No one wants to read what Native Americans think about the future. That is what Vine Deloria suggested to me the first time I met him. Deloria was the author of some very influential books—including God Is Red and Custer Died for Your Sins—and I was honored to meet him.
Deloria was delighted to meet me, too—not because I had done anything special, but because I had a copy of one of his books on my desk. He arrived in my office that day unexpectedly, and when he saw the book he laughed and said I must be the only other person on earth who had read it. It was called The Metaphysics of Modern Existence. According to Deloria, the book had bombed because it was about the future. Native American writers are supposed to talk about the past, not the future.
Why? The larger society, which is a colonizing society, wants to keep Indigenous people firmly positioned in history, where it can control the narrative. Colonization is the process by which Indigenous populations are categorized, defined, and frozen in time. It turns us into artifacts, not participants. We are historical footnotes, not modern agendas. One of the core strategies of colonialism is to consign its victims to the past tense—not to the present, and certainly not to the future.
