Modernity and colonialism are framed as a violent ontological project that reduces plural socio-cosmologies into a single “naturalist” world and a single, preemptively predicted capitalist future, producing dystopia as an unevenly distributed condition while foreclosing alternative futurities. Indigenous Futurism (read through Cadena, Berardi, Eshun’s future anterior, and Vizenor’s survivance) is mobilized to reclaim “parallel futures” that inhabit trauma rather than transcend it, critiquing techno-progressivism and anarcho-primitivist/posthuman teleologies while proposing sovereignty through situated, improvised alliances across difference.

Indigenous Futurisms reframes science fiction as a decolonial practice of world-building that pluralizes both “science” and “future,” foregrounding Indigenous sciences, sovereignty, and non-linear/spiral temporalities (kobade) against settler modernity’s extrapolative, one-world futurity. Through concepts like Native slipstream, Contact, Native apocalypse/survivance, and Biskaabiiyang, the conversation critiques colonial epistemologies (including the category of “myth”), advances multispecies personhood and environmental/climate justice as narrative method, and proposes storytelling as a cosmopolitical technology that can “take the fiction out of science fiction.”