In her artist statement for Along the River of Spacetime (2020), a virtual reality “activation” of Anishinaabe star knowledge, scholar, artist, and video game designer Elizabeth LaPensée (Irish, Métis, Anishinaabe) described the ways in which Anishinaabe cosmologies anticipated a series of experiments carried out by CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the world's most advanced particle accelerator. The CERN project used the decay of beauty quarks, a type of elementary particle, to detect the influence of ghostly forms of matter that “pop briefly in and out of existence.” An exciting precursor to teleportation technology, the quarks offer insights into the fundamental behavior of the cosmos in ways already anticipated by certain Anishinaabe cosmological frameworks. Behavior that favors a reality interconnected and probabilistic, where beings relate to and entangle with one another regardless of the physical distance between them, where particles and parcels of matter acquire their ontological statuses only relationally. These relations, within Anishinaabe cosmology, are lively and reciprocal, dynamic and holistic; LaPensée, through her multimodal work, activates these nonlocal entanglements between celestial bodies and bodies of water, medicinal plant life blooming at the horizon line between the rivers and the sky, and the manner in which Anishinaabe teachings flow along and across these cosmological contact points.

Astrophysical cosmologies--contingent on empirical verification and instrumentation--are often set at odds with Indigenous cosmological frameworks. Aware of the fact that such a schema risks rendering Western science a strawman whose dialectical position diminishes the incredible diversity among Indigenous cultures worldwide, this session aims to consider cosmologies constituted by multiple representational kinds: "family resemblances" aimed at understanding the origins of and particular phenomena operating within the universe, resemblances that at times percolate into each other, bleeding across their disciplinary and metaphysical edges like ink in waterlogged paper, and at others chafe at their contact points, a fire-starting friction.

By cosmology, the session will refer to plural articulations of experience and sensation that encompass both worlds of the very large and the very small, within which the human is understood not as isolated from, but as an integral part of environments planetary and extraplanetary. Cosmology refers to the astrophysical studies of the properties and dynamics of the universe as a whole; cosmology also contends with the diverse cultural practices, belief systems, spiritual frameworks protected and practiced by Indigenous communities around the world.

From Hershman John's (Diné) poem "Theory of Light," which mobilizes Mąʼii BizǪ, the Coyote Star, as a reclamation both of the land and of the stellar nucleosynthesis expropriated by the Manhattan Project; to Robert Sullivan's (Ngāpuhi Nui Tonu and Kāi Tahu) imagining of fleets of great spacecraft waka that affirm the primacy of traditional navigational techniques in journeying across the cosmos; to Maize Longboat's (Kanien'kehá:ka) interrogation of his own heritage through the medium of a cooperative video game that stages a first contact scenario between Earthborn and Starborn, Indigenous writers and creators deploy a multitude of creative forms and speculative modes as a means of indexing, animating, and activating plural cosmologies. Indigenous mobilizations of diverse cosmological frameworks resonate with work within Indigenous futurisms and Indigenous speculative fictions. Emphasizing Indigenous resilience, sovereignty, and cultural revitalization in the face of colonialism and historical erasure, Grace L. Dillon (Métis, Anishinaabe) in her groundbreaking introduction to Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction positions as praxis biskaabiiyang, an Anishinaabemowin word that involves, for Indigenous creators, “discovering how personally one is affected by colonization, discarding the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovering ancestral traditions in order to adapt in our post-Native Apocalypse world" (Dillon, 2012, 10). Simultaneously, engagements with plural cosmologies affirm, according to LaPensée, that "Indigenous languages, stories, art, and other forms of expression carry with them scientific teachings" (LaPensée, 2017).

This session invites contributions from scholars, artists, gamers, practitioners, and teachers interested in exploring works across modes and mediums that illuminate the complex and uniquely Indigenous comprehensions of the complex web of relatedness across human and other-than-human spacetimes and persons. This session will also investigate the relevance these plural cosmologies hold for the study of Indigenous literatures, and what Indigenous literatures in turn reveal about the intricate interplay of multiple oppositions and contact points between world systems and frameworks. 

Topics may include, but are not limited to...

• Cosmologies and fictional and theoretical dialogues and/or tensions between Western science and Indigenous knowledges
• Cosmologies and Native astronomy
• Cosmologies an Indigenous environmental advocacy, environmental ethics, and sustainability
• Cosmologies and confrontations with (neo)colonial narratives and scientific and techno-modernity
• Cosmologies and Indigenous futurism(s)
• Cosmologies and Indigenous new media and video games

This session invites abstract submissions of 150-200 words and a bio emailed to Kaitlin Moore (mooreka@wfu.edu)

Deadline for submissions: Friday, 21 March 2025