Mission
The Indigenous Futures Institute (IFI) aims to recast the relationship between a legacy of unethical scientific practice and Indigenous peoples. By creating pathways toward participatory science through design-thinking, IFI brings together global Indigenous communities to study, access, and harness science and technology, critically intervene in the production of knowledge, and dream up abundant and plentiful Indigenous futures in an age of climate crisis, global pandemics, and the continued denial of Indigenous sovereignty. Collaborating with visiting scientists and scholars, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and other stakeholders, the IFI advances efforts of decolonization and environmental justice, drawing on Indigenous science and knowledge to combat the misuse of technologies and its often dire impacts on Indigenous communities. Put simply, IFI channels Indigenous knowledge through a community-based participatory model to create community-driven solutions to these challenges, imagining futures grounded in collaboration, decolonization, and Indigenous resurgence.
More concretely, the goals of IFI are threefold:
1) Create an interdisciplinary trans-Indigenous network of activist-community-scholars,
2) Incubate community-driven actions labs that bring together scholars with Indigenous communities,
3) Host an annual Unconference to convene trans-Indigenous activists-community-scholars, including students, for dialogue and collaborations, and
Through this intensive, interdisciplinary, and Indigenous work of bringing together a global Indigenous community dedicated to social justice and to solving the challenges of our current moment, we are currently working on the publication of interdisciplinary, transformative, trans-Indigenous, and futures-oriented scholarship that our communities will be able to put into practice.