Paper short abstract:

Both dreams and science fiction are ways of speculating about the future. How indigenous narratives that we can approximate to science fictions incorporate elements of dream life is the point we intend to address here. We will refer to texts and films produced by contemporary indigenous artists.

Paper long abstract:

Both dreams and science fiction are ways of speculating about the future. How indigenous narratives that we can approximate to science fictions incorporate elements of dream life is the point we intend to address here. We will refer to texts and films produced by contemporary indigenous artists.

My aim here is to treat dreams (as well as prophecies) not exactly as predictions of the future but as speculations. There is another notion of time implicit in dreams and prophecies. Time appears as an entanglement. Different times coexist.

Another point to pursue is the possibility of thinking about what could be an indigenous science fiction or indigenous anticipatory narratives, now in a context in which indigenous authorship gains centrality in an interface with non-indigenous artistic/cultural production. We are in the field of "contemporary indigenous arts" (Jaider Esbell).

Grace Dillon, an Anishnaabe writer and scholar, coined the term "indigenous futurisms" (plural, she insists), in dialogue with so-called Afrofuturism. Dillon aims to rethink the very idea of "science fiction." Dillon asks: which science? Only modern, Western science? Which fiction? Which notion of reality or of artifice? And even more: which idea of time?

Our question echoes Dillon's. In order to understand these new narratives, maybe we also need to rediscover the logic of Amerindian dreams.