Refuse Ecologies: Indigenous Posthumanism in Polluted Futures

In an era increasingly defined by apocalyptic climate change and extinction, critical theories often situate politics in strange forms of more-than-human kinship. In this dissertation I explore the ways human lives are entangled with the nonhuman matter of technologies and technological waste in addition to the animal and plant beings endangered by these conditions of environmental precarity. Post-apocalyptic Indigenous futurisms depicts dangerously toxic technological kin created from the refuse of capitalism and colonialism but enlivened through their relationship to Indigenous ontologies which find kinship in a nonhuman world. Indigenous futurisms craft ecologies that incorporate these toxic materials not just as kin but as a form of posthuman kinship. These figures are posthuman not because they are positioned beyond or after the human, but because they are as entangled with capitalism, climate chaos, and colonial science as they are with Indigenous ontologies of nonhuman life. This reorients a set of conversations about technological futurity towards land, sovereignty, and settler colonialism