“I’m Writing This All Down So I Don’t Forget”: The Indigenous Futurist Short Story and Kinship as Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Resistance

While Speculative fiction often entertains a future free of Capitalism and invites speculation, Native American Post-Apocalyptic short speculative ficti on is not purely speculative. Native American and First Nations Two-Spirit, Transgender and Indigiqueer authors write alternative futures and re-imagine new spaces of belonging. Although indigenous futurist literature, under the umbrella of speculative fiction, offers alternative imaginings to the dystopian capitalistic present, it is not guaranteed that settler colonialism has been expunged in these alternatively reimagined Indigenous futures. Love After the End, an anthology of Indigenous futurist short stories authored by Two-Spirit writers, approaches the dystopian-now and erasure of trans-lives in a nuanced way that complicates contemporary Western and postcolonial trans-imaginings of the future. Although Kai Minosh Pyle’s “How to Survive Apocalypse for Native Girls” and Jaye Simpson “The Ark of the Turtle’s Back” depict reimagined societies, Indigiqueer peoples are still situated on the margins. While Pyle’s short story depicts a society free from capitalism, Indigenous youth still face ongoing persecution for challenging and resisting the colonial gender binary, Jaye Simpson’s “Ark of the Turtle’s Back” imagines a future where Native trans-indigenous have limited access to life-saving gender affirming care and their rights are revoked. Thus, in my paper I argue Pyle, and Simpson unsettle, upset, derange and perplex the colonial binary, and persistently challenges erasures of said belonging.