Ideas - (Land) Back to the Future | Riley Yesno 

Episode Date: June 12, 2024

Can Indigenous people dream a better future into being? Anishinaabe scholar Riley Yesno explores Indigenous futurism and the connection between dreams and new realities, inspired by playwright Cliff Cardinal’s Huff. This episode is part of our ongoing series of talks, each inspired by a theme in a play at Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. And welcome to a live taping of Ideas at Crow's Theatre in Toronto. Thank you. This is the fourth in our series for this season. We've invited five interesting thinkers to give a talk inspired by one of the plays in the Crow's Theatre season. The ideas in a play are often much the same as

those that concern us in real life, some of the most pressing questions of our time. The fourth play in our series is Huff by Governor General award-winning playwright Cliff Cardinal. Huff tells the story of Wind and his brothers as they struggle with their mother's death, a reserve school system that's failing them, and a solvent abuse problem. As the play goes on, Wind's fantastic, gas-induced dream world starts to blur with his harsh reality. It's that relationship between dreams and reality that inspired today's talk called Land Back to the Future. Riley Yesno considers the role that dreaming plays in making a better world through the stories and lessons of Indigenous futurism. She is an Anishinaabe scholar, writer and commentator from Abnatong First Nation.

scholar, writer, and commentator from Abnathong First Nation. Her major project right now is teaching Indigenous governance and justice at Toronto Metropolitan University, and completing her PhD at the University of Toronto, where she studies Indigenous and Canadian politics and is a Vanier Scholar. Please help me in welcoming Riley. Thank you. Please help me in welcoming Riley. Hi friends.

So to start, I want you to close your eyes and imagine for a moment. Imagine that you could live an extraordinarily long life or that you found a time machine, whatever suits your fancy. In any case, you've suddenly found yourself 100 to 200 years in the future. What do you see? What does the future look like? What does it feel like? Okay, open. If I had to put money on it, I'd bet that most of you envisioned one of a few worlds. The first, it might look like something out of a Jetsons cartoon, sleek, robotic, featuring self-driving cars, or perhaps the comically impractical flying cars that always appear in visions of the future? Or perhaps your imagination took you someplace much darker, an apocalypse. Climate change has ravaged the land. If there are people, we're living in a dangerous society. We may have failed to deal with today's crises

and have thus lost the promise of a good tomorrow. Did you see aliens? Were they friends or were they foes? No matter the specifics, when asked to envision the future, it can feel hard to think outside of those types of motifs. Personally, I put a good deal of blame on sci-fi for that. Think about it. The future as a setting has been largely claimed as one of science fiction's main domains. All around us, we're presented with books, TV shows, movies, and art of all kinds that become our cultural anchoring points for what the future is. Let's go back to your imagination for a second. Remember what you first pictured. remember what you first pictured. Just as I feel confident I can bet on what you did picture, I'm also willing to bet I know at least one thing you didn't picture. I bet that in your vision of the future, no matter what it looked like, you probably didn't think of indigenous people.

I at least partially blame sci-fi for this too. I say this and you may be wondering, Riley, how exactly is this George Lucas's fault? Well, let me tell you. Just as sci-fi has claimed the future, it also claims the narratives that take us to those futures. You'd be hard-pressed to find a sci-fi story that doesn't feature technological upheaval, contact and invasion, some form of apocalypse or multiverses, a muddling of time and space. As an Indigenous person, I see these narratives and I think, wait a second, that is quite familiar. Think about it. A foreign people coming up to your land one day out of the blue, and they bring with them new technology and also conflict. Is this not the story of colonization? Indigenous people have and continue to live through the destruction of our lands, our ways of life, our families. Is this not apocalypse?

The Handmaid's Tale, taking people's children, evangelizing communities by force. Is this not the story of residential schools? Trust me, my goo-goo told me about Nanabuju traveling through space and time way before Doctor Who did it. But just because Indigenous people have been largely left out of mainstream narratives of the future, that doesn't mean that we've stopped dreaming up and sharing our futures on our terms. Futures where we are centered, powerful, and in control of our stories. These kinds of works are called indigenous futurisms. According to Nehiyaw scholar Erica Violet Lee in her excellent

essay, Reconciling the Apocalypse, which builds on the work of prolific Métis author Maria Campbell, she writes, the job of writers and artists is to be mirrors for the people, that we build what I especially love that last bit of the quote. The word interruption rings in my ears. It's reminding me that colonization is not permanent. It is not inevitable. That there have been worlds far before Canada and there will be worlds far after Canada. My curiosity creeps in. What exactly are such worlds like? When you start looking, you'll find plenty of stunning futurist works that don't invisibilize BIPOC folks and that challenge colonialism. You probably already even know some of them. For instance, who has seen the Black Panther movies? Yeah. In the Black Panther, if you did not raise your hand, the fictional country of

Wakanda, located on the African continent, has mostly avoided the violence of colonialism. And this has allowed them to hold onto their resources, vibranium, for all of you sticklers to the story there, and it allowed them to develop without having to use every resource of energy consumed by mere survival. The result? Wakanda is a thriving global technological leader that beautifully blends the strengths of tradition and innovation. And this is a classic example of Afrofuturism, a world far beyond colonialism's interruption. The term Afrofuturism itself was first coined by culture critic Mark Derry in 1994, but Afrofuturist work existed long before it was given that specific label.

Like indigenous people, and also noting that countless Indigenous people are also Black people, Black people too have been left out of our visions of the future, constantly depicted in positions of inferiority or stuck only in a perpetual struggle. And for decades now, Afrofuturists like W.E. Dubois, Octavia Butler, Sun Ra, Outkast, and Janelle Monae, to name only a few, have been illuminating the way for other discounted demographics to express themselves through prose, song, fashion, and beyond. Honestly, I could spend this entire talk just gushing to you about all my favorite Afrofuturist works, but more than just highlighting awesome and important work, I also have an objective here.

I want to convince you all that dreams of Indigenous futures are not just a creative act of reclamation, but they are an active and essential step in materially transforming our world. To that end, I'd like to tell you the story of how I fell in love with the future. It's 2021, and I'm on a Zoom panel hosted by York University. I'm sharing my experiences and snippets of my research that talk about Indigenous land defense and movements for sovereignty. Sitting in my home office and mostly staring at a screen of black boxes, all of you who do Zoom meetings know the struggle, I am explaining how the growing Indigenous-led land-back movement is a huge source of inspiration for me.

In short, Land Back, for those who aren't familiar with it, is a slogan that originated online and has been proliferated by Indigenous youth especially. It emphasizes material restitution for Indigenous people over symbolic gestures. for Indigenous people over symbolic gestures. Simply put, if reconciliation is a land acknowledgement, land back is returning the deed to the land to its original stewards. After I explain all this, my co-panelist, who I already introduced you to, Erica Violet Lee, responds. And she says something to the effect of land back is undoubtedly important and it's exciting, but to me, there's something more there. Imagine we get all the land back tomorrow. Do we know how to live on that land in a good way?

Have we sufficiently addressed internalized patriarchy and colonialism that has seeped in over the last 150 or so years? Can we build a better world on that land than the one that we currently live in? Her words rung in my brain for months afterwards. I realized that I had been so caught up in the immediate struggle, the righteous call for the return of stolen lands today, that I hadn't given enough thought to what the day after would look like. I took her words not as a negation of the work that's happening now, but as a challenge to think about that work more deeply and in more ways than I had ever done to that point. And as any good student would do, I began to research and read. This is when I began to immerse myself in all of those amazing Afrofuturist and Indigenous

Futurist narratives I already spoke about. It was invigorating, but I also still felt like something was missing. While I loved the aesthetics and the visions these Futurists created, an aesthetic that I affectionately sometimes call canoes in space, I often found them more fantastical than instructive. In other words, yes, I'm obsessed with the Black Panther, but how do I become the Black Panther? To answer that type of question, I did something that may seem counterintuitive to some, but stick with me. I stopped looking toward the future in my studies, instead turned towards the past. As a student of political science, my specialty lies

in Indigenous social movements. I am endlessly curious about how a small group of people, Indigenous people in particular, but anybody, often armed with nothing more than sheer will and a commitment to a cause, continue to organize against the enormity of state power and global systems of domination. Indigenous or not, what all social movements have in common, I realize, is the explicit belief that when you commit to action, you can build a new world, a new future, brick by brick. Indeed, as Adrienne Marie Brown and Walida Emarsha insist in their novel Octavia's Brood, in a way, all organizing is science fiction.

brood. In a way, all organizing is science fiction. Organizers and activists dedicate their lives to creating and envisioning another world or many other worlds. I am convinced that every activist has a futurist sensibility, or they've at least been successfully influenced by one. At all scales, activist action stands firm in the face of violent powers and dangerous apathy and insists a better future is not just needed, it is possible, and I'm here to make it happen. Strategically also, it's easier to work towards futures that we can tangibly imagine. This is why storytelling is essential to our political projects. We need stories to give our actions meaning, to root us in something.

For Indigenous people, I think about how stories from our elders about life before colonialism, oral histories that have traveled across generations, act as hopeful and cautionary tales. They remind us that worlds beyond colonialism, again, have existed, and they detail some little pictures of what those worlds looked like, what sort of governments we had, what sort of communities we lived in, what sort of food we ate. For example, those more collectivist societies, bottom-up governance, communal living, non-extractive economies, those are all things that so many Indigenous people call for today, not because it's this progressive, forward-oriented vision of politics, but because we're actually reaching back into the past,

reclaiming the strengths of worlds that were sought to be destroyed. This idea is perhaps easiest to understand when you examine some of history's most notable indigenous protests, particularly blockades and occupations. I'm sure many of us here have heard of Alcatraz Island. When people hear that name, most think of the federal prison off the coast of California, but I think of the Red Power Movement. Yes, what many people don't know about Alcatraz is that in the 1960s, dozens of Native American activists, particularly students, occupied the island for over 19 months before then President Nixon had them forcibly removed.

Inspired by the emergent Black Power movement and civil rights actions like Siddons, these land defenders proclaimed Alcatraz as rightfully theirs by virtue of discovery, they joked. The reoccupiers demanded the return of this land and others and the creation of an indigenous-led post-secondary institution. They made a community on the island. The community ran on the labor of the individuals who lived there. They held elections for representatives. Children lived there. They played. Adults debated the best ways forward. They ate, they laughed, they slept, they cried. For almost two years, these individuals lived in a different world. A world that was imperfect, that was still nested in with the larger settler colonial status quo, but which nonetheless tried to model an alternative that could become, if embraced, more widespread in the future. And this is the real impact of Alcatraz. More significantly than what actually happened on the island, Alcatraz's influence was the inspiration it served for the decades of

actions that would follow. Indeed, this reoccupation reminded indigenous organizers in other parts of the continent that they too could participate in this type of nested world building. After the reoccupation ended, several organizers from that event became influential activist voices and onlookers from other sites called Alcatraz an instance of inspiration for their own movements. This is why Occupy Alcatraz is often considered the catalyzing event for the rest of the action that falls under what is sometimes called the Red Power Era, an era which began in the 60s and saw this huge uptick in indigenous land defense, calls for cultural revitalization, and direct action protest. And of course, these forms of action did not begin or end with the Red Power Era. Every generation has seen pivotal moments of struggle.

Even in this last decade, perhaps folks will remember the protests that took place in 2016 and 2017 around the Dakota Access Pipeline in the United States. Often known as the Standing Rock protests or hashtag NoDAPL, indigenous people and allies from all over the world gathered in Lakota territory for days and months to protest the building of a 1,172-mile-long pipeline that, once completed, would carry crude oil through four states and across two major rivers. If you followed the story of NoDAPL, you might know that despite the worldwide attention and the support that the protesters attracted, the pipeline construction was completed in April 2017, and it has spilled at least 12 times since then. Still, the story of Standing Rock is not one of failure, but one of success in very many ways, including how it demonstrated another form of future living.

another form of future living. Yes, it only took place in a contained area, and yes, it existed only for a limited period of time. But nonetheless, it demonstrated that Indigenous people, despite so often being cast as characters stuck in a pre-colonial past, primitive, unable to thrive without the help of a paternalistic state government, that we continue to demand to be heard in the present, that we will fight for an Indigenous future, and that non-Indigenous people too will join us. Describing the feeling and the conditions of the Standing Rock encampments, a Seti Sakowin scholar and activist Nick Estes writes, the main camp was a fully functioning city. There was no running water, but the Cannonball Community Center opened its doors for showers. There was no running water, but the Cannonball Community Center

opened its doors for showers. There was no electricity, but Prairie Nights Casino, the tribal casino two miles up the road, had Wi-Fi. And there were no flushable toilets, but Standing Rock paid for porta-potties. Where physical infrastructure lacked, an infrastructure of indigenous resistance and of caretaking of relations proliferated, of living and being in community according to Indigenous values. This, for the most part, kept people safe and warm. I should also note that the title from which that excerpt is from is called Our History is the Future. About half a decade before Standing Rock, and especially resonant in the Canadian context,

let me bring you back to 2012, when four Indigenous women from Saskatchewan created what became a global movement called Idle No More. Idle No More, like No Dapple, was a movement that brought both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people together in a moment of mass social movement. You might recall protests and round dances taking place in Dundas Square in Toronto or in the middle of the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta. These places, which can be so emblematic of settler colonial Canada, Dundas Square, were, for a brief moment, transformed into places where a new story was attempting to be written, one in which Indigenous people, our voices, our ways of life, and our presence were undeniable and valued. In giving you these examples, I don't mean to romanticize these actions

or the countless others that have occurred. This type of work is difficult, though it is rewarding. Just like every world that has ever been, these nested worlds were imperfect and at times deeply fraught. Organisers fought about the best course of action. People didn't always treat each other well. And it frequently became difficult to navigate good relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and craft lasting online solidarities. But let me ask, are missteps not to be expected when we're walking a

new path for the first time in our lives? How do we learn if not by first trying, making mistakes, and then reflecting? Yes, the world's activists we're trying to build in these actions were partially borrowed from pre-colonial knowledge. We knew what we were doing in some sense, but in another part, they were entirely brand new, uncharted territory built within the dominating shade of all of today's problems and shortcomings. In short, when we disrupt the everyday status quo, when we not only demand but actually act differently, we get to live the future in the present. That, I suggest, is how we will know the way forward. We embrace what is tried and true. We learn from our mistakes and we work to be better. And that's how we become the Black Panther. Building on this sentiment, Anishinaabe phenom Leanne Beresamake Simpson, in her book based on her 2020 address at the CRSSA lecture series,

writes about blockades and occupations broadly. In it, Simpson parallels the actions of activist blockades to the beaver dam. Beavers are often referred to as nature's engineers. To the Anishinaabe, she shares they are also known as the world builders. A bit of biology to elaborate, of course, when beavers build dams they actively redirect water flow. They flood some areas, dry out others. As they add water to parts of the previously parched ecology, they allow for new water plants to grow. Fish, frogs, and insects start to migrate, hatch in the area for the first time. In short, they create a whole new ecosystem, a whole new world. If we think of the blockade as the beaver dam, the activists who erect the blockade as the beavers.

Like a running stream, we can see the ripple effects the blockade cause, the national and international attention, the lessons learned, the temporary encampments built, this is the catalyst for world building. Unfortunately for the activists and many a beaver, many people don't like disrupting the status quo. Without fail, whenever Indigenous people erect a blockade, you can bet that you'll see news coverage to the effect of public mad their commute was affected by road closure, or province mad that resource extraction project is delayed due to indigenous encampment. Instead of seeing the opportunity that these activists are giving you for a reimagined future created by that blockade, people only seem to express frustration and resistance in many cases. They try to break down the beaver's dam and take with

it the future indigenous land and water defenders are forging. And also to be noted about that future, that is a future that of course benefits everybody, not just indigenous people. Yes, I pitch these indigenous futures to you because I believe that supporting indigenous people in combating colonialism is the morally correct thing to do. But I also firmly believe that indigenous people are some of the only keepers of a future in which we can all thrive. They are unique in this. Remember the climate catastrophe futures I'm sure some of you imagined at the start of this? Those are not unfounded visions to have about the future. We know that entire communities are already being destroyed by fire and flood. We are now consistently having record

hot seasons, and it's hard to imagine that we are anywhere close to correcting this in the state of political and cultural affairs that we're living in. And at the same time, fossil fuel companies and other stakeholders co-opt and use the language of the future to sell their products to us. They tell us that we need that pipeline or that mine. No, seriously, this permanent nuclear waste creating energy source is the future, they say to us. This is a reminder that visions of the future are always contested and that some people's ideal futures are ones in which they, before anyone else, thrive, profit, and retain power. We must follow another path. I don't believe, contrary to what many of your favorite politicians

will say, that that path will look like we're living exactly the same way we do now, but with solar panels and electric cars. More fundamentally than any of that, as a collective society, we will have to completely transform our ways of life, our ways of work, our consumption habits, our modes of living, our relationships with lands, waters, and each other. Basically, in a livable climate future, our infrastructure, yes, I'm sure will be different. But more importantly, we will be different. We learn to be different, largely, by modeling ourselves after existing behavior. And Indigenous people are the ones doing that modeling. They are putting the well-being of the land and waters before the well-being of our wallets. We are carrying what I believe is the only livable future we can count on on our shoulders. And we hold it even as the RCMP is at our front line,

and the newspaper headlines may treat us as nothing more than an inconvenience, a fly that they would rather see swat away. But to return to our metaphor, a beaver doesn't stop being a beaver just because someone doesn't like its dam. While these moments of disruption are fantastic and instructive, they can also feel alien to many people. Yes, even if you understand how this activist work and indigenous reoccupations in particular are futurist ventures, that doesn't necessarily mean you're ready or able to march out on the front lines and join the encampment. That would be really cool if you did, and I would also support that. This is why, in addition to the critical work of occupation and other forms of direct action, we need to find ways of future living in the mundane, in the everyday.

In the 2018 collection of essays, Everyday Acts of Resurgence, a host of indigenous and non-indigenous authors share stories about how they are living differently, more in line with pre-colonial ethics and wisdom, perhaps more in line with all of our futures. The authors discuss a range of activities, including how some consciously work to raise their children in ways that are non-dominating and that honor them as whole human beings rather than these half-baked adults, as we often treat kids. Others talk about their practice of just walking, how they walk without music or podcasts, and as this author deals with the pain of arthritis in every step, are actively thankful that they can still walk and connect with the land and the air in this way, even if it's through difficulty. They

prioritize their relationships with the nature around them. They notice when the city has marked a tree in their neighborhood to be cut down. They pay attention when that new couple that moved in down the street paves over what was once a beautiful garden. Do you notice these things too? More authors talked about revitalizing practices like traditional forms of net making to catch salmon, de-centering commercialization of Kanaka Maoli hula culture, and in some show that there are countless ways that we can disrupt the path to our current future in our everyday actions. We can support Indigenous people, and we should, and find ways to center Indigenous values of reciprocity, collectivism, and attunement in our lives. We can prepare so that when we find

ourselves straddling that border of the future, we know we've already done the individual work necessary to inhabit that place wholly. In keeping with treating the future as a place for a moment, I also want to spend a second breaking down one story from that collection of essays that sticks out to me the most. This chapter of the book is called Poi is Pedagogy. me the most. This chapter of the book is called Poi is Pedagogy. Poi, for those who are unfamiliar, is a dish from Polynesia, and in this case, Hawaii in particular, and it's made from the vegetable taro. The author of this chapter is a native Hawaiian scholar and parent who grew up in the diaspora away from the islands. Influenced from this physical distance from Hawaii, the author shares that poi was a treasure dish for her growing up, connecting her to the place and the practices that Kanaka Mali have

engaged in for generations, even as she's on the mainland. Now, as an adult, she makes poi for her children frequently rather than just on occasion. In fact, she makes poi frequently enough that when she tells her children that they will be eating it one evening, after she picks up the ingredients after a really good day, they respond with, again, we want something else. The author doesn't really address her children's responses in the writing. I don't think that was the main point she was trying to get across. But I became very hung up on their words.

trying to get across, but I became very hung up on their words. More accurately, I wondered, are their reactions so tragic or are they actually beautiful? On the one hand, after reading the author's meaningful reflection on her connection and the significance of the dish, part of me was devastated and angry that these kids didn't want to eat poi that night. Do you know how important this is to your mother? I could hear myself scolding. Where's the gratitude? But then I thought, isn't that actually a rather beautiful thing that these kids are so accustomed to poi? It isn't the exception. It's the rule in their house. The feeling of abundance is so clearly present for them. They feel comfortable enough that they can afford to dismiss one night's poised dinner. It's not likely, is that not likely rather, the future that their mother would have dreamed of for them? I don't know the answer to

that question or if there is a right answer, but I retell this story because it reminds me of one important point about dreaming about the future. Just as much as we make the future through our protests and our everyday acts of transformation, the future also makes us. In other words, it would be wrong of me to be too prescriptive about what every interaction in the future would or should look like, because the thing about the future is that it's alive, it's evolving, it has potential that I can't fully know and I shouldn't. Said otherwise, I can't marry myself to a particular dream of utopia because if I do I risk missing the future when she arrives at my door just looking slightly different than I

imagined. On this point of knowing the future when she's here, I've often been challenged. People have told me, I feel like even if we succeeded in creating a better future, people wouldn't know it. It would get overlooked in the slog of everydayness or go unappreciated by the vast portion of majority that is only concerned with themselves and their own day-to-day. And I can't be too hard on these skeptics. It would be hypocritical, as I often find myself among their ranks. However, on this point, I must still disagree. I disagree because I have to imagine that if we, not the government, not a few Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos types, but we, the masses, built the dam that leads to the birth of the

new future, we'd remember what it took to build that dam. that leads to the birth of the new future, we'd remember what it took to build that dam. And further, we would have to spend a lot of intentional time and energy maintaining that dam's integrity. Like any relationship, our relationship with the future won't be strong and healthy without effort. It'll have ups and downs and we'll be thrown curveballs that we must deal with as they come.

You can be in whatever relationship comes your way, whatever future comes your way, or you can choose every day through difficulty and joy to be in a relationship that is nourishing and fulfilling. And that's the relationship I want. That's the future I want. As I start to wrap up this talk, and I will introduce folks to Cliff Cardinal's Huff, a story of Indigenous brothers whose dreams begin to bleed into their realities, I want us to really consider the role of dreaming in this future-making project I've outlined here. In many Indigenous nations, including my own, dreams are taken very seriously.

More than just a symptom of repressed emotion or the product of watching something really weird before bed. Dreams, in my teachings, are a very real alternate world that speaks this one. They're in conversation with each other. And they can be a way for those voices and beings that we often ignore on our day-to-day to reach out and find a pathway for communication. In my experience, these communications are not meant to be written off. Instead, I think of it as an obligation to share these dreams, these communications, these insights. We cannot often decode them alone, and both warnings and gifts are valuable.

Dreams, whether they come in the day or the night, can be some of the only ways to reach beyond the limitations of our daily lives that we don't even realize are there. Dreams aren't worried about practicality. They aren't worried about what the forecasters say about our economic future. With this in mind, isn't it funny that we encourage children to express themselves while simultaneously telling them

to stop daydreaming in class? Or that when our young people are planning for their future, we tell them to consider a more realistic dream. You want to be an artist? Some of those out there. In many ways, many of us are taught to hold some very anti-dream sentiments in our daily lives. Perhaps this could be one of our daily acts

of alternate future forging, listening to our dreams more intently future forging, listening to our dreams more intently, and deliberately carving out time in our days to dream further into the beyond than we allow ourselves. I won't pretend that this task of dream listening is intuitive or comfortable. Still, at least in the context of relating our dreams to the future of our communities and nations, I'll insist to you that it's necessary. I remind folks just how many models and tools we have at our disposal in addition to dreaming to make those dreams a reality. First, bringing us back to the title of this talk, I believe we can build a better future

by returning in every way we can to the land. I believe that ways of living that are informed by and rooted in long longstanding place-based knowledges are our best chance at creating not just any future, but one that is just and one that is sustainable. More than this, you'll hear stories if you're listening every day of waterways that refuse to be filled by concrete, currents eating away at a building's foundations despite the contractor's very best efforts. You might know a type of plant that looks ugly to a homeowner, but nonetheless insists on

returning and expanding even in numbers every season. Species of animals and insects that continue to repopulate even as we pollute and destroy their homes. The land is fighting for its future, with or without us, and it's comforting to know that we're not alone in our cause. As we spoke about too, we have even more tools. The art, performance, and creative works by Black and Indigenous people inspire us to reclaim the narratives that sci-fi might otherwise have you believe belong to a white protagonist. They empower us to project ourselves into the future and say we are not a past people. We are not even just a present people.

We are solely and squarely a future people. Histories of activist action have paved the way so that as we build our future, we know we aren't starting from zero. We have models of success and failure to draw from. We have elders who've actually lived in those momentary futures that I talked about, and they can help guide us forward. Again, future making necessarily means that we take best the both of the past and the present, and we need to be agile as our conditions change and we gain knowledge. We have today's activists, the beavers, both created by and actively creating even more versions of the future, offering us constant opportunities to join in on building the dam.

We are rich with opportunity to tell those who would have us believe that our future is pre-decided, that it looks more like holes in the ground but maybe with an indigenous face on the research, a resource extraction project. That we have something we need to embrace something else. We can embrace something better. Indeed, again, as Erica Violet Lee continues to write on in her essay, far from being tragic or doomed, as Indigenous communities, we are working towards our futures daily. We are working towards futures that Canada tried endlessly to curtail, control, and eliminate. Thanks to the work of generations,

Indigenous futures have never been so clear and bright. Can you see that clear, bright picture Indigenous people are painting? Are you dreaming with us? Are you building with us? If you're not, it's never too late to start. Learn about our past. Fight with us in the present. Learn about the future, our future. The dam is waiting to be built. Congrats. Thank you. You deserve that applause.

That was a wonderful presentation. Thank you. And now you get to cool your heels for a bit while I read a bit of script. So just take a few sips of water, relax, and we'll be back to you in a moment. So I'll just read a bit more script and we can start our conversation. Excuse me. On Ideas, you've been listening to Land Back to the Future with Riley Yesno, recorded at Crow's Theatre in Toronto. You can hear Ideas wherever you get your podcasts and on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on US Public Radio and Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also hear us on the CBC Listen app.

I'm Nala Ayed. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds.

By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is the fourth in a new series we've developed with Crow's Theatre in Toronto, an opportunity to explore some of the ideas that animate great theatre. In Cliff Cardinal's play Huff, gas-induced dreams blur with a harsh reality. It was the inspiration for Riley Yesno's talk about Indigenous futurism and the relationship between dreams and new political realities. Thank you again for starting us on an exploration of

these questions. As I mentioned earlier, we're going to start with a few questions or a little discussion between you and me, and then we're going to throw it to you, the audience. If you do have a question, just wave it in the air and someone will pick it up from you shortly. We'll try to get through as many of them as possible. Again, wonderful presentation, Riley. Thank you so much. I want to start, of course, with your idea of the future, you said a couple of times about the idea of treating the future as a place. This is a massive question, but just what comes to mind when I say when you imagine the future and you imagine that place, just tell me what it looks like. Just paint a picture. Yeah. Well, I guess I should first say, like, the first thing that came to my mind when you said that, because the idea of the future as a place, I was reminded by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who's like, you know, a very famous black abolitionist.

And she talks, she's a geographer by training, and she talks about how freedom is a place and about how the world where there's no prisons and when there's no policing is not an absence of those things, but the presence of something else. And so that is what I think of when I think about, you know, what does the future largely look like? I would also agree with her that I think it's an absence of these like punitive infrastructures that we have these, you know, what some might would say carceral logics. But then also there's, I think, a lot more to it than that. I think it's a far more collectivist place than an individualist place to live. I think the metric of what success is, ideally, in this other world

looks very, very different than what success looks like now. The other thing I noticed is that you, later in your lecture, you referred to the future in the feminine sense. Oh, yeah. Can you talk about why you imagine the future as in the feminine sense. Oh, yeah. Can you talk about why you imagine the future as in the feminine gender? Yeah.

I don't know. When I was writing, I was just like, oh, when she shows up at my door. And it felt right. And part of it, I'm sure, is also, like, it's a nod in a way to the way that I think, in addition to just Indigenous people writ large, that it's also like women, femmes,

queer folks who already lead the way. And I forget who said the quote now, but there's this great notion about especially like trans individuals and how by refusing to, you know, and non-binary folks who refuse to adhere to these like prescriptive labels of like what we have to be, what we are assigned at birth say, they they have this innate ability to look beyond these confines that make us more radical thinkers, more progressive thinkers, and why they're the heart of so many of our movements. And so I think there's a nod to the feminine, I guess, in that way. Also, I think about how Grandmother Moon was also in my mind and how all of these world-sustaining and world-building, I guess, ideas or entities in my teachings are often also feminized as, like, givers of life.

Though I don't think that that's necessarily exclusively women is, yeah, how I pictured it. I have to say that I learned so much today. And one of the biggest things that I learned, and I think this is probably applicable to others out there, you say that you want us to look at Indigenous people as solely a future people. And I think that was a correct statement. And it's not how, it's not the first thing I think of, because it is so much of what we hear about Indigenous people is about the past. Can you just talk a little bit more about how you bring

those two things together, the past and the future? Yeah. So, I mean, I guess the first thing is, like, when I try and describe the future, I think of it not as, like, this, like, line, this binary of, like, there's the past. People on the radio can't hear, but there's the past, there's the present and there's the future over there.

Instead, like I think of it more as like a circle. And I think about like the quotes I was telling about how our history is actually the future in some ways, what we think is progress is actually going back. And like, there's this non-linearity to it that I think opens up a lot more possibility that way. And so just as much as like, yes, we are solely a future people, because I don't think we will ever go anywhere other than forward. We will not like disappear. It's been proven that there's also that non-linearity part of it that makes us, I guess, a past people and a present people in a way as well.

But how transformational a thought is it to speak in those terms? I mean, I think those are one of those everyday acts maybe of decolonization or resurgence of just rewiring your brain and the ways that you are like, oh, I never thought about that before. And recognizing that there's probably a reason why, that what got lost in all of those years, that I didn't think about it that way. What did I cut myself off from? And so, yeah, I would say that's probably one. Okay. So you suggest we should be looking to the past and thinking about the future, of course.

But as you very rightly point out, even in the successes of the past, there are stumbles, there are setbacks, and that's part of the process. Can you talk a little bit about why it's important to remember episodes of success, even if they did not end in what might describe as exactly what you want or success? Yeah. I mean, a couple of things that come up to my mind is like, one, I have found that there's often this undue burden that's placed specifically on indigenous and black people to like have a perfect plan light out. And when you try that plan, if, you know, the powerful dominating powers that be let indigenous people have some land back, or they let, you know, this alternate way of going, the second there's a stumble, it becomes evidence and proof that they could have never done it in the first place. And there's this like really unjust expectation. And so recognizing that the and the slip-ups as not actual failures, but part of

the process is one way, I think, of rectifying that. And then the other thing is that the mistakes and the ways that we learn, it catalyzes a new generation. It was a mistake for the red power activists of the 60s, but it'll be a barrier I no longer have to overcome, or if I do, I know how to now in the 2020s. And so in that way, it's so abundantly necessary. So much of your message is tied to embracing indigenous values of, quote, reciprocity, collectivism, and attunement in our lives. This is also another big question. What does that mean in the world of politics? Well, maybe now I'm feeling like I'm going into my lecture material

for my class. But please do, yeah. There's this one story to also draw on Haudenosaunee governance, say, for example. And each nation has their different models of what that might look like in their political system. But the one I think about is the story of how in the Six Nations Confederacy, when a leader that would usually be at a decision-making table, there's a story about his daughter dying. And that he's in this profound period of grief. And so instead of them saying, them saying, go home

and deal with that, like what we do now to people who have grief, you can take two weeks off work. Instead, they stop whatever was on the bill for that day. And all of the leaders collectively help work this man through his grief of losing his daughter. And that becomes the political project of the day, saying, we're not going to make decisions without you. Instead, we are going to find ways to make decisions through this together. And that's that really, again, collectivist mindset. And also, I think, would be so wild to see in the House of Commons today being like, someone's going through something, so we're just going to stop right now. Both that would never happen, you know, bureaucratically, and also I'm sure we'd

kick up a fuss. And so you think, why is that? There's reflection on both parts there. You're very careful in your lecture to tell us that the future isn't necessarily what we think it will be. There's a note of caution near the end there and a warning about missing it when it might come. What makes you sound that note of caution? I mean, I think that there's a lot of stories of people who even, and like, this is maybe the cautionary tale from sci-fi, again, that I'm taking, but is that like, of people who, even if it is a righteous cause, get so married to, again, their vision of what that cause would be that even when the reality turns out to be

that maybe it's more harmful, maybe you need to readjust or pivot or tune, they can't. And what happens then is we also lose the plot a little bit where I think we become married to an idea as opposed to the reality of the thing and the actual conditions and the people that those ideas were meant to serve in the first place. And so being able to critique is another class I have in my lecture about how

critique is also a necessary form of future making and of resistance and part of that process. Okay. Just to get to a few questions from the audience. Yeah. We'll go through sort of a lightning round if we can. Okay. Okay. Let's start here. Thank you for writing legibly, whoever this is.

Is it enough for us beavers to build the new world? Must we also actively hospice, I think, the old world? Or can we just get away with moving on? Yeah. I mean, I think that there are, are, um, like the, one of the things I was keeping, I think to say is that just as much as we're going to the past, um, uh, and that is going to be our guide in many ways for the future, that there are a lot of things about the present right now that I think are

strengths and we need to take with us and we will take with us whether or not they're like indigenous oriented or originated. And I think this is a main also critique of like one to your point about that word decolonization. That's everyone's favorite buzzword right now, right? Which is like that decolonization is not just slapping an indigenous face on something. It is not just like building that new dam. It is actually, in many cases, you have to dry out the other part of the river first and maybe remove some of that old world.

So yeah, I hope that answers your question, is that we will take things with us, but we also, I think, will have to fundamentally leave behind and destroy some others. And how we pick and choose those things is a different conversation, maybe. Here's another one. What connection do you have with the worldwide Indigenous communities to share similar or different notions of the future? Oh, yeah, that's good. I mean, I think just as much as I was saying that we learn from the

struggles of Indigenous activists and people past, I don't think that that also, it could be expanded to say elsewhere generally, whether that's temporally or in a different geographic location. I remember in my first year of my undergrad degree and learning about like the Zapatista movement in Mexico and like just being totally invigorated by this idea that these people completely took back a city, these Indigenous people on their own, and what that looks like. And whether or not, again, you think that's a good thing or a bad thing and things have to be adjusted, there's real fundamental lessons about power and strategy there that I think we need to be able to practically take.

Can you speak about hope, is what this person is saying. Can you speak about hope in terms of the future? Huff explores many dark topics of current Indigenous reality, but ends on a hopeful note. Yeah, I mean, if the question is also like maybe where I get hope from, which is a part of this, is that like, I know that as bleak as things might look to me some days, that puts me in the pessimist camp.

That like I said, like the story of of apocalypse the story of complete destruction of world is one that's already been lived and survived as well I am not alone and not none of us are alone in like going up against insurmountable odds um and that is comforting the stories I was telling about like the land also fighting for itself for the futures whether or not we do anything is also comforting. And I also like I think a lot about the exchange between hope and love, where Leanne Simpson, once again, an icon, talks about how, like there was this creek in her hometown. And when she grew up there, it was like this great place to be connected to the land. And now that she's an adult, it's so polluted that she can't take her kids to it anymore. And she talks about how she was reeling from this, and she was like, I should just leave and go somewhere else where there's more greenery or whatever. And then she stopped and she thought and she said, you know, when you actually love something, when it's broken and it's hurting, you don't leave it. That's actually when you dig your heels in deeper and you stay and you show up.

And I think about how even if I'm maybe low in stores of hope that day, I don't doubt that I'm high in the love for the land, for the people who came before. And so the two act as real self-resources there. Very good. Okay. That's actually a great segue to the last question I want to ask you,

which is that in your lecture, you say that you have an objective, which is to convince you, all of us, that dreams of Indigenous futures are not just a creative act of reclamation, but an active and essential step in materially transforming our world. How persuasive do you think you've been? Oh my gosh. Well, how successful, how successful have you been in, in getting that word out there? I mean, uh, my mom always told me I should be a lawyer growing up. So I hope that maybe those skills translated. Um, but I mean, I, if I wasn't, I'll say if I wasn't successful here, like I see my part, my role to play in that collectivist project, that future project is one of like

knowledge mobilization and knowledge translation. And so in the spirit of ideas, I will also not stop trying to find ways to translate that idea in a way that resonates, whether it's this talk or elsewhere. And so I fundamentally believe in the concept, though, that a good idea can really catalyze all of those futures that we talked about here. And a good idea can change the world. Agreed. Raleigh Esno, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Will you stay for a couple more minutes while I read some more script?

Yeah. Okay. This will take but a minute. On Ideas, you've been listening to Land Back toalucia, Chris Abraham, Carrie Sager, and the entire Crows Theatre team. Applause For Ideas, technical production by Danielle Duval, our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, acting senior producer is Lisa Godfrey, Greg Kelly is the Executive Producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayed.

Thank you for being here. Thank you so much. Congrats.