kitaskînaw 2350
The year is 2350 and the future is Indigenous. 15-year-old wâpanacâhkos, a knowledge-keeper in training, is sent back in time by the Council of Elders to the 21st century. Her journey will shape Indigenous-settler relations on kitaskînaw — our Earth — for generations to come.
CBC podcast dramatization of kitaskînaw 2350
Chelsea Vowel’s “kitaskînaw 2350” is a highly original speculative-fiction piece in which a Cree youth from the future is sent back to 21st-century Western Canada and witnesses the ravages of climate change…
This Place: 150 Years Retold is a fantastic teaching tool for junior and high-school students and a great read for any age.
This Place: 150 Years Retold is engaging, visually stunning, and eye opening. It explores the three themes of relationality, resurgence, and Indigenous futurism by exploring key milestones in history between Indigenous, Métis, Inuit peoples and Canadian settlers over the last 150 years.
This Place: 150 Years Retold
This Place: 150 Years Retold brings the last 150 years to life through Indigenous characters and stunning, full-colour graphic novel art. The writers represent a broad spectrum of Indigenous voices, communities, and experiences.
Contributors: Writers: Richard Van Camp, Chelsea Vowel, David Alexander Robertson, Jennifer Storm, Rachel and Sean Qitsualik-Tinsley, Brandon Mitchell, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, Katherena Vermette, and Sonny Assu; Artists: Tara Audibert, Kyle Charles, Natasha Donovan, GMB Chomichuk, Scott B. Henderson, and Andrew Lodwick; Colour Artists: Scott A. Ford and Donovan Yaciuk.
Folks are interacting academically with “kitaskînaw 2350”!
I’m a nerd and I love to see how people are thinking about what I put out there – especially the Indigenous futurist stories. Click on the tabs to see some cool pieces doing deep dive explorations of the chapter. Some of these may be behind a paywall, but the abstracts alone are pretty interesting!
Donovan, Keighlagh T. 2024. “‘These Ones Will Learn it Too’: Transforming Relationships with Chelsea Vowel’s ‘kitaskînaw 235’.” Settler Colonial Studies, July, 1 – 19. doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2024.2378239.
Kanasheva, Malika. 2023. “Imagining Futures Through Graphic Storytelling: a Qazaq Dystopia in Orda and an Indigenous Utopia in Kitaskinaw 2350,” MA thesis, University of British Columbia. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0438322.
My intro to kitaskînaw 2350
Dystopian or apocalyptic writing occupies an enormous amount of space in contemporary story-telling and in the social consciousness. We are told that the end is nigh, and that the world (or at least the world as we know it) will be destroyed, and this is a Bad Thing. We are encouraged to imagine what life could be like during and after this supposedly inevitable destruction, but are steered away from dreaming up alternatives. Indigenous peoples have been living in a post-apocalyptic world since Contact. This entire anthology deals with events post-apocalypse! Why end on the same note?
In 2014, Molly Swain and I began an Indigenous feminist sci-fi podcast called Métis in Space. We explicitly rejected the idea that liberation necessarily proceeds from a period of even more intense oppression, of apocalypse as a catalyst for decolonization. Instead, we envisioned a future shaped by Indigenous peoples; a future in which the ways we relate to one another are fundamentally transformed for the better.
There are ancient nêhiyaw concepts in this story, frameworks for how to live together as human and non-human kin. These concepts are relevant today, and will continue to be thousands of years from now.
The character wâpanacâhkos is named after my youngest daughter. This chapter is a love letter to my ancestors and my descendants. It is a refusal to lose hope, and a denial of oblivion. Indigenous peoples will continue to exist into the near and far future. We need space and time to imagine our relationships branching out, growing in spite of severances, becoming more firmly rooted and nourished. We can do that work wherever we are, in our communities, in the academy, at the bedside of our babies who demand just one. more. story.
Perhaps, after you finish this anthology, you will realize you too have been doing this work, and for that, I thank you. kinanâskomitinâwâw.
