a moose they don’t hoard but share it with everyone, starting with the elders. To me, that is the hope that underlines the reality of Native apocalypse: you lived through it, so you may know how to pull together as an Indigenous community through any kind of crisis." (Dillon 2021)
* "In terms of the future, my Anishinaabemowin language has a word, kobade—a very small word, but in reality an extremely sophisticated concept. The idea is that everything that’s in the past and the future is also in the now, but it’s not as simplistic as that. It’s more like there exists a spiral of intergenerational connections, so that even if you are in the present you have spirit persons at your side; they can be ancient spirits, considered to be from the past or from the future. Kobade is the recognition of all persons, not just human persons, and of all the intergenerational connections that we have, which are never linear, but spiral. " (Dillon 2021)
* "When talking about her 2010 short film The Cave, Helen Haig-Brown says that what she did in the film was to take the fiction out of science fiction. The film tells the story of a bear hunter who ends up in a cave, inside an alternative world where people speak to one another telepathically and you have these spirit beings floating in the air" (Dillon 2021)
* "I grew up in a pacifist anarchist community that was Anishinaabe-founded, at least to some degree. So, when I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed, I could absolutely understand the whole process of community and of shunning or shaming a person as a form of power and control, but also the recognition of combining art with science, rather than understanding them as separate. Although her story is science fictional, by acknowledging the role of storytelling in this combination between art and science, Le Guin again takes the fiction out of science fiction, and works with other forms of science." (Dillon 2021)
* "the reason I’m interested in science fiction is that when I was little and we had firesides, sweats, and other ceremonies, we were telling stories about star peoples that came to earth in, basically, space canoes. For me, the concept of a spaceship was not unusual. And, of course, we are all star people. We are made of stardust, which is scientifically accurate. Everything is made of stardust." (Dillon 2021)
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