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Gestures, imperfectly, to other ways of being in the world, and it reminds us that the way things are is not how they have always been, nor is it how they must be.

(Justice’s chapter on wonderworks was excerpted in a special issue of Apex on indigenous futurisms, available here.) “Wonderwork” draws on a growing body of indigenous scholarship that emphasize the aesthetics and affects of “wonder” as a world-making intervention in things as they appear to be, as they have appeared to be, statically so, since colonization. Tanya Tagaq‘s Split Tooth is what Justice refers to as an “indigenous wonderwork”, a term he uses to offer an ontologically indigenous way of thinking about indigenous texts that navigate around, journey through, and refuse to commit to western literary categories such as realism, fantasy, science fiction, and boundary-blurring genres like magical realism, speculative fiction, or imaginative literature.

In his treatise Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (2018), Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee) argues that literature is part of a larger struggle across our cultural practices, social formations, and our very selves, to “understand and articulate our humanity.” Literature tells stories about people, and indigenous literatures matter because they tell stories about what it means to be indigenous-in a world of one’s own people, in a world of settler peoples, in a world with other beings who may or may not be human but are nonetheless people, of a sort.