This talk explores how Anishinaabe (Neshnabe) philosophies of futurity offer alternative frameworks for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—reimagined here as Science, Trickers, Ecology, and Matriarchs (STEM). Drawing from my book, Mapping Neshnabe Futurity, I examine how Indigenous knowledge systems—rooted in land-based ethics, intergenerational responsibility, and reciprocal relationships—function as sophisticated technologies for sustaining ecosystems and communities. Central to this approach are both women-led political movements and trickster methodologies. Figures like Nanabozho embody creativity, misdirection, and transformation, showing how experimentation, surprise, and humor can drive innovation. Trickster thinking unsettles linear notions of progress, inviting scientific practices that are adaptive, relational, and open to unexpected outcomes.

Rather than treating “technology” as merely mechanical or digital, I highlight how Indigenous worldviews understand technology as relational: practices for maintaining balance between human and more-than-human worlds. Examples include sustainable water stewardship, climate adaptation, and culturally grounded mapping projects that foreground Anishinaabe languages and histories. By bringing Indigenous studies into conversation with STEM fields, this talk argues for futures where scientific inquiry is inseparable from ethics of care and responsibility. Through Indigenous futurisms and trickster methodologies, we can envision and build worlds that are innovative, just, and ecologically thriving.

Blaire Morseau is a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Michigan State University where she is also affiliate faculty in Digital Humanities and American Indian and Indigenous Studies. Before becoming a professor, she worked as her tribe's first full-time archivist, launching an online collections and dictionary website called Wiwkwébthëgen (We-oh-kweb-jug-gin) using Potawatomi cultural protocols of access and traditional knowledge labels.

As Co-Director of The Indigenous Chicago Project, Blaire also helped shape the project's components which include oral histories, digital maps, curricular materials and more, that explore the histories of the region, centering Indigenous voices, laying bare stories of settler-colonial harm, and gesturing toward Indigenous futures. She recently released an edited volume featuring the collection of antique birch bark books written by nineteenth century Potawatomi author, Simon Pokagon, titled, As Sacred to Us: Simon Pokagon’s Birch Bark Stories in their Contexts, published by Michigan State University Press.

Dr. Morseau consults on various exhibitions and collaborative programming for archives, libraries, and museums around the country including the Field Museum of Natural History, The Newberry Library, and The Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Her research interests are in Indigenous science fiction and futurisms, traditional cultural and ecological knowledge, digital heritage, and Native counter-mapping. Her newest book project published in May 2025 with the University of Arizona Press, is titled Mapping Neshnabé Futurity: Celestial Currents of Sovereignty in Potawatomi Skies, Lands, and Waters. The monograph investigates how Native peoples in the Great Lakes region leverage their traditional knowledge in environmental activism and in creative works of speculative fiction to reclaim Indigenous space and tribal sovereignty.