From Turtle Island to Vistula’s Shores: Indigenous and Slavic Futurisms in Dialogue

When observing non-Western medias, colonialism, connections to land and time (or lack of), representations of culturally specific ideologies, and politics become key themes. In my proposed presentation, I examine the use of oral stories, memories, history, and cultural survivance within pop culture, contact zones, Native and Slavic Slipstreams and oral stories/legends as sci-fi (SF) narratives within Indigenous Futurism and Slavic Futurism, and how these genres are connected through those concepts. The core artists and filmmakers include Andriy Ermolenko, Jakub Różalski, Rosalie Favell, Skawennati, Sonny Assu, Danis Goulet and Tomasz Bagiński. Grace L. Dillon’s concept of the Native Slipstream promotes the “possibilities of multiverses” that allows authors, artist and filmmakers to recover “the Native space of the past...to build better futures”. In implementing biskaabiiyang (“returning to ourselves”) creators are “changing rather than imitating Eurowestern concepts”, creating their own unique “ethnoscapes”. A small sub-section of Eastern European SF, Slavic Futurism, seems to be following a similar route of representation of culture, language, and colonial encounters. With widespread Westernization, Slavic Futurism is less focused on overt representations of outer space and technology, and more about reclaiming traditional imagery in a contemporary setting; as if the traditions of the ancestors travelled through their own Slipstream into the future (the present).