Indigeneity as a Post-Apocalyptic Genealogical Metaphor

Abstract

This paper is a theoretical exploration that works through a global Indigenous consciousness. As a critically reflexive story work and auto-ethnographic contemplation it begins by confronting a presumed genealogy in a post-apocalyptic world of coloniality through a global Indigenous lens. Extending beyond racially legalised genealogical ancestry, the metaphysics of indigeneity in the context of Western modernity can be re-positioned as a metaphor of past future human-being-ness or person/people-hood. Global Indigeneity and Indigenous metaphysics are framed as a portal and entry beyond coloniality through fugitive sociality and subversive relationality. Confronting the tensions of colonially purist and racially essentialist categories of indigenous identity, lineages of the post-post-apocalyptic world are forming in the enduring social connections embodied in an Indigenous genealogical consciousness of the present.

1. Presumed Genealogies in a Post-Apocalyptic World

The world as my ancestors knew it has changed many times, according to our own stories and memories (Montejo 2021). One of my ancestors, Tecun Uman, is a temporal marker for the era catalysed by imperial encounter and the project of Western modernity, or in other words the post-Columbus world (Mazariegos 2013). This was a major apocalyptic moment for my ancestors’ lives and ways of being (Batz 2020; Montejo 2021). Kyle Whyte (2018) has stated that we are living in our ancestor’s dystopian future in the Americas. Gerald Horne (2018) also refers to the trans-Atlantic enslavement and settler-colonial projects in the Americas as an apocalypse. T. L. King (2019b) adds that the idea of a “new world” was truly a project of making a world in the modern European imperial image. Race, gender, class and Indigeneity converged and were formed in unique ways in this global colonial matrix of power identified as coloniality (Lugones 2007; Maldonado-Torres 2008; Quijano 2000). This context that I refer to as an already present post-apocalyptic setting is one that presumes the genealogy of ‘others’ as part of its structure. This post-apocalyptic present is based on a uniquely world-altering moment, which is a form of interconnected global power that is unprecedented on this planet. Post-apocalyptic in this essay signals the world-making/altering project of our modern world-system and paradigm that is ongoing through coloniality (Maldonado-Torres 2007; Patel and Moore 2017). Coloniality as a reference point offers a larger global frame than settler-colonialism, while not excluding it, facilitating tenets of this essay which include the argument that a global Indigenous consciousness expands the possibilities of understanding Indigeneity as an emancipatory genealogical metaphor (Patel and Moore 2017; Tecun and Siu‘ulua 2023). The post-apocalyptic as a signifier of a post-Columbus global paradigm also allows for consideration of an imminent post-post-apocalyptic reality that contemporary and global Indigenous peoples along with others face, in the already materialising and impending crises of the future today.

I look like a lot of different kinds of people. I have dark brown skin, identify with my highland Maya inheritance, but am also of mixed ancestry. Whatever the racialised colour codes are of the locales I find myself in places a presumed genealogy upon me. I was raised in the territories occupied by the United States, in Utah, and according to the general and locally understood range of difference there, I was often identified by a mainstream public as “Pacific Islander” when I was hanging out with Tongan or Sāmoan relations. Alternatively, I was labelled as Mexican, Latino, Hispanic, Diné (Navajo), or generally as Native American/Indian when I was by myself or not in proximity to Oceanians. This changed when I crossed state lines, however, according to what the general perceptions and understandings of difference were in those places. When I spent some time in the south of England many years ago I became a ‘real Indian’, coded as South Asian in that context to which I would reply, “I am the other kind of ‘Indian’”. Living in Aotearoa (New Zealand) for eight Matariki (Gregorian calendar years) revealed a presumed genealogy on me of being Pasifika or Islander in general while I resided in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland). Tāmaki Makaurau has a massive presence of Moana (Eastern Oceanian) peoples and descendants who reside there, as well as heaps of Eastern and South Asians, and many other peoples from around the world. However, when I would visit Te Wai Pounamu (South Island, New Zealand) I was faced with questions of “are you Māori?” I remember learning through this presumed genealogy of me in my first visit to Te Wai Pounamu that the demographics were much less diverse there than what I experienced in Tāmaki Makaurau. When I inquired further of those who presumed this of me, I observed a general binary assumption of difference in that context between being either Indigenous Māori or Pākehā (European descended New Zealanders). Among a general public in each of these global locations, my identification would vary, and often, despite my explanations otherwise, I would still be placed into the category that made the most sense to locals. The exceptions to this are when I am with Indigenous folks who value relation through a genealogical consciousness. I adopt and use local Indigenous language or concepts of genealogy throughout this essay reflecting when I am in the physical or metaphysical domains of other Indigenous relatives who are elder with respect to me, in those contexts. I do so to uphold their mana (honour, authority) and cosmology through my mobility and relation, but not as a claim to their authority or ancestral lands or waters. I also emphasise the use of ‘place’ instead of ‘land’ throughout this essay, in order to also include water-space and an Oceanic lens that honours relatives from the Moana. Finally, throughout this article I use a lower case ‘i’ indigeneity to emphasise formations initiated by coloniality and as a category of analysis, and the upper case ‘I’ in reference to the identity, self-determined assertions, and ontological position of Indigeneity (Tecun and Siu‘ulua 2023).

There are tensions with a presumed genealogy found in the racial or biological politics of identity, particularly in my experiences in the United States (US), but this is not exclusively a US phenomenon, in my experience. Academics who have indigenous ancestry may straddle some elite standing in society on one hand and, at the same time, be positioned with little to no power and marginalised in university settings. Folks in this position at times also presume a particular genealogical logic upon me as well, as I engage with them at conferences or in other academic settings and situations. A distinguishing example is that when I am with Tāngata Whenua (People of the land, Māori) relations; the genealogical consciousness and kōrerorero (talk, discussion), in my experience, is expressed as whakapapa (layers, genealogy). I understand whakapapa as more than a presumed linear hetero-monogamous line of descent, which instead encompasses many complex layers of relationships that are multi-directional and that are not exclusively biological (Haami 2024; Mahuika 2019). For example, when looking for a point of connection, Māori relations from various hapū (sub-tribe) and iwi (tribe) have at times located me as coming from the lands where the kūmara (sweet potato) originated. Through relationships solidified over the years with kai (food), kōrero (talk), and koha (gifts), a new layer and whakapapa between us was created. Yet, outside of these types of relationships, the contrast is that I have also encountered boundaries premised predominantly on a logic of racialised biological genealogy. This has been an experience particularly with academics with middle to upper class backgrounds who often have lighter skin and are perceived to identify exclusively or primarily as indigenous, downplaying their mixed ancestry or cultural upbringing and practice. This is not a universal rule, but an observation based on some of my experiences with some indigenous scholars specifically from settler-colonial nations and their universities. I want to emphasise that a context of oppression that maintains a condition of fighting for scraps, space, and recognition, are key factors in my view that impact this type of boundary making. When I encounter these ideas, my experience is of a presumed genealogy that is limiting and seeks to erase and distance me from my relationships and obligations with Indigenous peoples not of my immediate biological ancestry. As an Indigenous person raised in a diaspora context with a mobile experience, I have been able to nurture a global consciousness. There are relations and obligations that I now carry with me well beyond my own immediate ancestral Indigenous inheritance. I hold more than one set of protocols and community connections. This is at times overlooked in academic settings by a range of individuals who have limited power or are marginalised in that context, but who nonetheless isolate my genealogy to what makes sense to them or their workplace politics and survival needs.

When I have shared my genealogy in Te Moana Nui a Kiwa (Oceania, The Great Pacific Ocean of Kiwa), which was expressed in Aotearoa as whakapapa with Tangata Whenua, or as hohoko (connections, to make genealogical links) with Kakai Tonga (people of Tonga), the general consciousness among them and other Indigenous folks was more complex and robust, be they Māori, Kakai Tonga, or Tangata Moana (peoples of Oceania). They often understood me to be Mayan or perhaps even as Guatemalan, if they could not remember my specific lineages. A Guatemalan nationalist identity was often the best I could hope for in any of the settings I have lived in. However, amongst global Indigenous peoples across the Moana and Americas, in my experience there is a general value and respect for genealogy and an effort made to understand who I am in terms of how I come to be in a place and what relations are part of who I am. Recognising the vast diversity among Indigenous peoples, moments where I experience shared values to know one another by who you are in relation to, through ancestors and living communities, further cultivates a sense of shared global Indigenous consciousness in me. This shared consciousness is distinct from general curiosities of racially identifying someone based on assumed ancestral origins because of their physical appearance. Instead, this global Indigenous consciousness extends to a sense of responsibility to know one another in relation to a broad sense of genealogy, be that in order to find an already present connection to fulfil one’s relational responsibilities, or to build a new layer of connection with a relative. The shared genealogical consciousness of global Indigeneity is found in the value for, and presence of, relational protocol, yet has a range of diverse and distinct expressions and practice.

I am sometimes categorised in indigeneity, dependent on where I find myself across the globe, but it is often through a racialised colour-coding logic based on the paradigm of a modern world. I see myself in Indigeneity, despite the external gaze that selectively considers me indigenous, depending on geographical context and a local social consciousness. In contemplating both a colonial inheritance that presumes a particular genealogy and a global Indigenous consciousness, one must consider how we inherit experiences that emerge out of a post-apocalyptic setting of coloniality/Western modernity. Indigeneity is complicated and messy and not my ultimate preference for an identity, but one that I use in global conversation because of the entry point it offers. This essay is part of an ongoing project based in my current reflections on what it means to be Indigenous, how that is linked to colonial genealogies, and also how it exceeds them. Indigeneity should be considered through a combination of contested and embraced genealogies, as a point of analysis and as an ontology.

I will continue this essay with a brief positionality that further locates me, after which I will interrogate the apocalypse of the modern global world, and the formation of indigeneity within and against it. Indigeneity is framed as having been constructed as a dichotomous antonym to Western modernity, like black is to white in terms of race, and like feminine is to masculine in terms of gender. What genealogies will emerge in a post-post-apocalyptic world? The next massive world-altering moment will add more layers; therefore, my interest is in asking, what does it mean to be Indigenous now and in the future? I propose that Indigeneity is a genealogical metaphor for those who maintain, advocate for, and live a connection to ancestors and ancestral ways of being and doing, with intimate ties to place. In this sense, Indigeneity is a powerful metaphor for what it means to be a human being beyond the modern concept of human that is created out of simultaneous conditions of humanisation and dehumanisation. The concept of indigeneity may change in the post-post-apocalyptic world that looms, but the portals and entry of past future temporalities of a global Indigenous consciousness may endure these paradigm shifts. I conclude this essay with an expression of my global Indigenous genealogy that holds many relationships, and a reflection on how the relations of today are creating genealogies of tomorrow.

2. Global Indigenous Positionality

My ancestors are many and come from many places. I identify with what I know most, as Wīnak, which is the English spelling of Winaq in Spanish. Wīnak means a person or the people for those who are currently more popularly known as Mayans. I use the English spelling because it locates me geographically in the dominant Anglo-speaking occupied territories where I have mostly lived. I descend from several highland Mayan peoples of Iximulew (Guatemala) who converged in the Kaminaljuyu territory currently known as Guatemala City. K’iche’, Tz’utuhil, Mam and Kaqchikel are lineages I have come to know intimately, but I also have West and North African, Arab, Jewish, Iberian and Northern European ancestries that converge within me. I was born in Tongva territory (Los Angeles, California) and raised in Soonkahni (Salt Lake Valley, Utah) in Newe and Nuuchiu territory. I am also a citizen of New Zealand, where I have been a local resident of Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland, New Zealand) in the Ngāti Paoa and Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei territories. The local Indigenous perspectives I experience vary, which are dependent on several factors, including whether someone knows which hapu (sub-tribe) they whakapapa (genealogically connect) to or not. Other influences include their cultural knowledge and practice versus identity based primarily on ancestral descent, and whether or not they are Mana Whenua or Tangata Whenua or not (the people of the land, people with ancestral authority in a specific place). Across these positionalities I might be seen as tauiwi or someone who is both non-Māori and non-Pākehā (European New Zealander), whereas others would relate to me via a shared global oppression connected in material struggles or for being dark-skinned in white supremacist systems. Within this complex web of Māoridom, others would make different connections based on other entanglements or fusions between our peoples. A popular example was Te Arawa and Tainui (Māori) actor Temuera Morrison playing a fictional character in the soap opera Shortland Street, who was introduced to the show in 1992 after spending time in Guatemala (Tecun 2022a). Another example was facing the entanglements between our lands that complicate a sense of clean boundaries or purity, through contemporary foods and extracted materials that arrive from and into each other’s ancestral homes (Teaiwa 2014). Some of the kōrerorero I remember is discussing how chocolate and corn, which are sacred foods to my people and literal embodiments of our ancestral lands and waters, are transported and mixed into different lands and consumed by peoples in a new place. On another occasion I remember a discussion of how the lands and waters of Aotearoa fuel the dairy industry and are infused in their products, which are then exported globally. This includes places like Guatemala, which imports and consumes New Zealand dairy products such as ultra-high-temperature processed cream, which is a point of reference for much of my family with respect to their geographical knowledge of Aotearoa New Zealand. These are places I share complex connections to in unique ways that are both local and part of a global entanglement. Through relationships with a range of Indigenous genealogical consciousnesses, a new lineage and narrative to these entanglements and connections is nurtured.

I was raised in Newe and Nuuchiu (Shoshone, Goshute and Ute) territories and have spent the majority of my life in their homelands. My religious community upbringing in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (popularly known as Mormons or LDS) uses another genealogical logic that presumes a different genealogy of my origins and kin. In the Mormon paradigm I traversed throughout my upbringing, ‘Polynesians, Latinx, and American Indian/Native Americans’ were imagined to have a common ancestral lineage to ancient Israel and are constructed into a unique racial–religious category known as ‘Lamanites’ in Mormonism (Hernandez 2021; Tecun 2022b). While this is a contested category by some, it is also embraced by other Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Polynesia within this religious community. F. King (2019a) has identified how this has resulted in a vast network of communities that spans across the globe, connected by a shared faith and religious institution. This religious paradigm, while problematic and an enactor of ‘genealogical violence’, is complicated by its facilitation of relationship-making between global Indigenous peoples, who at times shift the purpose and cosmology of Mormonism, and instead nurture overt expressions of indigeneity and subversive Indigenous ritual and ceremonial practices (Benally 2017; Colvin 2017; Hernandez 2021; Murphy 2019; Simon 2024; ‘Ulu‘ave-Hafoka 2017). This religious genealogical logic creates a simultaneous tension and opportunity between different Indigenous communities in diaspora settings such as the one I was raised within. My relationships with Kakai Moana (Indigenous peoples of Oceania from a Tongan perspective) began at an early age and was heavily catalysed by Mormon connections, yet was also not limited to that paradigm, even if it was a site that facilitated many of these relationships. My relationships with Kakai Tonga (Tongans), Tagata Sāmoa (Sāmoans) and Tangata Moana (Oceanians), for as long as I can remember now, led to much of my collaborative research on kava and talanoa (Tecun and Petelo 2021; Tecun et al. 2018, 2020). I now have young family members in my ha wīnak/ja winaq (one expression in K’iche’ for family) or kāinga (Tongan for family clan) that fuse genealogies in a physical tangible way through direct ancestry. Yet prior to and beyond this important genealogical link of biological ancestry, I have had, and continue to have, genealogical responsibilities through relationships and co-participation in each other’s distinct communities, as well as in the burgeoning ones we are co-creating.

I traverse distinct colonial and imperial contexts that are connected to and part of my positionality and genealogy. I was raised in a place where you have to prove you are indigenous legally to the nation-state that holds you captive. I was also raised by people who are from a place with an indigenous ethnic-majority population that is politically and economically subordinate to a dominant minority of European descendants and assimilated mixed-race peoples. I come from a working-class background of displaced peoples and have lived an experience of global mobility, and have likewise inherited a global genealogy. I remain entangled with Christianity and Mormonism through kinship and community, and as an anthropologist I have been a participant in various Abrahamic religious traditions, as well as syncretic fusions between them and Indigenous practices. In my own practice, I participate in Indigenous rituals and ceremonies of Turtle Island (North America), Iximulew (Guatemala/Mesoamerica), Abya Yala (South America), and Te Moana Nui a Kiwa (Oceania). I am academically trained as an ethnomusicologist and social anthropologist who carries out global Indigenous studies. I am a father, spouse, child, brother, homie and relative. I bring all of this with me in my reflection, research and analysis of indigenous formation through coloniality/modernity and its ruptures via a global Indigenous genealogical consciousness. The metaphysics of indigeneity are encompassed in the realities marked as ancestral outliers in the global paradigm of coloniality. This reality transforms and becomes Indigenous metaphysics as it embraces ancestrally rooted memories that are a fugitive reality in the context of Western modernity, offering portals of ontological possibilities beyond it.

3. The Apocalypse of Western Modernity and Origins of Indigeneity

Throughout my upbringing, I regularly navigated a sense of indigenous consciousness under and through many different names such as race, culture and nationality, but as a professional nerd I have been able to continue this work with more linguistic precision. The tension I saw in the particularity of an indigenous identity was found for me in a division of time. This division is in between the modern and primitive, with no exact calendrical start date, but with a useful temporal marker found in the unique globality and social structure of a post-Columbus world. The use of ‘post’ for me is not an assumption of an end, but rather the life ‘after’ a particular phenomenon begins, emerges or is established. As I began to pay attention to the tensions of temporal divisions embodied in various multi-faceted identities I held or embodied, the expression of ‘Western’ versus ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’ became a prominent tension to unpack.

“That’s so Western” or that is “a Western way of thinking”, versus “from an indigenous perspective”. These are comments that I have heard, and which continue in various forms of expression. The questions I reflect on when I encounter them are where the dividing line is assumed to be between the ‘Western’ and ‘indigenous’. When does ‘indigenous’ begin and end and when does ‘Western’ begin and end? I try and recall when I have made such expressions in my life, as well. What was I trying to say and make sense of? This is not a criticism of these expressions, but rather a reflection and catalyst to inquire further of what is meant and formed out of such ideas embedded in the tension between that which is formed and identified as ‘Western’ or ‘indigenous’.

Indigeneity came into existence through the inception of ‘Western modernity’ or coloniality. The paradigm of modernity is one of constant conflict with the antonym it creates of indigeneity. Similar to dichotomies of presumed binaries of gender (masculine and feminine) and race (white and black), the modern or civilised likewise defines itself against the primitive or indigenous in order to extract its own meaning (T. L. King 2019b; Tecun 2022b). This paradigm creates an invisible whiteness and hegemonic racialised cishetero-patriarchy as its dominant cultural norm. However, even when entangled identities of being both Western and indigenous are considered, a genealogical tension between them reveals a political position in the embrace, rejection or refusal of ‘being Western’ for those who identify as indigenous. When I refer to Western modernity it is a starting point, not an assumption of a clear or pure category, but instead a symbol that includes the concepts, ideologies, and systems that have in relatively recent history imagined and constructed “the West”. This includes that which is called Western, Western paradigms, Western metaphysics, modern Western notions of civilisation, eurocentrism, white supremacy, global capitalism, all internal nuances, and more. “Western” can be defined within the epistemology of modernity, which is projected out of the tempo-spatial Columbian intersection. Loomba (2005) explained that this global project of colonialism served as the “midwife that assisted at the birth of European capitalism” (p. 10). Modern global systems of power differ from other ‘pre-contact’ power relations in both intentionality, consequences, and the sheer scale in which so many changes have occurred on a planetary genealogical scale of time for our species. In other words, ‘Western’ is a symbol for the hegemonic culture, dominant global representation, and systems of power derived from the “West” or packaged as such, which have metastasised over the recent centuries. Modernity is fuelled by teleological linear thinking and temporality, which supported the rise of capitalism and continues to fuel it along with nation-state formation, and current notions of fixed hierarchical superiority along the lines of race, class, gender, ability and indigeneity. This paradigm simultaneously creates, then demonises and romanticises, a frozen and orientalised past for the coloured exotic indigene (Byrd 2011; Calderón 2016; Fanon 2008; Maldonado-Torres 2008; Mills 2007; Rifkin 2017; Said 2016; Tuck and Yang 2012).

I recall conversations with several friends about Indigenous markings on the body, tā moko, tatau, tātatau, or, as they are known in modern English, having been borrowed from Oceanic languages, ‘tattoos’. The idea of ‘traditional’ or ‘Indigenous’ in these conversations focused on the aesthetics of such, giving the appearance of not being ‘modern’ or as ‘modern’, despite ‘modern’ tools and influences on the materials being used to make ‘traditional’ markings on the body. This discussion is not an uncommon one for me, and is also an idea I at times perpetuate with my own aesthetic preferences for certain cultural practices or rituals. However, this idea echoes the assumption of Western modernity as the owner of “advanced” technology and divides “past” peoples in the present on measures of authenticity premised on the absence of “modern” tools. Western paradigms assume an exclusively “Western” authorship and use of so-called “modern” technology, which are made possible through legacies of exploitation of people and land or in collaboration with them. There are Indigenous peoples and artists that push past or beyond this tension by creating new expressions of ancestral images and icons of their Indigenous identities, albeit to a varying degree of success in terms of adoption by their communities (Koloamatangi 2023; Tecun and Petelo 2021). The use of ancient or ancestral icons or images in ‘modern’ formats such as digital media complicate the tension further, whereas the medium may be contemporary, but the reproduction of the ancient offers an indigenous aesthetic. Therefore, I would contend that Western technology is not the objects or tools themselves, but rather a different set of relationships with them. Modern technology cannot assume it is advanced without considering the environmental and social cost of non-convivial and unsustainable tools (Illich 2001). Modernity then, is not necessarily the adoption or use of externally introduced or co-produced tools either; rather, it consists of the dominant logics of manufacture, distribution, and use of technology (tools) in our modern paradigm. Yet the symbolic power of the aesthetics of ‘modern’ tools often continues an association with the ideas and paradigm of modernity/coloniality. The paradigm of modernity maintains sets of invented dichotomised binaries, such as between the modern and primitive, divided by time, the former presumed to be futuristic and the latter associated with a frozen past.

Western modernity is expressed through coloniality which self-creates through ‘others’, such as the black, feminine, queer, poor or Indigenous. Maldonado-Torres (2007) defines coloniality as the remaining pattern of power derived from colonialism, yet in existence beyond colonial administration. Coloniality is “in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and [more] … as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and everyday” (Maldonado-Torres 2007, p. 243). Indigenous etymologically came from the Latin ‘indigena’, in order to distinguish the “cultural or ethnic other” from the dominant norms of “civilised Christian—Western man—rational human” within the post-apocalyptic paradigm of Western modernity/coloniality (Hamill 2012; Maldonado-Torres 2008; Wilson 2008). Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) has identified ‘indigenous’ as a problematic term and category, because “it appears to collectivize many distinct populations whose experiences under imperialism have been vastly different” (p. 6). Loomba (2005) supports Smith’s sentiments in their statement that:

By the 1930s colonialism had exercised its sway over 84.6 per cent of the land surface of the globe. This fact alone reminds us that it is impossible for European colonialism to have been a monolithic operation… The legacies of colonialism are thus varied and multiple even as they obviously share some important features.

(pp. 19–20)

Smith (2012) explained that collective or pan-identity terms that have since emerged under the umbrella of indigenous includes, First Peoples, Native Peoples, First Nations, People of the Land, Aboriginals, or Fourth World Peoples. In Iximulew (Guatemala) and throughout Abya Yala (South America), Pueblos Originarios is also used, meaning Original Peoples in Spanish. People of the Sea, Ocean Peoples, Pasifika, Tagata/Tangata Moana, and Moanan are also used by Oceanians, as terms of convenience which are subject to the same negotiations of collective similarity and distinct diversity (Gordon-Smith 2015; Samu 2016). While indigeneity has limitations due to its vast range of distinctiveness, it also encompasses all of these different regions, with a particular relationship and worldview tied to place and ancestors in a global post-Columbus world of coloniality/modernity.

The word indigenous first appeared in English in a 1598 document, and is framed by conquest (Hamill 2012). However, although it was created and introduced by outsiders of the “New World” to refer to people who were already there, indigenised people eventually began to own the term. Cajete (1994) explains that the terms Tribal and Indigenous apply to the large amount of “traditional” and “tribally oriented” communities with identities tied to specific places and regions, and whose cultures espouse “an inherent environmental orientation and sense of sacred ecology” (p. 14). Indigenous is a local and global identity, drawing from both place-based uniqueness, and common global struggles (Merlan 2009). Global indigenous identities are linked to different colonial legacies, mostly derived from the same geographical region of the European ‘West’; or catalysed by and modelled after the manner of modern empire. Indigeneity has been defined in the tension between ‘the West and the rest’, where whiteness, coloniser, and patriarch is defined as the “self” and defines all “others” in contradistinction (Hall 1992; Minh-ha 2005, 2006). Fanon (1963) explains the imagination of this dichotomy and its antagonistic tension by stating that, “it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates [their] existence. The settler owes the fact of his very existence, that is to say, his property, to the colonial system” (p. 36). Eve Tuck (Twitter, 6 January 2018) explained the complications and yet embrace of the term ‘indigenous’, stating: “I don’t love the word ‘Indigenous’ more than all other words. I care about it insofar as it conveys a spatial, political, ongoing and historical relationship to the state. I care about how it connects up with other peoples”.

Although indigeneity is continually adaptive and changing in its expressions legally, politically, culturally and racially, it can be identified metaphysically as being linked to a deliberate, intentional, and living connection to the ancient past, ancestral place, and is often presented as an oppositional “other” to the “modern”. Fanon (2008) emphasised the temporal significance of the tension that produces indigeneity in a context of Western modernity, reminding us that “the architecture of this work is rooted in the temporal… [and] must be considered from the standpoint of time” (p. 5). Modernity not only creates the native, the indigenous, it freezes indigeneity and race/colour in time, creating a paradigm where the future for the dark-skinned indigenous body is “white”. Indigeneity is often an invisible presence assumed to be absent, whereas civilised and modern is coded through whiteness as an invisible socialised norm assumed to be standard. Modernity continues to exist through a colonial-blind state, which is a covert state of ignorance that perpetuates a settler futurity or future coloniality and civilisation by erasing the indigenous presence it co-produces (Calderón 2016). Reflecting on the presumed genealogies previously mentioned, of both incomplete or incorrect genealogical association and erased genealogical relationships, race and indigeneity complicate each other, yet exist simultaneously. Race is often overdetermined within paradigms of Western modernity through visible spatial relationships, a question of where one belongs, enforced through colour-coded segregation and white entitlement to both private and public space. Whereas, indigeneity is often overdetermined by invisible temporal relationships, a question of when one belongs in time, removed from modern temporality and outside of contemporary colonial time. Asserting one’s own Indigeneity across racialisations and gendered and classed identities is a counter hegemonic act which opposes the linear temporality of modern Western societies and their globality.

American Indian activist and poet John Trudell poetically articulates the paradigm of modernity or a post-apocalyptic present as the project of civilisation (Rae and Katz 2005). Trudell critiqued this paradigm in a recorded interview, sharing that

It has been literally the most blood thirsty, brutalizing, system ever imposed on this planet. That is not civilization, that’s the great lie, that it represents civilization … or if it does represent civilization, and its truly what civilization is, then the great lie is that civilization is good for us…It’s like there is this predator energy on this planet, and this predator energy feeds upon the essence of the human being, the spirit. This predator energy will take fossil fuel, and other resources out of the earth, and turn it into fuel, to run a machine system, but in order for there to be a need for that system, and in order for that system to work, they have to mine our minds, to get at the essence of our spirit… for this predatory system, this disease to work, we must not be able to use our minds in a clear coherent manner, because if we use our minds in a clear and coherent manner, we will not accept the unacceptable.

He adds that, in order to understand this paradigm regardless of one’s ancestry, one should interrogate how they became “civilised”, or, in other words became “modern” in a post-apocalyptic world. Trudell explains that in order to remain physically alive, Indigenous people have had to shift their perceptual reality in order to survive.

Killsback (2013) refers to the driving force of this paradigm as an organism based on an invented ideology that “dehumanizes entire groups of people and damns whole societies while excusing itself from any past, current, or future acts of inhumanity” (p. 107). This system produces a “societal bipolar disorder: half-colonizer and half-colonized” (p. 107). Vandana Shiva refers to the current reiterations and maintenance of modernising, civilising, and development projects, as a production of in-between people who become caught up in the cracks of an in-between world (Black et al. 2010). Calderón (2009) highlights the logics of Western metaphysics as anthropocentric, individualistic, and linear. LaDuke (2015) explains that this system and society assumes that “man’s” laws are highest and is superior knowledge over “others”. LaDuke adds that the linear thinking of Western modernity is

The idea that you can always make a new frontier and find someplace greener…there’s gonna be greener grass someplace … and that we can trash it and move on…the perfect examples of linear thinking are two things: you have a linear production system where the largest products that we produce are waste; 50 Trillion pounds of waste… And the largest growth industries … are what—waste management and the social element of that, prisons. There you go. That’s a linear production system, which is totally unsustainable.

Killsback (2013) explains that this organism or post-apocalyptic world “defies all of the characteristics of other human societies, even previous European ones”, which is an anomaly “that survives under conditions that are dire and lead to dysfunction for itself and nearly all its members” (p. 107).

Killsback (2013) argues that the Western paradigm is one of spiritual immaturity, selfishness, self-aggrandisement, greed, violence, sexual frustration, insecurity, domination, one which fears death, and is in denial.

Western cultures…hold a dysfunctional relationship with their history, especially when their histories are unfavourable…Indigenous peoples and their histories are often unfairly forced into this Western perception of history, which can lead scholars to adapt their work to defend their peoples’ honor against the threats of shameful histories. Indigenous peoples embrace their histories and need only to defend their survival.

(p. 91)

The paradigms of Western modernity are destructive aspirations of unattainable monolithic projects, which can only exist with the eradication of “others”, be it through genocide, ethnocide, or assimilation. The illusion of Western modernity is that clean divisions maintain pure and separate realities, pervading a complex existence (Maldonado-Torres 2008). Calderón (2009) argues for a rejection of Western metaphysics and a “move toward epistemological and ontological diversification, and the shattering of colonial blind ideologies and practices” (p. 73).

The inception of indigeneity took place as indigenous identity was formed out of an essentialised “other-ness” in relation to an evolving hegemonic norm of modernity. This condition attempts to erase what most groups refer to themselves as, in their own languages, drawing from an Indigenous genealogical consciousness of being a ‘person/the people of this land/sea/ancestor’. Only “the self” is human in Western modernity, not all people are humanised, and only humans are sentient. This ontological collision is another tension between modernity and Indigeneity, which exist simultaneously in contested space and time (Gilardin 2001; Montejo 2010). Figueroa-Helland and Raghu (2017) define Indigeneity by its rift with civilisation, which is to say its rift with the modern, Western, and capitalist. They argue that efforts to revitalise and recirculate ancestral traditions by Indigenous peoples is “part of their longstanding struggles for emancipation from the hegemonic world-system” (p. 190). This has given rise to an alternative Indigenous paradigm known as Indigeneity. Indigeneity is a variety of worldviews, epistemologies, and ontologies that practice communal lifeways and advance a non-anthropocentric and decolonial alternative to coloniality and Western modernity. Indigeneity is a portal of possibility beyond the ecological and socio-political crisis of civilisation (Figueroa-Helland and Raghu 2017; Hernandez 2021; Ka‘ili 2023; Māhina 1993; Montejo 2010). Cajete (1994) adds that “the crisis of modern [people’s] identity [is their] cosmological disconnection from the natural world…a deep sense of incompleteness” (p. 26).

Modernity is a material condition and conceptual state of mind or consciousness, a paradigm where spirits get eaten (Kindheart 2011). This crisis is identified when you are metaphysically disconnected from the past and have (un)willingly rebuked and thus forgotten the teachings of your ancestors, the inherited ancestral knowledge and customs once handed down through generations. John Trudell said this is when you have no relationship to being, just reaction to living (Kindheart 2011). This is not to suggest that the lack of awareness or knowledge of adapted or transformed traditions over time, in order to survive, removes Indigenous connection. Instead, Indigeneity not only maintains, but pursues, connection to the forgotten, to find and identify that knowledge in order to reclaim, re-invent, nurture, and re-create ancient wisdom. One might say that this type of inquiry is one of chasing shadows and tracking past echoes in the present. The attempted erasure of what many Indigenous peoples call themselves, ‘person, the people’, presents Indigeneity as a metaphor of what it means to be a human being. Wynter (2003) framed the post-apocalyptic coloniality paradigm as one with a single genre of ‘human’, which global Indigeneity ruptures continuously as the ‘past’ smuggled into the present, offering a broader range of genres of what it means to be a human being.

4. Indigeneity as a Metaphor of Fugitive Past Future Human Being-Ness

The term ‘Indigenous’ unifies people globally with shared roots of experience with displacement from land and water, threatened cultural knowledge and language, large-scale material poverty, and health disparities, and struggles to exist with self-determined collective identities. Global Indigeneity also shares values and principles of place-based worldviews that are non-anthropocentric and hold relational ethics that are intentional for social connection, albeit in a variety of diverse ways. These are general reflections on global Indigenous cultural connections that extend beyond legal and racial definitions of indigeneity, which are specific to political and colonial particularities across modern nation-states. Although this sense of shared collective experience is significant, it can threaten distinction as well, by homogenising unique peoples’ lifeways and histories. It is important to remember that “local definitions become validated not within international forums or courts of law but the closed circuit of cultural identity in indigenous communities” (Hamill 2012, p. 7). Indigeneity can be demonstrated by “tracing family lineage [which] pulls ancestral connections into the present, where individuals are living embodiments of the past” (p. 7). The dominant Western cultural hegemony in the post-apocalyptic world creates conditions that position indigenous people to be essentialist in order to be able to collaborate with “others” from a marginalised position. Many feel a need to essentialise marginalised identities in order to create a sense of identity and belonging out of the fragments that survive colonial violence. However, being Indigenous and using indigeneity in essentialist ways strategically differs in positionality, relationship, and use, compared to being categorised in essentialist ways by external forces as “others” (Smith 2012). While racialised indigenous essentialism can be problematic and limiting, perhaps the underlying layer expressed through essentialism speaks to a deeper connection between ancestrally rooted people.

As global Indigenous peoples we have endured a post-apocalyptic context of coloniality/modernity. What might the impending crises yield in a post-post-apocalyptic world for our genealogies? The next massive world-altering moment will add other layers; therefore, what will it mean to be indigenous in the future? What do our descendants become next, in order to live their connections to us? Considering Indigeneity as a metaphor for what it has meant for us to be human beings beyond the paradigm of Western modernity, Indigenous peoples framed as living pasts become embodied metonyms of place and ancestors. Metaphors extend out of metonymical origins, which produce an Indigenous metaphysics based in past-futures of the present. In other words, an ancestral sense of being human or a person is a genealogical metaphor captured in the expression, identity and experience of indigeneity. Building on the Tongan time–space theory of tāvāism, cosmovisíon Maya (Mayan philosophy), and experiences in te ao marama (the natural world of understanding and light) and with matauranga Māori (Māori knowledge systems), Indigenous metaphysics, for me, represent that which exceeds the temporality and spatial relationships of Western modernity (Māhina 1993, 2010; Hernandez 2021; Ka‘ili 2017; Mead 2003; Tecun 2022a). The metaphysics of indigeneity is a hoa (coupling, pairing, twinning, partner relationship in tā-vā theory) to Indigenous metaphysics (Lear et al. 2021a, 2021b), the former being the contested co-formation in a post-apocalyptic context of coloniality identified through shared struggle, and the latter being the re-invention and emancipatory possibility of the fugitive portals of ancestral memory that global Indigeneity opens. My use of fugitivity is derived from Black Studies and the emphasis that fugitive study is found in acts of being social (Moten and Harney 2004). Indigeneity then is found in the realms of Black consciousness because it is also a sociality that is fugitive with a subversive relationality (Tecun 2022a). A global Indigenous consciousness is, in general, a socially conscious way of being and doing, which is in opposition to the hyper-individualistic logic of modernity (Hafoka 2020; Harney and Moten 2013). From these combined lenses, Indigeneity can be expressed as that which was smuggled into the modern world, a memory of ancestral meanings of being a person/people.

Indigeneity as a post-apocalyptic metaphor of being a person/people/human being obtains meaning as an echo of an animate world found in cultural expressions that emerge out of metonyms of place. Blood and Heavy Head (2014) first introduced me to metonyms and their role in Indigenous spirituality, identity, and knowledge. They discussed the Blackfoot tribe’s beaver bundle, and how each element is an actual organic material from the land, found in their local ecology, which forms their culture and language. They compared the role of the actual to the symbolic by saying that instead of worshipping an abstraction of deity or intermediary, the worldview of Blackfoot people is centred on local organic physical reality. Indigenous metaphysics are part of a complex web of knowledge and experience, which includes a reverence and respect for life systems, a holistic combination of elements, entities, and beings that make up an Indigenous reality, an expression of connection to metonyms. Indigeneity or Indigenous metaphysics is a practical reality tied to place and connected to ancestry, a metonymically based social system that is unique and adaptive in time and space. Place is inseparable from Indigeneity. This is why transportable metonyms become anchors across time and space, responding to legacies of both temporal and spatial mobility, which are the lifelines for our own Indigenous identities and metaphysics. This is so, even when we adapt to a place and time that may have a local Indigenous identity and a precedent that is an elder authority to us. Elder Indigenous authority in a local setting is a deeper line of living connections to ancestors in place, expressed in my experiences in Tāmaki Makaurau as ‘mana whenua’ (those connected with the authority, honour, and prestige of a place).

Metonymical consciousness is a foundation for Indigeneity and its metaphysics, where earth is not a metaphor of life, it is life. Parallel to this is the gendered shift in coloniality where the mana (authority, honour, and prestige) of the feminine is extracted and put in service to cis-hetero-patriarchy (Niumeitolu 2019; Lopesi 2021a; Lugones 2007). Earth and women are a source of life, not merely a resource for living. The conflict and confusion lies in modern Western thought and the legacy of the narrative that woman was created by man, for man. Kimmerer (2015) explains that creation stories and cosmologies are how we orient ourselves in the world and make sense of it, telling us who we are. Kimmerer explained that “we are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness” (p. 7). She tells of the colliding intersection between Skywoman (Indigenous deity of Turtle Island) and Eve (Biblical/‘Western’ first woman), saying:

One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven. And then they met—the offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve—and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting, the echoes of our stories. They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and I can only imagine the conversation between Eve and Skywoman: ‘Sister, you got the short end of the stick…’

(p. 7)

I imagine that the female-bodied deity and gender-transcendent guardian Hikule‘o of Tonga, or my feminine ancestress Ixkik’ would respond similarly to Skywoman upon meeting Eve. Farella (1993) explains that there is a general tendency to politely talk about Indigenous thought in a dismissive way. For example, when it comes to the Earth being mother he says, “we virtually never talk about the literalness of this. Politeness that is false, translating their ideas into our own image” (p. 18). The metonymical amnesia of modernity results in the problem of the human, which falsely justifies the vision of modern Western man as ‘master creator’ and the standard for ‘human’ (Juárez and Pierce 2017; Wynter 2003). “The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be a human”, perpetuating an anthropocentric human/object dichotomy (Kimmerer 2015, p. 57). The only way to make something alive or recognise it as alive in modernity is to make it human (white, Christian/rational, civilised, modern, cis-gendered, male, able-bodied, neuro-normative, etc.). All “others” are ranked on a scale based on one’s closeness to the proximity of man, a ‘humanising, whitening, civilising, straightening’ project that can never be fully achieved by ‘non/sub-human things’ (Fanon 1963, 2008; Maldonado-Torres 2008).

Indigenous metaphor makes it possible to liberate modern rigidity and fragmentation, where new realities can be created through a relationship with the original. Metaphor is the face of metonym. In the case of my experiences in the Kingdom of Tonga, this is quite literally one’s face. I recall on several occasions new relationships attempting to read the design of my face as first attempts to locate my genealogy. Who do you look like? Who is in your face? What relationships does the kupesi (design) of your mata (face/eyes) reveal? This often initiates inquiries of who you are related to, what places you are related to, who you descend from, and thus who and where you are in relation to. You are a metaphor of those who designed you. Metaphor is the vision and the reach of the original, the actual, the metonym. A relationship with metonyms allows for a reciprocating, regenerative, relational, and reinvented metaphor. This allows for a dynamic identity within changing contexts that is anchored by the original. Indigeneity transforms as metonym does, because it is an embodied experience, an affect that reveals complex relationships in the actual conditions of modern life. Indigenous presence and identity are a memory of past future possibilities that shift the cosmology of existing circumstances, through ‘collective remembering’, which shifts us beyond the confines of a colonial temporality (MacDonald 2024). Indigeneity collapses the borders of presence and absence, the walls between past and future, and the divide between physical and psychological. The past is a metonym for the present, it is the force that animates the now. Indigeneity is thus a metaphor for the metonym of ‘the past, the ancestral’, the origins and basis of people’s experience. We as Indigenous peoples are living metaphors of our ancestors, and when we live this experience we are also metaphors of our ancestor’s consciousness. Modernity, however, is a condition of disconnected genealogies with selectively inherited metaphors that have lost connection to what gives them their meaning.

If we are the elder societies of tomorrow and the metonyms of the metaphors that will come after, what remains and what changes in our descendants’ futures? Killsback (2013) suggests that new “Societies reinvent themselves through the manifestation of new ceremonial practices, laws and customs” (p. 95). He also argues that the past cannot be undone; thus, colonisation cannot be either, although it can be endured and overcome. “This is what indigenous societies must do to emerge into a new reality of indigenousness, and they must do so in accordance with the teachings from their elder societies” (p. 111). Memory is traced in metaphor, and the metonym reinvigorates the memory, keeps it alive, and reminds us to keep it warm so it can maintain animation. This is a common practice with Indigenous peoples in my experience, whether that means one returns to origin places periodically in life or permanently in death, physically visiting past sites or moments, or doing so ritually and metaphysically. I grew up with stories about returning to past places of my people’s origins. My father explained to me that a story can refer to multiple times and places at the same time, which have been temporally layered as a genealogy of time and space.

Indigeneity is that which was smuggled into the modern world, while the portals that it offers exits beyond it. I say portal, because I do not claim indigeneity to be the end-all solution, because it is a co-product of modernity. Indigeneity, as I have demonstrated, is identified and labelled in contradistinction to the modern and civilised human, and it is a reminder of other possibilities, not just from a modernity outside of us, but the coloniality that is also within and part of us. Modernity and indigeneity are interconnected and entangled like the dichotomies within race and gender. I shared stories of presumed genealogies at the beginning of this essay which reinforce in different ways a sense of purity or arbitrarily bordered categorisation, based on an assumed or limiting genealogy by non-indigenous and indigenous peoples alike. The embrace of messiness and of an impure and promiscuous relationship-making I experience today, in subversive and fugitive time-space, disrupts indigeneity and modernity’s co-production, through global Indigenous metaphysical portals that lead elsewhere (Lopesi and Keil 2024; Tecun 2022a).

5. Conclusions: Imagining a Genealogy of a Post-Post-Apocalyptic Future

I do not know exactly how the impending climate and economic crises will unfold, but as they loom we must prepare for yet another world. Since we are in many ways already living in a dystopian future of our ancestors, will things get worse or could an apocalypse to modernity offer something else for us? While a post-post-apocalyptic future will likely be a harmful and cataclysmic transitional event, considering what we have endured and might yet endure, who will we become next? If Indigeneity on a global scale is a metaphor for a greater range of genres of how to be and who can be a person/people, the metaphysics of a deeper sense of what it means to live on this planet must endure. Indigeneity is a paradigm of an emergent struggle from apocalyptic circumstances that altered our ancestral worlds in globally unprecedented ways. Considering Indigeneity as a metaphor for a metonym of ancestral worlds of the pasts that have been smuggled into the modern world, they have fugitively seeded burgeoning worlds of potential found in the subversive cracks and fractures of the incomplete hegemony of the modern world. Lopesi’s (2021b) use of Moana Cosmopolitan to refer to Indigenous Oceanian artists, claiming belonging to many worlds and holding the tensions between them, is a growing possibility. Llanes-Ortiz (n.d.) has similarly identified a Cos–Maya–Politan identity that has, through artistic expressions that speaks across time and space, begun collapsing the modern national boundaries that have separated Mayan peoples in Central America between several nation-states. Tecun (2022a) and Hafoka (2020) have built from the work of Moten and Harney (2004) and Harney and Moten’s (2013) fugitive space, where the social is study, into an Indigenous Oceanic context they call the ‘undercurrents’, where creolising formations across differently similar people compose and remix relationships across time and space in the vā-borderlands (in-between spaces). This is accomplished through the enactment and convergence of unique protocols with shared values that honour distinction and connection at the same time, which are critically conscious of and which confront our modern and Indigenous worlds, simultaneously (Tecun 2022a). Due to the entanglements between indigeneity and Western modernity/coloniality, Lopesi and Keil’s (2024) offering of ‘promiscuity’ lends itself well to the ruptures already existent in coloniality’s matrix. These are future ancestral cultures in the making, emerging outside of the morality of modernity. Reconceptualising indigeneity beyond political or racial category, by exceeding the presumed and imposed genealogies of indigeneity within Western modernity, means that indigeneity as we know it must also inevitably end. Global Indigeneity, re-calibrated as a metaphysical portal and emancipatory trajectory of possibilities, offers us entry to a range of creative new beginnings of future genealogies.

I was raised with stories of spiralled time and many worlds prior to the one that Winaq refer to as the current era of corn people from an Indigenous Mayan perspective. As Wīnak (Anglo-speaking diaspora Mayan), these ancestral stories I am genealogically connected to have become intertwined with local cosmogonies of the Great Basin and Oceania through mobility and the many relations I carry. The Indigenous genealogies of tomorrow are remembered today and re-imagined from yesterday through an interplay of distinct and shared relations. The lineage I embody and hold is a promiscuous one, which is connected to, but not cleanly in, the boundaries it traverses. I am Wīnak, descended from my great grandmother Tz‘unun (Hummingbird) and her line back to Tz’ununiha/Tz’ununija, the Water Hummingbird (Kingfisher), founder of a highland society. I was born on the Ajmaq/Ahmak sign in the cholq’ij/cholk’ih calendar with totems of the owl and bee who are also my relatives. These are all nahuales/naguales, or totems (metaphysical relations and non-human–animal counterparts), which I carry as genealogical relations. I have another still, that I keep for myself. These lineages exceed the anthropocentrism of modernity’s genealogies. I was taught by my parents, aunties, and uncles, and I learned many stories and practices from them before I began to read what had been written about us, which I now do to compliment my lived experiences. Since I was an adolescent I have also been taught in faikava, which could be defined in one way as Tongan and Moana community symposiums that occur while imbibing kava (Tecun et al. 2020, 2021). I am not ancestrally from the Moana, but I have imbibed so much of those Oceanian lands (kava) with Moana peoples it is now also part of me and my genealogy. I have responsibilities with knowledge I steward, imparted to me by teachers from Tonga, Sāmoa, Viti, Hawai‘i, Papua, and Aotearoa who are part of my intellectual and relationship genealogy (Tengan et al. 2010). I currently live in the lands of the Newe, Nuuchiu, Nuwuvi and Diné peoples, who I have also had the privilege to learn from and with. I recently made connections with one of the Sosogoi-Newe (Northwestern Shoshone) elders that began a re-setting of our presumed genealogies in the dominant colonial society of our local setting. This connection led to a gifting of local stories by this elder and a return gift from me that symbolised our ancient connections across this continent. My partner’s and my two eldest children recently represented our family to some of this elders’ relatives who are leaders and guides in their tribe. This moment affirmed a re-newed genealogical link between us which we must continually perpetuate, as we share a space they have ancestral authority over, but which is occupied by a settler-colonial nation-state. These relationships are also part of my genealogy. I nurtured critical consciousness in my youth through Black music such as reggae and Hip Hop, which I have since complimented and expanded by continuing to study from a range of literatures in Africana and African–American/Black Studies. This is also part of my intellectual and musically experienced genealogy. I have lineages to peoples beyond the presumed genealogies placed upon me in a modern colonial paradigm. I have lineages to places and non-human animals beyond the anthropocentrism of a modern colonial paradigm. The words hohoko (lea faka-Tonga), whakapapa (te reo Māori), and nantat (K’iche’), all have personal meaning to me as ancestral connections, genealogy, and layers of time, space and people. The stories of my Winaq ancestors include different creations prior to that of corn people who I descend from and embody. I have wondered what people or consciousness emerges next out of the many relations that converge in those of us who are fugitively promiscuous and part of many worlds already?

The metaphor of indigeneity in the post-apocalyptic world of coloniality signals to the ruptures in the boundaries and barriers of modern global hegemony. This opens up entry points that exceed modernity through the fugitive sociality of Indigenous metaphysics that includes a robust and complex genealogical consciousness. A global Indigenous consciousness includes direct physical ancestry and biological family, but it is more expansive, and spans beyond the confines of legal, anthropocentric, and racialised categorisation. Global Indigeneity reveals an interpretation of itself as a metaphor for different genres of what it means to be a person/people outside of the singular ‘human’ of Western modernity. Global Indigeneity exceeds the logics and presumed lineages of coloniality’s matrix of power as a post-apocalyptic genealogical metaphor. Indigenous metaphysics hold various meanings of what it is to be a human being on this planet. I do not yet have a name I would call the future peoples being created in the present. Yet, I see their formations today in the global Indigenous portals of elsewhere that reveal diverse past future metaphors of ancestral memories.