Miindiwag and Indigenous Diaspora: Eden Robinson's and Celu Amberstone's Forays Into "Postcolonial" Science Fiction and Fantasy (Critical Essay‪)‬

Postcolonial SF and fantasy often seem inherently contradictory regarding indigenous issues. Native intellectuals have for decades questioned the "post" in postcolonial and have cited the history of attempts to unsettle hard-won treaty and court claims giving indigenous sovereignties to various nation-states that exist within new-world, first-world colonizing governments in the Americas. While SF and fantasy have the capacity to facilitate a politics of recognition, (1) how can their lessons carry genuine weight when the speculative terrain itself diffuses Amerindian, Aboriginal, and Native outlooks and exploits the common leitmotif equating the indigenous/Native with the alien other? (2) The constraints of traditional point of view in mainstream SF have it both ways: you're an alien if we invade your realm from our far-away homeland, and you're an alien if you come to our homeland from far away. Indigenous peoples thus experience a double bind. They become other as a colonized culture, and they become other as a diasporic culture. (3) Perhaps this tension explains why few Native authors have been directly linked to SF, (4) which as a mainstay narrative often depicts first-world cultures "going to foreign countries and colonizing the natives," as Nalo Hopkinson succinctly puts the matter in her introduction to Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial SF and Fantasy (2004). "For many of us," Hopkinson continues, "that is not a thrilling adventure story; it's non-fiction, and we are on the wrong side of the strange-looking ship that appears out of nowhere. To be a person of colour writing SF is to be under suspicion of having internalized one's colonization." (5)