Johanna Lederer

My dissertation analyzes Indigenous literary and artistic practices as decolonizing and Indigenizing placemaking practices in a Turtle Island context. I argue that these placemaking practices—remembering places, imagining places, sounding places, and creating Indigenous futures in urban spaces—can be understood as futurist storytelling, bringing forward Indigenous narratives and epistemologies.

They also contest the imaginative geography of Canada being a benevolent multicultural nation-state whose history can be told in a linear manner. Working with theory by Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca), Heather Igloliorte (Inuk), and Dylan Robinson (Stó:lō/Skwah), for instance, I discuss how Indigenous futurisms in novels, short stories, and comics but also in museums and public art destabilize Canadian settler colonial claims to diversity and the settler colonial infrastructure. Over the course of four chapters, I combine different media, reading comics such as “Future World” by Jennifer Storm (Ojibway) and “kitaskînaw 2350” by Chelsea Vowel (Métis) alongside short stories such as “Lost in Space” by Drew Hayden Taylor (Ojibway) and “History of the New World” by Adam Garnet Jones (Cree/Métis), for instance. These futurist forms of storytelling are not new to Indigenous people, but understanding Indigenous artistic and curatorial practices through the lens of place enables one to read e.g., museum exhibitions and public art differently. Alternately engaged in connecting Indigenous youth, calling attention to structural issues such as violence against Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people, or revitalizing traditional practices and languages, the case studies illustrate the connection between Indigenous art, activism, and placemaking. The broad scope of my case studies transcends narrow settler colonial borders and shows similarities between Indigenous placemaking practices in francophone Quebec, anglophone Ontario, and the United States. Many of these Indigenous future imaginaries are clearly community-oriented and do not (immediately) provide a reading or decoding strategy for audiences who are not intimately familiar with the specific Indigenous community’s epistemologies and stories. Not only are the literature and art community-oriented, but they also create community and kinship.