Beyond the Glittering World: An Anthology of Indigenous Feminisms and Futurisms

 Darcie Little Badger is a Lipan Apache author of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and comics. 

Based on a recommendation from a colleague, I read her books Elatsoe and A Snake Falls to Earth. One of the things that I loved about A Snake Falls to Earth is that the book is not driven by a will-they-or-won't-they romantic subplot. I found it refreshing. It's a wholesome story about friendship, community, and books. There is so much kindness in the book. And the main character is so tender hearted. I also loved the intergenerational connections/family responsibility elements of the story. I relied on one of Darcie Little Badger's short stories in order to conclude my dissertation (now available through the ERIC database). 

I was very surprised to learn that her books have appeared on book ban lists in the US. Here is a site which contains a number of Indigenous books banned in the US if you would like to support authors of banned books by purchasing their books. 

Anyhow, Darcie is one of the editors of this new anthology, Beyond the Glittering World: An Anthology of Indigenous Feminisms and Futurisms. 

I was listening to a podcast for the launch of the book, and in the podcast Darcie talked about how the people who put her books on a book ban list did so because of the asexual characters in the book, and the people who banned her books did not even read them. In the podcast she also talks about her recent experience where she was slated to speak at a post-secondary institution, but then shortly before the event they gave her a list of banned words/concepts that she could not use in her presentation, and she cancelled the event. She posted the list and her cancellation on social media, and the media picked it up. The newspaper articles are behind a paywall, but this article from Inside Higher Ed is free. 

The banned words/concepts are: 

• equity, diversity & inclusion 
• anti-racism 
• bias 
• Critical Race Theory 
• implicit bias 
• oppression 
• intersectionality 
• prohibited discriminatory practices 
• racial privilege 
• promoting stereotypes based on personal identity characteristics

In the podcast, co-editors of the collection also reflect on the list of words, and also the general political climate right now. I accessed it for free. 

I provide all of this background as context. The publisher's description of this book is this: 

Rooted in visions of Indigenous futurisms, Beyond the Glittering World proclaims and celebrates a rising generation of storytellers.The collection brings together twenty-two emerging and established women, two-spirit people, and people of marginalized genders who immerse readers in poems, stories, and worlds that challenge and delight. From a museum heist 177 years in the making, to lyrical explorations of love and loss, to a tale where language itself becomes the force that saves the land, this boundary-breaking, genre-bending anthology illuminates the power of Indigenous voices.

In the context of book bans and banned word lists, the act of imagining a different future is a critical and important act. I really commend the editors and authors for doing this work within a political context where there is active structural hostility towards this work. They model how to respond to oppression with creativity and hope. 

The book begins with a foreward by Natalie Diaz. She reflects on the Mojave language and how it informs her understanding of the future, and her relationship to the future. She says, "My responsibility as a human, is to not sit and wait for it but instead to meet is, through my makings and labors of sleep or dream, or running wild in the night." (Diaz, 2025, p.1). She explains that the title of the book comes from Native stories such as, "the Mojave glittering or sparkling world is a time when the world was still wet, after a flood or deluge, or after the original waters we came from had receded." (Diaz, 2025, p.II). She explains that the glittering world is where we live. "In this glittering world we are also taught to dream. We have become those dreams. And we have yet to become those dreams." (Diaz, 2025, p.II). And she comments on how the authors in this anthology honour the idea of the glittering world through their work.

I think that the glittering world is a beautiful concept. I have heard different flood stories from different places, but the glittering world is new to me. I will think of the glittering world when it rains (as it does often in Vancouver). I also love that the concept entails the impetus to dream.

The book contains an introduction written by the editors. They review the history of Indigenous anthologies and celebrate some of their favourite Indigenous authors who came before them. Regarding how their own cultures informed the work of editing the book they state, "Our traditional conceptions of gender and sexuality take on a subversive role as they challenge oppressive patriarchal structures. Women, Two-Spirit people and people of marginalized genders can be incredible leaders and story tellers; in the vein of futurisms, this has been, is, and will always be true." (Denetsosie, Drake & Little Badger, 2025, p.VI). And they explain that in this anthology, "each piece in its own way, answers the question: What lies beyond this Glittering World?" (Denetsosie, Drake & Little Badger, 2025, p.VI).

I love the strengths based stance that the editors take towards Indigenous stories, and also the way that they celebrate the act of storytelling as important work. 

The book includes many authors who are Indigenous to the southwestern United States. It also includes authors who are Indigenous to other regions of the United States, Mexico, Samoa, and Canada. The authors who are Indigenous to Canada are jaye simpson and Arielle Twist. 

The book is compact (204 pages) and features over twenty contributors, so the works are short. Some of the poems are only one to two pages long. I like short pieces. I think it's interesting to see what people can do in a small space. I read this just before the holidays. I did not take too many notes and I was not in an analytic mode. I just kind of existed inside of the book and it was nice. 

One story which stood out to me was Sky Woman Rising: A Memoir by Moniquill Blackgoose. In the story, humans are trying to leave earth. They need to live in space for awhile in order to let earth recover. But the scientists can't get it right. Indigenous people drew lessons from the story of Sky Woman in order to inform how to build their space biome, and they are successful. What I love about this story is that it presents Indigenous knowledge and science as complementary and overlapping. I often get annoyed when people make charts comparing Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people. Generally I think it's not a compelling persuasive strategy because it's an overly broad approach which everyone can find something to disagree with. Anyhow, sometimes in those comparisons, people will put science in the non-Indigenous column, as though Indigenous people did not have our own systems of knowledge and inquiry. I dislike categorizing science as being a non-Indigenous thing because I think it has the potential to lead to Indigenous people being marginalized in science and it also runs the risk that we will marginalize ourselves by avoiding science. What I love about this story is that Indigenous Knowledge literally helps save the world, and it does so by informing a scientific problem which western science on its own could not solve. Indigenous Knowledge, encoded in stories, has an important role in the present and the future. 

I'm currently in a period in my life where I have gone through a period of grieving my aunt, my uncles, and my cousin. As such, the story Sandstone ballad by Danielle Shandiin Emerson really moved me. In the story, the mother dies. But the one of her children finds a statue which looks like her, and it is kind of alive. The story navigates the unease of this mother statue with the longing that comes with grief. It's not horror. It's something else. 

The Oklahoma Ocean by Chelsea T. Hicks was one of my favourite stories. At twenty-seven pages it's one of the longer works. I have no rationale for liking it other than the fact that it was easy to immerse myself in the story. Two friends journey to the Oklahoma Ocean (fracking collapsed aquifers leading to a salinated body of water in Oklahoma) in order to meet a third friend. Everything is uncertain. 

Overall, I would highly recommend this book. I will probably read it again soon. 

Works Cited 

Denetsosie, S.S., Drake, K. & Little Badger, D. Introduction. In (S.S. Denetsosie, K. Drake & D. Little Badger, Eds) Beyond the Glittering World: An Anthology of Indigenous Feminisms and Futurisms (p.III-IV). Salt Lake City, Utah: Torrey House. 

Diaz, N. (2025). Foreward. In (S.S. Denetsosie, K. Drake & D. Little Badger, Eds) Beyond the Glittering World: An Anthology of Indigenous Feminisms and Futurisms (p.I-II). Salt Lake City, Utah: Torrey House. 

***Note: this blog is a sister blog to https://twinkleshappyplace.blogspot.com/

jaye simpson's short story "The Ark of the Turtle's Back"

According to the bio in Love After the End, "jaye simpson is an Oji-Cree Saulteaux Indigiqueer whose roots hail from the Sapotaweyak, Keeseekoose, and Skownan Cree Nations." 

jaye is the subject of a film called I'll Tell You When I'm Ready. The film is 14 minutes long and available to stream here, and here is an interview with jaye about the film. In the film, jaye processes the grief of being seperated from her late mother, the significance of publishing her first book, and what her drag personanna means to her. And jaye reflects on how being in Vancouver helps her to feel close to her mother. The film includes spoken poetry and is poignant and beautiful. 

jaye's book, a body more tolerable, can be found wherever fine books are sold. Their short story The Ark of a Turtle's Back can be found in Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit & Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction.  

Summary

The protagonist of this story is introduced as someone who is "iwkekaazo, pretending to be a woman." (simpson, 2020, p.63). Her sister helps her obtain hormones. She takes care of children with her partner. She is unsure about whether or not she ever can or should have a baby of her own, and so she acts as though she is unsure about her partner. 

Her sister arrives and says they all have to leave quickly. They are in danger if they do not leave the planet, and the sister has found a way for them to leave the planet as part of a mass exodus. If they leave the planet, the main character will be able to have surgery in order to be able to have children. But the energy required for the exodus to leave earth would cause its core to cool, turning it into "the new Mars." (p.69).

The main character is very upset when she hears this. 

"Our people wouldn't leave her, and you know it. We would stay until her last breath and go with her. We are the caretakers, and if she dies, we die too." (p.69)

They leave earth. The main character has her surgery and also goes through an intense grieving process for earth. And then she does a ceremony with her partner and they prepare for their new life. 

Reflection

While I was reading this, I felt a lot of gratitude for my cis-het privilege of being able to conceive without medical intervention. I imagine it would be very difficult to want to have a baby and not be able to have a baby. I'm glad that the main character was able to have her surgery. 

When I was doing my PhD, someone asked me whether or not I found it depressing to reading about Indigenous science fiction, and I think they meant specifically cli-fi. I do not find Indigenous cli-fi depressing. 

I find actual climate change depressing. I used to live in Lytton, and one year I had to move to Lillooet. We were under evacuation alert and we were trying to get the moving truck packed before it turned into an order. Then when we got to Lillooet, we had to hurry, because there was a fire there too and we didn't know whether or not it would shut down the road back to the town where I had rented the truck from. And then later that summer, we could not go to our family fishing camp because of fires. That was over fifteen years ago, and since that time, I have been mentally grappling with the reality of climate change. I was on the road coming home from Alexis Creek during the atmospheric storm in 2021, and that is when my brain really started to rewire itself. Things are not like they used to be. Things will never be like they used to be. Things I took for granted, like fishing camp and quick trips to the interior, are no longer always within easy reach. We are beyond the "is climate change real?" phase. We are in the adapt phase of climate change. 

I find Indigenous science fiction, including cli-fi, comforting. When the main character in this story expressed emotional concern for earth as one does for family, she was voicing something that I feel inside of me, and something that is missing in mainstream coverage of climate change. I grieve climate change, and it's not all one big grief, it's ongoing. I am pretty sure that all of humanity feels some grief, even if it is pushed down. But I think that Indigenous people experience it differently because of the connection to land which is present in many Indigenous cultures. So when I read Indigenous cli-fi, I feel less lonely about what we are collectively going through. 

I also think that these stories which involve earth becoming uninhabitable also in a way hopefully push us all in society towards conversations about mitigation. 

My attitude towards Indigenous cli-fi reflects my attitude about stories generally. Stories are important. Stories play an important role in helping us understand the world around us. Stories can incite transformation. And so yes, sometimes stories talk about serious things. 

Works Cited 

simpson, j. (2020). The ark of the turtle's back. In J. Whitehead (Ed.), Love after the end: An anthology of Two-Spirit & Indigiqueer speculative fiction (pp. 9-16). Vancouver, British Columbia: Arsenal Pulp Press.  

Uatan - A short story which illustrates Indigenous youth in the future who love their culture

 Josephine Bacon is a poet who writes in both French and Innu-aimun. I visited her website and it was in French so I used the magic of the internet to translate it. Here is an example of her poetry: 

I made myself beautiful

so that people would notice

the marrow of my bones,

survivors of a story

that is not told.

Her poetry is so beautiful when translated into English. I feel sad that I don't even know how beautiful it must be in French and Innu-aimun. 

Kim O'Bomsawin, Abenaki, recently created a documentary about Josephine Bacon. Here is the trailer. 

I found Josephine Bacon's short story Uatan, a beating heart in Wapke, which is an Indigenous science fiction short story anthology from Quebec. I admit that in my mind, I sort of just think of Quebec as basically Ontario but French. Wapke helped me get a better sense of the distinct people who are Indigneous to Quebec as well as a greater appreciation for the beauty of the land in Quebec. 

Summary

A youth wakes up from a dream. It's 2070 and he is in his homelands, which his people have returned to. They use modern technology like greenhouses, and seem to be thriving. He tells his father about his dream and they spend the day together. He goes to sleep again, and dreams that someone is creating a bag for his drum. He wakes and tell his father, and his father tells him that his drum is not for decoration and that he should ask for a bag to be made for it. At the end of the story it's revealed that "All drum players must have had three dreams about the teueikan before they can make use of it." (p.150).

Reflection

 A lot of stories within the genre of Indigenous futurisms deal with what many consider to be dark topics: zombies, apocalypse, dystopias, and so on. This story is an example of a light story that just feels good to read. 

It is nice to imagine that in the future Indigenous youth will have everything that they need. And in the future these Indigenous youth will want to participate in their culture and the adults around them will support them as they take on cultural roles and responsibilities. 

Similar to 2091, this short story also envisions a period of justice where Indigenous people are able to have more agency over their lives and able to actually just be modern while also having an Indigenous relationship to their homelands. 

The story is a hopeful portrayal of the future of Indigenous youth, families, and communities. And as Chelsea Vowel says, “having some space to cast ourselves as far into the future is vital and potentially emancipatory” (p. 20).

This story is very, very short (three pages). I personally love short fiction. I also love concise writing. The first time I read this I thought, "hmm not sure what that was." It was so short that it almost got lost among the other, longer stories. But the story stuck with me, and so I visited it again. Something that I appreciate about short fiction is the way that it requires the author and the reader to attend carefully to every word. This story would be good to share in a creative writing class along with the inquiry question, "how does the author accomplish characterization, setting, and plot within a very tight word count?" 

Works Cited 

Bacon, J. (2021). Uatan, a beating heart. In M. Jean (Ed.), Wapke: Indigenous science fiction stories (pp. 148-150). Holstein, Ontario: Exile Editions Ltd.

Vowel, C. (2022). Buffalo is the new buffalo. Vancouver, British Columbia: Arsenal Pulp Press.

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This is a sister blog to https://twinkleshappyplace.blogspot.com/