Mapping Neshnabé Futurity
Mapping Neshnabé Futurity
Celestial Currents of Sovereignty in Potawatomi Skies, Lands, and Waters
In Mapping Neshnabé Futurity Blaire Morseau weaves together on-the-ground insights and Indigenous speculative fiction to illustrate the profound ways in which Anishinaabé/Neshnabé (Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe) communities are reclaiming their sovereignty and crafting vibrant futures. Morseau lays out how Neshnabék have marshaled dissent to hydrologic fracturing, oil pipelines, and other damaging infrastructures of capitalist settler futurity. The book positions these efforts as vital acts of nation building and visionary reclamation of space, both terrestrial and celestial.
Morseau also challenges the hegemonic narratives of settler futurism found in mainstream science fiction, which often perpetuate colonial fantasies and exclude marginalized voices. By fusing ethnography of tribal nation-building projects and analysis of Indigenous speculative fiction, Morseau provides a path to Indigenous futurisms and its role in imagining decolonization. Morseau’s analysis underscores the potency of Indigenous knowledge systems and ceremonial practices in imagining and actualizing alternative futures.
Mapping Neshnabé Futurity is an essential read for scholars and activists alike, urging a rethinking of how we conceive of futurity and sovereignty. This work shows how counter-mapping projects both on the ground and in the skies reclaim space in the Great Lakes region—Neshnabé homelands—and are part of larger constellations of Indigenous futurities and stories of survivance.
Blaire Morseau presents a fresh and exciting view of Indigenous kinship and relationships to land and environment in her book. Drawing on her own community-based knowledge, Morseau shows that Indigenous knowledge has the capability of creating desirable futures for Indigenous communities going forward. A must-read.’—Deondre Smiles, author of Decolonized Afterlife: Towards a New Understanding of the Spatial Politics Surrounding Indigenous Death
‘Blaire Morseau’s Mapping Neshnabé Futurity argues the everyday lived activities of Potawatomi peoples enable futures on their own terms and tackles the idea of landscapes of possibility through nation-building projects. This book is necessary for classroom use and anyone interested in Indigenous futurisms as they disrupt and upend settler colonialism.’—Natasha Myhal, Ohio State University
‘A deeply necessary book that grounds our hope for futurity in our present relations and foregrounds the importance of Indigenous relationships to land and water situated in embodied practices and ceremonial praxis.’—Renata Ryan Burchfield, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
