Alien Landscapes: Border Security Voids and Astro Settlements on Indigenous Land

This talk considers how astronomical scientific discoveries perpetuate settler colonial occupation of Indigenous land. Through an investigation of the collapsed “sightings” of border surveillance and scientific discoveries in outer space, how might Indigenous land persist as an alien space at the limit of conceptions of human/alien, earth/outer space, and subsequent notions of time and space? At the same time, how do Indigenous relational cosmologies remembered through origin stories, everyday life, and sci-fi films preserve an ancestral science that refuses the violence of borders, militarism, and environmental devastation that is rapidly expanding into outer space?