fiction by Jason Edwards
Space aliens have landed in the American Midwest and taken on the form of indigenous peoples of the region from 10,000 years ago. Despite hailing from a star system several million light years away, these bioforms now look and act like Indians. “But don’t call us that,” says X!3gkrk Twofeather, one of their leaders. “The forms we have now predate such nomenclature.”
“Even travelling faster than the speed of light,” Twofeather explains, “it took us several thousand years to get here. We took readings with worm-hole scanners to find a form we could shape ourselves to and in that way blend in. We chose what was, at the time, one of the most stable, long-lived forms. We used a controlled evolutionary process, which took as many years. What we were before was, basically, sentient rocks. The switch from silicone to carbon was itself a few millenia.”
Astride his horse, wearing a war bonnet and gazing regally out at the plains, Twofeather is utterly unmistakable from an authentic Native American– at least our modern sense of one. “We didn’t expect your planet to change so rapidly. But here we are. And we’re adapting as quickly as we can. This horse, for example. The bioforms who dwelled her ten thousand years ago didn’t have horses. We’re just catching up.”
As expected, the arrival of foreign bodies has stirred up protest. Hundreds have gathered at the edges of the designated encampments to expression their displeasure with the new visitors. “Go back where you came from!” reads more than one sign.
Zk*tp7r Lurking Bear tries to engage some of them in conversation. “I’ll go back where I came from if you do, brother,” he says.
“I was born here, ya martian,” shouts his fellow interlocutor.
Lurking Bears eyes flash a dark green, as he performs a retinal DNA-residue scan on the protestor. “No you weren’t. You were formed in the back of internal-combustion powered vehicle some several thousand miles from here. I, however, was in vat of forming proteins until five days ago. I was “born” 200 hundred feet from this spot.”
“You know what I mean! Go back to your mother ship, asshole.”
Nearby, actual Native Americans are in conference, deciding how to approach these doppelgangers. Max Brandt, one-eight Sioux, explains: “On the one hand, it’s hilarious to see white people tell natives to ;go back home.’ On the other hand, these advanced beings are not us. They’ve appropriated our culture.”
Presented with this opinion, Twofeather shakes his head. “We have not appropriated their culture. We have appropriated the culture of their ancestors, and have adapted to modern expectations. Indeed, technically, it’s Mr. Brandt and his kind of who appropriated our culture. But we aren’t going to complain. Our understanding is that complaining about cultural appropriation is the purview of so-called Social Justice Workers, and we don’t want to steal their raison d’etre.”
Molly Waldring, a survivor of the Tumblr revolution who identifies as a bi-straight penguin kintype with homo-normative kanga (non-roo) tripolarity, has presented the New (Old) Natives with a manifesto, detailing grievances of the Uncis Nation. “And using phrases like ‘raison d’etre’ ranks right up there; stealing the linguistic heritage of French-born multikins, no matter what they’re self-designated geospatial centering coordinates are, is tantamount to brain-slavery,” s(h)e[it-they] explains while having bandages applied to stress fractures from rapid typing. “We won’t stand for it!”
Waldring’s colleauge, ex-Olympic bronze medalist sprinter Kart Mittering, who identifies as a quadraplegic snailkin with snake-formative sex-prey commercial-unbranding, scoffs. “Stand for it? Enabling shit-lord.”
Back in his intersteller neutron punch-drive wigwam, Twofeather goes over his people’s seven-point plan for assimilating and thriving on planet Earth. “We’ve already contacted the heads of state around the world, and provided them with information as it pertains to cancer, infectious disease, super-bug suppression, improved forms of non-animal nutrition distribution, the ozone layer, global warming, the roles of women and minorities in the motion picture industry, reducing head trauma in contact sports, and inoculations against Boy Bands and Top 40 Radio. Of course, we sent them this information some 50 years ago, before we arrived, so we’re not sure why they’ve taken so long to implement our solutions.”
“Nevertheless, we’re hopeful,” he goes on to say. “We’ve encoded information on large squares of fabric by precision-cutting them to a ratio that, when measured to the appropriate decimal point, will contain information on all of the secrets of the universe. We’ve taken these “blanks” and sliced them into holographic portions, and distributed them around the world. And, we made sure each of this “blank-ettes” is appropriately coated with self-replicating copies of our original DNA. Kind of like your so-called earth ‘viruses’ but much more hearty.”
Twofeather smiles. “We’ve been reading up on your theories of Manifest Destiny. We think it’s a really great theory.”