The Indigenous Futures Institute (IFI) is an interdisciplinary community established in 2020 with the support of the Social Science Research Council. We are committed to uplifting Indigenous knowledge, cultural practices, and stewardship by amplifying the work of knowledge keepers and community members from different backgrounds, disciplines, and institutions. We understand that doing so generates meaningful dialogue and collaboration, produces creative knowledge, builds trans-Indigenous relationships within and beyond the university, and grows healthy and sustainable futures for everyone.
Our Mission
IFI is a project concerned, principally, with the transformative power of the future. Rather than take “futurity” as an abstract concept focused uncritically on potentiality, the IFI takes to task the practice of futurity as an act of relational accountability and transformation. In pursuit of this goal, the IFI aims to put the power of scientific and academic knowledge back into the hands of communities that have been framed by dominant academic and scientific discourse as objects of study rather than producers of knowledge. A focus on the future is not merely a utopian project; it requires the recognition of past harms and a commitment to addressing them.
IFI seeks to become a university home for existing and new community-based projects from communities, activists, scholars, artists, leaders, youth, and more. In the long term, we envision the IFI serving as an incubator space by providing residence, mentorship, and seed funding for these projects to develop community-driven education, business, and policy models showcased through IFI.
Why Futurism?
Indigenous knowledge has long been denied status as legitimate research and knowledge in academia. When included, Indigenous peoples and cultures are represented as primitive and disappearing. Indigenous Futures is a point of departure from this paradigm. In practice, futurism amounts to Indigenous Peoples intellectually, spiritually, and physically resisting resource extraction, environmental degradation, cultural and linguistic genocide, and erasure and reflected in how Indigenous Peoples and communities exercise their political and cultural sovereignty, educational attainment, research, language preservation, and economic development.
From our standpoint, Indigenous Peoples have always been futurists, always taking into heart, mind, and prayers our future generations, always understanding that Native nation-building is a project of immediacy and longevity. Epistemologies of relationality shared by Indigenous communities across the globe, such as kuleana and seven generations philosophy, guide intergenerational practices to act on behalf of past, present, and future generations. Futurism requires we rethink university policies, practices, and beliefs to ask how we can include Indigenous knowledge and communities in co-creating futurist solutions tailored to our San Diego region and beyond.