Harnessing the postmodern dialect of Historical Fabrication and Indigenous Futurism, Xicana artist Alicia Smith weaves together science fiction and Aztec cosmology to tell the story of a group of indigenous women who escape the 1492 Spanish conquest of the Americas in a pyramid-vessel or Teocalli that brings them to Mars. Utilizing a combination of costuming, ritual objects, and performance, TOCI : Chapter 1 invites viewers to imagine an alternate reality where sacred indigenous knowledge and practices are fully intact and remain centered in society. (Source)

All of the women in my story were altered by the conquest. Even though they were able to make their escape before Tenochtitlan fell. In order to survive in their new home they had to rely on not just each other, but countless plants, insects, and animals that gave them the power to live on a planet that as of today, is uninhabited. The colony on Mars was co-created by all of them. Their identities fundamentally were entwined with other living beings and that is what saved them.

Melissa K. Nelson, an Anishinaabe cultural ecologist talks about the Native Woman’s body that in so many stories acts as a kind of meeting place, a contact zone, between the human and more-than-human life which establishes our ethics of kinship. My tribes’ understand that their lives exist within the lives of others and how other beings interact and influence each other is what shapes their identities and existence. The Bat-Women are the Bat-Women because of the Bats, because of the virus Rabies, the Spider-Women are the Spider-Women because of the spiders, etc. They would not have Oxygen without the corn, beans and squash. Their bodies absorb radiation from space, that the DNA of the Axolotls help them to withstand. 

“The permeable borders of the female are what make her threatening to ideas of containment, control, accountability. In her things merge, and from her things emerge." -Rebecca Solnit 

These women are defined by their relationships. If we think about relationships not just as connections between things happening at the same time but as the telling of a story about where things come from, their cosmogeneolgy, then the potential of such relationships bring forth a presence that is unexpected and beyond human time. It encomposes the history of our galaxy and our gods. 

“I will be out there as a piece of endless body.” - Louise Erdrich