Amazofuturism: Tupinambá Time Machines

The forest remembers everything. It remembers songs. It remembers grief. It remembers the exact moment when your ancestors turned into light and whispered to the rivers. But Brazilian science fiction? For way too long, it forgot.

Instead of honoring the forest's memory, it turned the Amazon into a set piece for colonial nostalgia and dystopian disaster. Indigenous characters were cast out or cast down—fetishized, erased, or made to vanish. But that script is being rewritten. Not by tech bros or space-age tourists, but by the original time travelers: Indigenous creators.

Welcome to Indigenous Futurism—a genre, a protest, a pulse. It’s not just a vision of tomorrow. It’s a survival technology made of story, sound, and resistance.

The Future Is Not a Ruin

Brazilian science fiction used to treat Indigenous people like relics—trapped in sepia, forever on the brink of extinction. This goes way back. During Getúlio Vargas’s nationalist reign and throughout the military dictatorship, the Amazon appeared in fiction as both utopia and chaos, a land waiting to be tamed or feared. The Indigenous body? A metaphor for everything the nation couldn’t quite reconcile: nature, past, failure.

But Indigenous Futurism snaps that colonial lens. In works like Daniel Munduruku’s "A Sabedoria das Águas," we don’t just get a token Indigenous presence—we get a protagonist navigating alien contact on his own terms. Koru is offered the future, but only if he gives up his people. His refusal is the revolution. These aren’t tales of assimilation. They’re blueprints for autonomy.

It’s not about whether the Indian survives modernity. It’s about modernity learning it was never the future in the first place.

The Science of the Ancestors

Indigenous science isn’t folklore. It’s infrastructure. It’s survival. And it’s been ignored, stolen, and silenced for centuries.

Take the botanical knowledge of curare—a plant compound used for hunting and healing—which Western pharmacology patented and sold as Intocostrin. Zero royalties. Zero respect. Or remember the grotesque case of James Neel and Napoleon Chagnon’s genetic exploitation of the Yanomami in the 1960s and '70s: a human safari masquerading as science.

Indigenous Futurism flips the lab table. In these stories, the elders are scientists. The forest is a database. Time is a spiral, not a line. Technology doesn’t mean alienation—it means deepening connection. Munduruku’s characters don’t need flying cars. They have dream logic and ancestral tech. The fungi network underfoot, the way rivers speak—this is Indigenous code.

Forget jetpacks. This is firmware built from myth, memory, and meteorology.

Art as Rebellion: Painting the Future with Our Own Colors

You want to see the future? Look at Denilson Baniwa. The artist turns pop culture inside out. He took E.T.—the alien we were told to love—and made him Indigenous. In one piece, the little grey visitor paints a Baniwa child’s face. Suddenly, the “alien” is the one learning, not teaching.

This isn’t just clever art. It’s decolonial sabotage. It’s saying: we are the ones you've always painted as alien. Now watch us paint ourselves.

Then there’s Mavi Morais. Her collages aren’t nostalgic—they’re lunar. Indigenous women farming cassava on the moon? That’s not sci-fi whimsy. That’s strategy. Because if Earth burns or floods, guess who already knows how to grow things with nothing but care and intuition?

These visuals aren’t background noise. They’re frontline resistance. They tell you this movement isn’t waiting for cinema deals or UN recognition. It’s here. It’s visual. And it’s beautifully armed.

Utopia as Gesture, Not Blueprint

Western sci-fi sells blueprints. Shiny cities. Problem-solving gadgets. The end of history.

Indigenous Futurism? It offers gestures. Movement. Seeds.

In "Todas as Coisas São Pequenas," a greedy CEO named Carlos crashes into a forest and meets Aximã—a guide who doesn’t scold or save, but simply exists as a different order of knowledge. Through hallucinogenic encounters and slow revelation, Carlos is unbuilt. His empire is not challenged—it’s made irrelevant.

This is what Jill Dolan calls "utopia in performance." Not the promise of a flawless world, but the crackle of transformation. Aximã doesn’t give Carlos a new job title. He gives him another rhythm.

This isn’t about perfection. It’s about remembering how to listen.

From “Vanishing” to Surviving—and Thriving

Mainstream sci-fi can’t seem to let go of the tragic Indian trope. In books like "A Mãe do Sonho," Indigenous people are either rescued or relocated. In "18 de Escorpião," they’re sent off-world as if Earth were too corrupt for their purity.

These narratives mean well. But they repackage the same old logic: Indigenous people as victims, not agents. Martyrs, not strategists.

Indigenous Futurism isn’t here for that. It centers survival—not as pity porn but as political imagination. Artists like João Queiroz are key. His "Icamiabas" series shows Amazonian warrior women wired into biomech suits, fierce and transcendent. It’s not cosplay. It’s prophecy. His Amazofuturist palette fuses neon, mud, and steel.

These aren’t refugees of the future. They are its architects.

The Right to Remain, the Right to Dream

There’s a story Munduruku loves to tell. A professor brags to an elder about humanity reaching the moon. The elder shrugs: “I know. I was there.”

That’s not just wit. It’s sovereignty.

Indigenous Futurism asserts: we’ve always been here—mapping stars, decoding seasons, communing with ancestors through story. The idea that we’re "finally joining modernity" is laughable. We’ve been time-traveling since before your calendar started.

Writers like Ambelin Kwaymullina call this an “act of defiance.” But it’s also love. Love for land. For memory. For futures that refuse to delete their pasts.

Conclusion

Indigenous Futurism doesn’t want your dystopias. Or your token heroes. It wants sovereignty.

It doesn’t dream of flying cars—it dreams of repair. Not Silicon Valley singularities but forest-based pluralities. Not Blade Runner rain, but river fog soaked in ritual.

Forget the Hollywood ending. This is a return to a story we were never supposed to hear twice.

Based on the academic work "Amazofuturism and Indigenous Futurism in Brazilian Science Fiction" by Vítor Castelões Gama and Marcelo Velloso Garcia (2020).