Coming to You from the Indigenous Future Native Women, Speculative Film Shorts, and the Art of the Possible Danika Medak-Saltzman Storytelling becomes a space where we can escape the gaze of the cage of Em- pire, even if it is just for a few minutes. . . . Storytelling is an important pro- cess for visioning, imagining, and critiquing the social space around us, and ultimately challenging the colonial norms fraught in our daily lives. (Simpson 34–35) In the irst episode of Joss Whedon’s short-lived but beloved series Fire- ly, set in 2517, the narrative pivots around the Firely spaceship landing on a moon to load people and supplies for transport elsewhere in the galaxy—the crew, we ind, keeps their bills paid by providing an of-the- books intergalactic delivery service. In the background, as the camera surveys the bustling trading post, the audience sees two Native men in powwow regalia make their way across the screen. Although this Indige- nous presence consisted of a brief glimpse that was unrelated to the larg- er storyline and was efectively a scene of Indians at a trading post, I nev- ertheless found myself both (embarrassingly) surprised and thrilled to see Whedon portraying a future where we exist ive hundred years from now as Native people. 1 his is not to say that I had bought into main- stream narratives that bind Native people and the utility of our knowl- edges and traditions to a time long past, where Native “disappearance” is conigured as always-already inevitable. Rather, it is to underscore that even though Native communities, our governance structures, the complexities of our social engagement, and the variety of our narrative traditions have always incorporated elements of futurity, prophecy, and responsibility-rooted strategies for bringing forth better futures, main- stream narratives represent a profound and pervasive inability to portray