Indigenous futurism is a literary, artistic, and scholarly movement that reimagines the future—and, by extension, the past and present—through Indigenous worldviews, cosmologies, and lived experience. The term was coined by Anishinaabe scholar Grace Dillon in her landmark 2012 anthology Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, which gathered writers such as Sherman Alexie, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, and Nalo Hopkinson under a shared speculative umbrella. Drawing on Afrofuturism as a model, Dillon argued that Indigenous authors had long been producing science-fiction work that mainstream criticism had failed to recognize as such, in part because it did not conform to Euro-American conventions of linear time, technological progress, or frontier expansion. For Dillon, the heart of the movement is what she calls “ʻreturning to ourselves,’ which involves discovering how personally one is affected by colonization […] and recovering ancestral traditions in order to adapt in our post-Native Apocalypse world” (Dillon, Grace L., editor. Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. University of Arizona Press, 2012).

A defining premise of Indigenous Futurism is that the apocalypse is not a speculative event awaiting humanity but a historical one that Indigenous peoples have already survived. Contact, epidemic disease, forced relocation, residential schools, and the destruction of ecosystems constitute what many Native writers describe as an ongoing post-apocalyptic condition. This reframing produces a distinctive body of post-apocalyptic fiction in which collapse is neither novel nor spectacular, and in which survival depends less on individual heroics or technological ingenuity than on the reactivation of kinship, ceremony, language, and land-based knowledge. Novels such as Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017), Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017), Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning (2018), and Stephen Graham Jones’s genre-bending horror fiction, such as The Only Good Indians (2020) and  My Heart is a Chainsaw (2021)  have helped establish Indigenous post-apocalyptic writing as one of the most essential currents in contemporary North American speculative fiction. These works often invert the settler-colonial logic of the apocalypse genre: Rather than dramatizing the collapse of civilization as a catastrophic loss, they treat collapse as an opening in which Indigenous nations may re-emerge, self-govern, and reconnect with displaced territories.

Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon series belongs squarely within this tradition. Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018) depicts a remote Anishinaabe community in northern Ontario whose members gradually realize that the electrical grid, supply chains, and communications infrastructure of the south have failed. As desperate outsiders arrive and social order frays, the community turns increasingly to traditional practices around food and fuel. Moon of the Turning Leaves, the 2023 sequel, picks up more than a decade later in the community of Shki-dnakiiwin, where a generation raised entirely after the collapse must decide whether to journey south to reclaim ancestral lands. Together the two novels exemplify Dillon’s model of “returning to ourselves”: Rice frames endurance and renewal as inseparable from a return to traditional practices including ceremony, communal governance, and relationship to territory. The series’ central southward journey is prompted both by dwindling resources and the desire to decolonize, positioning Indigenous cultural continuity as the very substance of what comes next.