Ancestors on motorbikes: cosmic rays bring retribution

This article engages with current affairs and the multitude of crises facing the world, offering a perspective of critical hope through the lens of Indigenous Futurisms. In this vision, Indigenous ancestors are called back to the present to enact retribution against the people who have sacrificed Country in pursuit of greed and power, reclaiming justice and restoring balance. Wholesale ecological collapse, devastating wars and famines, rapid deforestation, the poisoning of vital water sources by pipelines cutting across Country, the extinction of entire species, the acidification of oceans, the aridification of once-lush plains, the leaking of oil into oceans, bushfires scorching tens of millions of hectares of bushland, the rapid heating of the entire planet—colonizers have had their day. This paper begins with Betelgeuse (a red supergiant star in the constellation of Orion) who has exploded into a supernova, shocking the scientific community. The year is 2025. The ancestors told us that this would happen. They understood the workings of the universe and had mapped the changing brightness of this enigmatic star long before the phenomenon was known to western science. They warned us. The explosion has triggered retribution. Cosmic rays, which have been thought of as being merely protons and atomic nuclei, are ancestors who transform into an army of anticolonial, flannelette-wearing, motorbike-riding Indigenous warriors fully equipped with weapons to combat the agents of colonialism. They are the protectors of the future. The article draws on the body of knowledge we call Indigenous Futurisms. Following Anishinaabe scholar Grace Dillon (2012) the aim is to provide an alternative to the trajectory the world is facing under colonial rule. This alternative response asserts that cosmic rays descend upon Country to protect the possibility of a future more expansive and favourable for human and more-than-human flourishing. Indigenous people are concerned with what Kanaka Maoli scholar Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua calls 'the deep time of human survival' (2017) – not colonizers time, not extractive time, which will sacrifice almost everything, including future possibilities of human existence, for the myopic vision of a colonial future. Cosmic rays are, as Goodyear-Ka'opua (2017) explains, 'Protectors of the future, not protestors of the past.'