Imagining our Future Interconnected Communities

A multi-racial democracy based on love, equity, regeneration, & interdependence

In our current reality, the future is an unpredictable place. The white American dream of the 1950s, full of idealist consumerism with comfortable retirement, is no longer a model anyone can even pretend to strive towards. Reinforcing that it has never been a possibility or an ideal for the majority of us. In the last few years of the pandemic, we've been privy to the intersectional conflicts at play in our society and how much responsibility we each hold to create a new reality. In this landscape where a pandemic, political distress, and racism forced us to gain more consciousness of each other, we’ve refocused. Prioritizing the greater health and wellness of people and considering our connection with earth. When we look to the future, we must consider the cosmologies, geographic landscapes, and histories that have occurred already. We need a different lens to imagine the future. 

The concept of futurism connects pillars of culture with science and technology; it is the imagination of how current issues can be solved in the future. In sci-fi novels and films, we see examples of these hypotheses: flying cars, humans living on other planets, and genetic modification. Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism position cultures' ancestral technologies, tools, and methods of living as foundations for future discoveries. We can imagine the potential of botanical medicinal knowledge, observance of natural cycles with related stories, and forms of collective healing through ceremony within cultural specificity. The practices we’ve learned through the terrain and events we’ve survived, the stories of our families, the long-term relation with kin can all help to transform new realities. These ideologies of culturally aware futurism are key pillars to the Navigating Change initiative for Ford grantees that can strengthen their capacity to become equitable, democratic organizations within larger movement and ecological ecosystems. 

In Dec 2023, the Navigating Change team invited Aisha Shillingford, artist and artistic director of Intelligent Mischief, to guide us into imagining a future world. During Futurist Session: Designing Our Organizations for the Future We Desire, we imagined a future collective in the year 2172, named the Turtle Island Federation. Our imagined futures are a unification of the cultures, ancestors, and non-human relations we currently participate in. We fast forward past a few generations into the future to see what has occurred. What follows is the narrative of a dreamscape, a textual idea of the future we envisioned as a group through a series of prompts. In no means is this text “complete”—it is an invitation to dream, as a reader, imagine what you would add to this futurescape. 

Our Ancestors 

To build our collective, we must consider who shapes our ideas of self. When we think of who inspires us, we consider ancestors who existed before us. For many of us, the first ancestors we can access are our biological family, our mother, father, parents. Beyond this, we may turn to our chosen families, imagined kin, known roots, or unknown ancestors that were forcibly separated from us. Our grandmothers, grandfather, and then further back, their parents and the network of family that built our understanding of self and memories of location and identity. Can we recall anecdotes of our family members? Family who we share blood with and those whom we crossed paths with, chose and cultivated deep bonds and trust with. Learning about our ancestors’ characteristics, the context of their experience, and their values and emotional connections, we learn about ourselves. 

We consider our ancestors' stories of migration (forced or unforced), the lands that they existed within, how they survived in those locations with the natural kin they encountered. Plants, geographic formations, and non-human animals serve as our generational teachers and supporters. We can envision their bodies activating ancestral knowledge through gardening, dance, and storytelling. We feel our ancestors' perseverance, fear, celebration as a memory that has been embedded into our biology. 

Our ancestors include the philosophers, writers, and healers of ideologies we are contemporarily drawn to, those who have given us methods to self-actualize. We include the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh and the Plum Village Tradition, who bring us meditative frameworks. We include indigenous healers such as Erika Buenaflors, who help to make ritual practices accessible to current lifestyles. We celebrate the writers who can put into words the lessons we struggle with regarding love and self-acceptance, bell hooks. Or writers like N.K Jemisin who can put into language imagined spaces that impose current challenges onto future technological worlds and new situations. These ancestors are the thinkers who bring us into praxis. We imbed their knowledge into our lifestyle. We were introduced to our ancestors' kin, and they became our kin.

The ancestors we seek guidance from are the activists and movement makers who have shaped the concepts of equality, equity, and liberation we strive towards. The individuals over history who showed us how to resist bigotry, supremacy, and refuse acts of discrimination. We honor their moments of perseverance in situations of pain and tension. In their moments of strife and fear, we send our energies and care in the past to support them. We have gained so many tools and stories of protest through these models of collective strength that fortify us. Each community and individual brings their ancestors into our circle, adding them to our communal altar. Bringing their wisdom, experience, and care into a mutual circle. 

Values we share 

We consider how to be consensual with the botany, non-human animals, and geography we live with. We develop our communication methods with ecology, continuing our curiosity and relationship-building with each other, with our ancestors, and with natural living kin. 

We believe in abundant resources for all, flattening the hierarchy and consensually asking for resources from nature. We prioritize that everyone has access to housing, water, and care. We believe in a shared open economy based on what is occurring in the seasons with our kin and evaluate that with our needs. We live in an interconnected democracy that allows for plants, animals, and geography to advocate for themselves. We acknowledge it's easier said than done. There is inherent difficulty balancing multiple groups and interspecies needs, a sticky task where groups combine and recombine to find balance and belonging within our ecosystem. 

Shared rituals and ceremonies

Our lives are sacred; we move with the seasons through constant change and challenge. We aim to move and flow in harmony with the seasons of life. We cultivate a deep sense of belonging and connection to larger purposes. Within our collective, our sense of community is sealed through the rituals and ceremonies we share. We are an amalgamation of the same histories experienced within different locations, expressions, and bodies. Together we honor the memories of our ancestors, those named and unnamed. We hold days to recognize and contemplate our ancestors and teachers in gratitude. 

We embraced the physicality and messiness of birth and death. We share stories and come together in authentic connections, healing circles, and presence. We highly prioritize our connection with the natural world, with land stewardship being everyone's role. We lore around a fire, creating collective meals of culinary fusions. 

We designate days to focus on reconciliation, to repair relationships that have fallen off or moments of harm. Within our collective, we embrace joy through celebrating community and their talents; we laugh together at comedy shows in humor and camaraderie. We spend time hearing the music, choral song, and transcending together through dance. 

Together we make a dreamscape, a reflective zone to manifest a future together. This textual musing of the future was envisioned as a group by answering prompts on a Miro board. In reflection about the futures we desire - this session became ceremony full of intention. 

This writing is not complete, nor does it answer all the questions of how we’d achieve our desired future reality. We invite you to continue to dream and imagine what you would add to this futurescape— are there specific rituals or ancestors you’d add?