What do seeds and paper have in common when thinking about Indigenous futures? This presentation takes us to highland Asia, into the Indian state of Nagaland. I explore two modalities of thinking about futures and the effort by communities and individuals to make a difference despite the turbulent and tempestuous political climate, the upheaval of traditional ways of life, and the ever-regenerative question of cultivating hope in an uncertain world.

My first vignette takes me to Chizami, a small agrarian community, run by North East Network, a women’s cooperative working on reviving local seeds as both heritage and heirloom.  Seeds are tangible things that are held, felt, and sowed. They grow and sprout into food for sustenance, and are associated with memory, history, inheritance, and heritage. Weather, climate, water, soil and human ingenuity influence their harvest, along with rituals – song, dance, prayers – that celebrate the gift of nature, ancestral relations, and ties to land, spirits and gods. I ask: what sort of memories do seeds evoke? How are they related to family, kin and indeed to the very survival of a people?

The second vignette takes me to the Naga Archives & Research Centre, a national archive maintained by Rev. V.K. Nuh. His archive functions as a relation – not formally to any state governments as such or to any institutional holdings – but to his family, friends and the nation. It exists in a space of vision and memory, narrative and tradition that is an active repository of various forms of visual, aural, and written sources that anticipate those still unborn. In these multiple material forms, the expansive visual and political economies speak and act to remind us of the power of stories to build a nation. I ask: how might we view the archive as an intervention of collective memory? How might we view it as a legacy of hope that will wield its presence in any future realisation of the nation-to-be?

Remembering Our Futures plays on the idea of memory, of a past, that is not only suspended in-limbo, a passive repository of events that no longer hold weight, but something that is actively remembered and enacted in the slowness and stillness of time.