She Falls for Ages and Imagines Future After Apocalypse

Abstract

What is an apocalypse anyways? Most consider it the end of the world, but as April Anson (2017) points out the word ‘apocalypse’ is derived from the Greek term “apokalypsis” meaning “something revealed or uncovered”. But what if apocalypse accounted for these histories and revealed something more than “an end”? What if the apocalypse signalled hope that there will be a future? By drawing on Indigenous knowledge, Skawennati’s machinima She Falls for Ages (2017) re-frames apocalypse as the beginning of time, rejecting the narratives in science fiction or climate-fiction (cli-fi) of apocalypse as impending doom. Skawennati is a Mohawk futurist based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal, best known for her machinima creations—movies typically produced using video-game software—and digital media works that re-interpret and connect historical events to the present and future. She Falls for Ages (2017), is a re-telling of the Haudenosaunee creation story, where Sky Woman falls from Sky World through a hole in the sky and lands on a turtle’s back, both eventually becoming Turtle Island, North America as we know it today. Creation stories like the one of Sky Woman can often take days to tell, but Skawennati uses the Second-life video game platform to show the futurist place where Sky Woman falls from as one that is dying or, in many ways, experiencing apocalypse. Skawennati’s version of the apocalypse is stark difference from cli-fis such as The Day After Tomorrow (2002), that appropriate Judeo-Christian biblical narratives of the apocalypse and erases the existence of BIPOC perspectives. I consider Skawennati’s machinima as a reconceptualization of apocalypse that moves away from narratives that insist on White-settler survival and settler-colonial ideas about apocalypse and the anthropocene. As the author of this text is a woman of color and settler scholar, she foregrounds Indigenous scholars’ research about the anthropocene to analyze this work.