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In 2018, scientists from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claimed that humans must take unprecedented steps to radically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Anthropogenic climate change has led to a 'increase in the frequency and intensity of daily temperature extremes and has contributed to a widespread intensification of daily precipitation extremes', while also multiplying the likelihood of 'extreme weather and climate events' (Stott 2016: 1517). The impact of human-caused climate change is already being felt globally, with devastating wildfires, melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, mass species extinction and abnormal weather events, making world annihilation seem more likely than ever before. Given this situation, it is perhaps unsurprising that postapocalyptic Action has grown in popularity, with the publication of climate fiction or 'cli-fi', as it is popularly referred to, steadily rising since the turn of the millennium (Whiteley et al 2016: 28). Faced with this bleak reality, David Higgins points toward a distressing trend in recent sf where many of the texts that are deeply 'concerned with the threat of impending environmental catastrophe seem immobilized by a sense of nihilistic futility; even those cynically aware of this sense of futility are often unable to do anything other than simply comment upon it with shrugged shoulders' (Higgins 2018: 69). As a result, many, though not all, of these contemporary post-apocalyptic novels are ultimately cynical about a politics of change or liberation - often exposing a future defined by grim determinism that reinforces pre-set structures of oppression.
Kyle P. Whyte, a Potawatomi scholar, has argued that 'Indigenous peoples do not always share the same sf imaginaries of dystopian or apocalyptic futures when they confront the possibility of climate crisis because the 'hardships many [non-Indigenous] people dread most of the climate crisis are ones that Indigenous peoples have endured already due to different forms of colonialism' (Whyte 2018: 226). While some post-apocalyptic narratives depict the end of our current system purely as a disruption of capitalist progress, Anishinaabe author and journalist Waubgeshig Rice's Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018) reverses the polarity of those discussions by framing the apocalypse as a politically mobilizing and agency-creating mechanism. In Rice's novel, settler-Canadian communities struggle to survive the unprecedented weather conditions because of their reliance on...