Repetition is interesting for a writer, because editors unfamiliar with Indigenous aesthetic principles hate repetition. Repetition is a bad thing whether you are writing nonfiction or fiction. Editors look for it because the assumption is that the reader will get bored, yet rhythmic repetition is at the base of Nishnaabeg intelligence. We hear variations of the same creation story for our entire lives, and we are expected to find meaning in it at every stage of life, whether that meaning is literal (when we are kids), metaphorical, conceptual, or within the constellation of our collective oral traditions or that meaning comes from lived experience. Our way of life is repetitive. Every fall we collect wild rice. We don’t take a year off because we are bored, because aside from that being ridiculous, if we are not continually and collectively engaged in creating and re-creating our way of life, our reality, our distinct unique cultural reality doesn’t exist. If you’re bored, frankly you’re not paying attention.

Duality is another principle that confuses Western thinkers because they get it mixed up with dichotomy. Duality again is present in all of our stories and our ceremonies and our daily lives, but it is not an either-or situation. I understand it really as holism. Every year, we all experience the fall and spring equinoxes, when there is the same number of hours of darkness and light everywhere on earth. Now that’s not what really happens. Our experience of an equinox is mitigated by weather, for one thing, but even if we understand that one day as a dichotomy, there are 363 other days of shadowlands, and all of it is part of a complex whole — a whole that is constantly in motion and constantly changing. Yet there is a clear dichotomy between night and day, and you know what? I’m not a postcolonial critical theorist, so I don’t experience dichotomy as a problem.

I like writing multidimensionality into my work not because I’m trying to write speculative fiction but because that’s how Indigenous worlds work. There is an organization of time and space that’s different than the colonial world’s — different plans of reality. The implicate order, if you want to use that term, is influencing and intertwined within our own continually created physical reality. I was recently asked to write Indigenous science fiction, which coming from Indigenous aesthetics didn’t make much sense to me. Our stories have always talked about the future and the past at the same time. They’ve always coinhabited the spiritual realm; the birthright of the storyteller has always been to make the stories that come through them relevant to the current generation. A lot of what science fiction deals with — parallel universes, time travel, space travel, and technology — is what our Nishnaabeg stories also deal with.

Abstraction is also a grounding principle in Nishnaabeg aesthetics. Again, I think Western thinkers get this confused with extraction. Indigenous abstraction is different because it comes from our grounded normativity. Extraction is a cornerstone of capitalism, colonialism, and settler colonialism. It’s stealing. It’s taking something, whether it’s a process, an object, a gift, or a person, out of the relationships that give it meaning, and placing it in a nonrelational context for the purposes of accumulation. Abstraction within the context of grounded normativity is shifting the relationality to change meaning or to illuminate a different meaning. [2]