How Native American Artists Are Claiming the Future

Across the Arts, Indigenous Creators Are Drawing From the Past to Imagine Different Paths Forward

Over the last 50 years, futurity has become an important theme among native people and artists, said Harvard historian Philip J. Deloria during a Zócalo event entitled “How Are Native American Artists Envisioning the Future?” and held at Cross Campus in downtown Los Angeles last night.

Deloria said that this deep interest in the future is unsurprising. If the goal of settler-colonialism is the removal and erasure of Indigenous peoples, the historian said, then one of the most powerful weapons to counter erasure is the creation of powerful visions of a …