Indigenous Futurity

In a post human world where the networks andsystems that circle the globe have the potential toeclipse any individual or nation, supplanting thehorizontal orientation of empire with a verticalorientation of cyberspace, new autopoetic formationsare emerging of individuals and communitiesin local expressions of the global. We can learnfrom the Lakota Sioux epistemology at a timewhen Cyberspace offers the potential to marry anancient technology that allows for a total immersionof the body in an expanding time and space with thenewest technology for mapping coordinates on thelevel of the body. The presentation takes an autoethnographicapproach to Lakota Sioux practices as acomplete technology that projects new possibilitiesfor human interaction through anticipatory and tacitknowledge, which can can be mapped onto puzzlingsituations to clear a path. Environmental activismhas found a new center in the ceremonies of theLakota Sioux, which locate knowledge in the groundthrough self sacrifice for the sake of the people forseven generations in the past and future. The ceremonieshave begun to reverse the trauma of theimprisonment of reservation by locating new waysof being in the land and new ways of gathering bothon and off the reservation through mediated circulationof knowledge that resulted in the encampmentat Standing Rock in North Dakota. Although stillstruggling mightily under the gross accumulationof effects of poverty that is passed down generationally,the Lakota-speaking Indigenous of the NorthAmerican Great Plains have emerged with a powerfullynetworked system of belief that can join inthe reorientation of the globe from a horizontal to avertical pathway through knowledge that is performative,embedded in the way that people live, andpotentially radically disruptive.

Volume Editors
Urs Peter Flueckiger & Victoria McReynolds

ISBN
978-1-944214-16-6