Indigenous speculative fiction takes on the apocalypse — with Canadian sci-fi Indiginerd Chelsea Vowel

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The difficulty with undue influence often is proving it.

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The person felt like they had no option, but it's difficult to prove that.

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**Natasha Mitchell** (0:46)
Are you a sci-fi fan for all its fantastical imaginings about alternate realities and future human societies? It can be dystopic, can't it? Catapulting us into a world that's post-alien invasion or climate apocalypse. But it can also be about liberation and hope, even healing, Afrofuturism, Indigenous Futurisms. They're both speculative fiction movements responding to a real life dystopia for its writers, invasion by colonisers, loss of land and culture, slavery.
Well, its stories reclaim agency over the future. Chelsea Vowel is a passionate sci-fi nerd and a member of the Métis Indigenous nation of Canada. And that combination is so powerful for her. Before you hear why, here's her welcome to the show.
And welcome from me too, hello, Natasha Mitchell, joining you for ABC Radio National's live event show, Big Ideas.

**Chelsea Vowel** (1:58)
APPLAUSE Hello, my friends. I'm very happy. I am very pleased by you being here today. Chelsea Vowel, my name is Nitsi Gassun.
I am from the Mantusa community. I am from the Mantusa community. So I am from Lac Saint Anne in Alberta. It's actually Spirit Lake. And I am living in a city right now in Beaver Hills House, Edmonton, way far across the ocean there. So I'm happy to be here going back tomorrow.
I am from the Nistosian community. As it was mentioned, I have six kids. I blame them for my constant exhaustion, but that's actually on me because I just don't sleep enough.

**Natasha Mitchell** (2:49)
Because this mother of six is also a prolific public intellectual educator, language instructor, whose books include Indigenous Writes, A Guide to First Nations, Métis and Inuit in Canada, and a short story collection called Buffalo is the New Buffalo. She's also host of a popular feminist sci-fi podcast called Métis in Space. With her co-host Molly Swain, she set up the Métis in Space Land Trust, which is a project to give land back to the Métis people for cultural use. So as she imagines possible futures of Indigenous futurisms, she's also changing the future in a very tangible way.
So let's join her on the stage of the 2026 Melbourne Writers Festival on Kulin Nation Country to consider the potency of dystopic stories.

**Chelsea Vowel** (3:42)
If we're a bit more globally oriented, then we can acknowledge that for millions of people, the apocalypse is a very present reality. The things that we fear happening to us are already happening to others. But mainstream media and sort of more broadly, white stream media has always been fascinated with dystopic tales and the apocalypse in general. So whether we're watching scenarios of fungal zombies, AI robot uprisings, you know, Mad Maxian desert hellscapes, or just late stage capitalism sucking the joy from every aspect of our lives, we've been inundated with these visions of dystopic futures for generations now. And they always sort of represent the fears of the time. So atomic energy, wars, pandemics, et cetera, right? Whatever we're afraid of is sort of what we're putting into our media. But given how dystopic our present is, it seems odd that we seek escape in these scenarios. You'd think that we would want to escape dystopia with utopia, but we don't. And I think that it's important to discuss how much of that interest in dystopia focuses around the promise of power. So first off, what is apocalypse? If we speak about it broadly, apocalypse is the breakdown of social and political systems. It's extreme changes to the environment, urban or otherwise, widespread violence. It's the end of the world as we know it, right? And for Indigenous peoples, this is all terribly familiar. We are post-apocalyptic peoples. We've endured multiple world-ending events. Anything you can think of, alien invasions, pandemics, all of these things have happened more than once.
So it's not a particularly interesting idea, to be honest.
And in my own work, I choose to reject apocalypse as the triggering event for change. A lot of people are sort of waiting to get up and do something for things to get worse, you know, and they increasingly get worse and people are still just sitting there waiting. Well, not yet, not yet.