Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction

by Joshua Whitehead

I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams come true. How

I don't like this being used by a rat. Perhaps my mind wil change as i read but i dunno...

“Of course not. But—humans have always been special. Through these last years it didn’t make sense that we might fail to find a solution. We’ve always been smart enough to think and build our way out of anything.”

Have we? This feels loke a colonizer mindset

murder of families torn apart at borders and the mass incarceration and enslavement of the undocumented.

Oh, like the US

But at least most of the shops were open. Only the commercial areas were really and truly unsafe. The internet, which piloted everything from phones and cars to personal memory enhancements, was still connected.

This sounds like now, and during the height of COVID

“Only a white girl could step into a completely unknown universe with the blind faith that everything was going to work out.”

Yup

“Being an Indian doesn’t give you any special insight here, Em.”

Bitch what?

But then my kookum told me about this old movement from when she was my age. She said that a long time ago, Black people invented something called Afrofuturism. The Afrofuturists imagined the future, but not just any future. They imagined ways that they could get free, ways they could hold their ancestors and descendants in the same hands. And my kookum said that other Indigenous people thought this was a beautiful thing, so they began calling their imaginings Indigenous futurisms.

On god, we are the blueprint

They said her Kinship ties were always suspect, since her father was not Anishinaabe. They said she and her descendants had forty-eight hours to leave Anishinaabewaki. Forever.

What in the actual fuck? Why are they abiding by blood quantum???