In a Q&A for NYU Local, Media, Culture, and Communication junior Robin Young asks Media, Culture, and Communication professor Jordan Kinder to reflect on why Indigenous Futurism matters now, how Indigenous Studies is evolving at the university, and what it means for students to engage with Indigenous knowledge.
A citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta, Kinder encourages students to move beyond static understandings of Indigeneity and toward frameworks that center futurity, sovereignty, and self-determined possibility.
Their conversation is reprinted below with permission.
Young: Why do you believe your Indigenous Futurism class is so important right now, and what do you hope students leave with after taking it?
Kinder: I like to teach Indigenous Studies with an anchor on futures, futurity, and futurisms partly because Indigenous peoples are often portrayed as of the past, which is to say as un- or a-modern. This is, of course, a fiction, but it’s a powerful, foundational narrative and ideological justification of settler colonialism that persists today even among well-meaning non-Indigenous people. It’s also the case that our futures have been systematically, intentionally, and violently foreclosed in expressions of settler colonialism such as land dispossession, residential schools in Canada, boarding schools in the United States, and forced relocation. So centering futurity immediately challenges these narratives and ideologies by approaching Indigenous peoples as modern peoples on the one hand while also creating space to engage with self-determined representations and interventions that advance Indigenous futures on the other.
I hope students leave with a stronger sense of where they’re living and working, its original peoples, as well with a motivation to putting decolonization into practice partly by carrying that knowledge forward with them in their lives.
Young: You’ve been closely involved in shaping conversations around Indigenous Studies at NYU, from your teaching to your role in the proposed Native American history minor. How do you assess the current state of Indigenous Studies at NYU, and what do you believe still needs to be strengthened or reimagined?
Kinder: This question may be giving me a bit too much credit so early on in my career at NYU as I’m still finding my place and roles here, but my hiring in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication (MCC) shows an ongoing and growing institutional commitment to Indigenous Studies that I’m happy to see and be a part of shaping. At a higher level, the establishment of the provostial Center for Collaborative Indigenous Research with Communities and Lands, with Eve Tuck as the founding director, signals a University-level commitment to expanding and sustaining Indigenous Studies at NYU on our terms. Right now, I simply think we need more at a time when higher ed tends to have less: more hires across the disciplines, more community engagement, and more programs, some of which is happening in promising ways and will help to create an enduring infrastructure of sorts for Indigenous Studies to thrive.
Young: As someone who grew up and was educated in Canada, how has that background shaped your understanding of Indigenous histories and relationships to the land, and how does that differ from what you’ve observed in how these histories are taught or understood in the United States?
Kinder: In some senses, Canada is “farther along” than the United States if we want to think about it in those terms, for historical and political reasons. The Canadian government undertook Truth and Reconciliation Commission from 2008 to 2015 to look into the historical and ongoing impacts of the residential school system, which in its findings clearly described the intention of residential schools as amounting to “cultural genocide” and produced 94 tangible recommendations for individuals and institutions known as “calls to action”. The findings of the federal Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women likewise detail how colonial systems have produced the conditions for disproportionate rates of violence against Indigenous women, girls and Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual (2SLGBTQQIA) people. And there is arguably more official engagement with and adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples at federal, provincial, and territorial levels. This certainly changes the level of discourse and knowledge of Indigenous peoples, our histories, and our presents in the classroom and outside of it as well as a more prominent culture of “recognition” and, indeed, “reconciliation”.
During a Q&A at an event with [scholar and activist] Nick Estes, I recall him answering a question about either recognition or reconciliation and simply answering that the US government and many institutions don’t even use that vocabulary in the first place. All that said, recognition doesn’t necessarily result in tangible actions, and there is a general impoverishment — arguably by design — surrounding this knowledge and both Canada and the US remain settler colonial in practice. In my own research, and close to home, this is most visible in the criminalization of land and water defense in the face of as oil and gas pipelines, hydroelectric mega dams, and other extractive infrastructures.
Young: Why do months like Native American Heritage Month matter, and how should institutions like NYU move beyond symbolic recognition toward sustained engagement with Indigenous communities and scholarship?
Kinder: I think we’re right to be cautious of the limits of recognition while also being aware of its necessity; months like Native American Heritage Month, at the very least, remind everyone that we’re still here. MCC’s ongoing land acknowledgement, in my view, models how recognition is a crucial first step that in several ways exceeds the symbolic. Pragmatically speaking, I would like to see particular engagement with the Lenape peoples who were historically forced off of their homelands of Lenapehoking (the Delaware Nation, in Anadarko Oklahoma; the Delaware Tribe of Indians, in Bartlesville Oklahoma; the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, in Bowler Wisconsin; and the Munsee Delaware Nation, and the Eelūnaapèewii Lahkèewiit, or Delaware Nation at Moraviantown, both in Ontario, Canada) at the University level, and perhaps a more resources for Indigenous students. However, it is the case that I’m still learning about what’s going on at NYU and what I can do as faculty to support sustained engagement in these ways.
Young: Indigenous Futurism challenges dominant Western ideas of time, progress, and storytelling. How do you see this framework speaking to a generation of students navigating activism, identity, and decolonization movements on campus today?
Kinder: One of the powerful lessons anyone can learn from Indigenous Studies, particularly critical Indigenous Studies, is that the current way that many of us are compelled to live, while inherited, is not necessarily a given, nor is it the result of abstract, impersonal forces of “progress”. Decolonization movements address this fact in calls for Land Back, and I ultimately think all activism, campus and otherwise, should be in part decolonial, particularly given where we’re living and working.
Young: For an NYU student who may feel unfamiliar or hesitant engaging with Indigenous Studies, what would you say to them about why this work is relevant not just academically, but personally, socially, and politically?
Kinder: These lessons I mentioned in the previous question might be motivating enough. But I also think there’s a certain responsibility for us living and working in Lenapehoking (NYC) for learning about how it was stolen from the Lenape peoples, its original caretakers, as well as learning more about the original peoples of this region and continent.
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