Keolu Fox, Theresa Stewart-Ambo & K. Wayne Yang dream of flourishing Indigenous futures

Theresa Stewart-Ambo and Keolu Fox are the co-directors of the Indigenous Futures Institute at the University of California San Diego. K. Wayne Yang is a critical theorist and social critic who writes about popular culture, social movements, urban education, critical pedagogy, decolonization, and many other subjects. Stewart-Ambo and Fox are two authors with wildly divergent research interests. Fox does work in genomic research and is an assistant professor at University of California, San Diego, affiliated with the Department of Anthropology, the Global Health Program, the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, the Climate Action Lab, and the Indigenous Futures Lab, while Stewart-Ambo is an Assistant Professor in the Education Studies program at UC San Diego. Despite these distinct research focuses, they co-direct the Indigenous Futures Institute with a visionary sense of collective purpose: for the Institute to signify beyond the individual demands of each member's disciplines. IFI is exceptional for the projects that are being worked on there, but it is also important because it is Indigenous-run at the highest level. This is not something that we encounter very much, and certainly not enough. The Institute is about imagining Indigenous design hubs outside of the constraints of, as Yang explains, the nation state, because that social formation, and its obsession with borders, cannot grasp the vital nature of living and interconnected bioregions. When I asked Yang, in this conversation, about what demilitarization could mean from an Indigenous perspective, he didn’t talk about any one conflict, but instead focused on the land and the context of a total war on nature, and how this language of interconnected bioregions allows us to think in radical ways about demilitarization beyond the “removal of troops.” While there is a discursive shift, among critical people, toward decolonization in the form of land acknowledgments, Stewart-Ambo talks about how universities are still clearly not structured with Indigenous prosperity in mind. She argues that so much of the language around equity, diversity and inclusion is about diversion, and either overlooks Indigenous peoples or actively plays into stereotypes. She demands “respectful engagement” at the highest levels and wants land acknowledgment statements to materialize relationships, with institutions actually stepping up and doing their part. No more superficial land acknowledgments, Fox says, because they so obviously function as a form of misdirection, a way of distracting the public from the persistence of privatization, extraction and harm done to Indigenous communities. What is so different, then, about the Indigenous Futures Institute, from their perspective, and I'm starting to see, as an outsider, how stark this difference is from the ways in which people are taught in the traditional Eurocentric university, what's so different is perhaps embodied by this idea of dream tanks: in direct opposition to the notion of think tanks, where, as Yang puts it, we are told how to think, rather than given time and space to explore what may be thought. Fox talks about the idea of a futurist fluency, against the nightmare scenarios that we face under settler colonial capitalism, and gives us this incredible vision for a moment where, in the “husk of colonialism,” communities can make something “beautiful,” innovating out of the remnants of militarism and industrialization.