"Dreaming forward" speaks to the essential human capacity to envision futures different from the present—to imagine what communities, nations, and the world might become and to work toward those visions. In Indigenous contexts, dreaming forward connects to traditional practices of visioning while charting paths toward self-determination and cultural revitalization. For all Canadians, the ability to dream forward matters for addressing entrenched challenges, inspiring collective action, and creating futures worth inhabiting. This is about more than optimism; it is about the deliberate work of imagining and building better possibilities.
Indigenous Futures and Futurism
Beyond Survival to Flourishing
For Indigenous peoples in Canada, dreaming forward has particular significance. Colonization sought not just to control but to eliminate Indigenous peoples—their lands, languages, cultures, and futures. Survival itself has been an act of resistance. But dreaming forward moves beyond survival to flourishing, imagining Indigenous futures where communities thrive on their own terms.
This visioning is not about returning to a pre-contact past but about creating futures that honour ancestral wisdom while embracing change and innovation. Indigenous futurism—expressed through literature, art, film, and community planning—imagines Indigenous peoples not as historical remnants but as protagonists of futures they shape themselves.
Traditional Visioning Practices
Many Indigenous traditions include practices of visioning and dreaming that connect present actions to future generations. The concept of seven-generation thinking—considering how decisions today will affect those born seven generations hence—reflects a temporal orientation very different from short-term political and economic cycles. Dreaming forward can draw on these traditions while adapting them to contemporary contexts.
Self-Determination and Nation-Building
Indigenous dreaming forward increasingly takes concrete form through nation-building efforts—developing governance structures, economic enterprises, educational institutions, and legal frameworks that reflect Indigenous values and serve Indigenous priorities. These are not abstract visions but practical manifestations of self-determination, creating the institutional foundations for Indigenous futures.
Youth Visions for the Future
Climate and Environment
Young Canadians are particularly engaged in dreaming forward around climate and environment. Facing a future of climate disruption not of their making, youth have mobilized around visions of sustainable, just societies. They imagine futures powered by renewable energy, organized around ecological principles, and prioritizing wellbeing over consumption. This dreaming is not naive idealism but urgent necessity.
Social Justice and Inclusion
Youth visions often centre equity and inclusion more prominently than previous generations' aspirations. Young people are dreaming forward toward societies without racism, where gender diversity is affirmed, where disability does not mean exclusion, and where economic systems serve human flourishing rather than concentrate wealth. These visions challenge assumptions about what is natural or inevitable.
Technology and Possibility
Having grown up with digital technology, young people often imagine futures shaped by technological possibility—both the benefits and risks. They envision technology that serves human needs, protects privacy, and distributes opportunity rather than reinforcing existing power structures. Critically engaging with technology's role in future society is itself an act of dreaming forward.
Community Visioning
Participatory Futures
Dreaming forward need not be individual; communities can collectively envision and work toward shared futures. Participatory planning processes, community visioning exercises, and deliberative forums create space for collective imagination. When diverse voices contribute to visions, the resulting futures are more likely to serve diverse needs.
Effective community visioning goes beyond consultation to genuine co-creation. It includes voices often excluded from planning—young people, elders, newcomers, people with disabilities, those experiencing poverty. It honours diverse ways of knowing and expressing visions. And it connects visioning to action, ensuring that dreams inform decisions.
Healing and Reconciliation
For communities affected by historical trauma—Indigenous communities, communities that have experienced displacement or discrimination—dreaming forward is intertwined with healing. Visions of healthy, thriving communities require addressing historical wounds. Reconciliation is itself an act of dreaming forward, imagining relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples fundamentally different from colonial patterns.
Rural and Northern Futures
Rural and northern communities in Canada face particular challenges—population decline, economic restructuring, distance from services—that require creative dreaming forward. Visions of viable rural futures might include new economic opportunities, technological connections, sustainable resource use, and community structures adapted to smaller populations. These visions push back against assumptions that rural decline is inevitable.
Obstacles to Dreaming Forward
Despair and Cynicism
Dreaming forward requires believing that better futures are possible—a belief that despair and cynicism erode. Climate anxiety, political dysfunction, economic insecurity, and social fragmentation can make imagining positive futures feel naive or impossible. Sustaining the capacity to dream forward requires acknowledging real challenges while maintaining hope.
Short-Term Thinking
Political systems organized around electoral cycles, economic systems focused on quarterly returns, and media environments emphasizing immediate events all militate against long-term thinking. Dreaming forward requires temporal horizons that extend beyond next quarter or next election to next generation and beyond. Creating space for long-term visioning within short-term systems is challenging.
Power and Whose Dreams Count
Not everyone's dreams carry equal weight. Those with power—economic, political, social—have greater capacity to realize their visions. Dreaming forward that challenges existing power arrangements may be dismissed, suppressed, or co-opted. Democratizing the capacity to dream forward means redistributing power to imagine and implement futures.
Colonialism and Imposed Futures
Colonialism has involved the imposition of particular futures—Euro-Western, capitalist, Christian—onto peoples with very different visions. Indigenous dreaming forward necessarily involves decolonizing futures, resisting the assumption that Western modernity is the only or inevitable path. This is not rejection of all change but assertion of the right to determine one's own direction.
Methods and Practices
Speculative Fiction and Arts
Arts and storytelling are powerful tools for dreaming forward. Speculative fiction imagines alternative futures—utopian, dystopian, or somewhere between—that help us think through consequences and possibilities. Indigenous futurism, Afrofuturism, and other movements use creative expression to envision futures centred on marginalized communities. Art makes abstract visions vivid and communicable.
Scenario Planning
More formal methods like scenario planning create structured processes for exploring alternative futures. Rather than predicting a single future, scenario planning develops multiple plausible futures and considers their implications. This approach acknowledges uncertainty while preparing for diverse possibilities. Governments, organizations, and communities can use scenario planning to inform strategic decisions.
Backcasting
Backcasting starts with a vision of a desired future and works backward to identify steps needed to achieve it. Unlike forecasting, which projects current trends forward, backcasting begins with goals and determines pathways. This method is particularly useful for transformational change where current trends lead to undesirable futures.
Intergenerational Dialogue
Dreaming forward benefits from intergenerational exchange—elders sharing wisdom and long-term perspectives, youth bringing energy and fresh vision. Spaces for intergenerational dialogue can enrich collective visioning, ensuring that futures honour ancestral knowledge while embracing change. Indigenous traditions often structure such dialogue; other communities might develop their own practices.
From Vision to Action
Connecting Dreams to Policy
Visions matter most when they inform action. Connecting dreaming forward to policy requires translation—expressing visions in terms that policy processes can engage, identifying concrete steps toward envisioned futures, building coalitions to advocate for change. Policy change is rarely sufficient alone but creates conditions that enable or constrain other forms of action.
Prefigurative Practice
Prefigurative practice means embodying envisioned futures in present action—creating, on small scales, the relationships and structures we wish to see more broadly. Community gardens prefigure food sovereignty; cooperative enterprises prefigure economic democracy; restorative justice circles prefigure transformed approaches to harm. These practices are both ends and means, demonstrating that alternatives are possible.
Movement Building
Transformational change typically requires social movements—collective action by many people over time. Dreaming forward inspires and sustains movements by articulating what we are working toward, not just what we oppose. Shared vision creates solidarity, motivates sacrifice, and maintains commitment through setbacks. Movements without vision may achieve defensive victories but rarely create new realities.
Canadian Contexts
Reconciliation as Dreaming Forward
The reconciliation process in Canada is fundamentally about dreaming forward—imagining and building relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples based on respect, recognition, and partnership rather than colonialism. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Calls to Action offer a vision; implementing them is the work of dreaming forward made concrete.
Multicultural Futures
Canada's diversity invites dreaming forward about multicultural futures—how different communities can live together while maintaining distinctiveness, how newcomers and established residents can build shared society, how historical wrongs can be addressed while moving forward. These questions have no predetermined answers; they require ongoing collective visioning.
Northern and Arctic Futures
Canada's North faces particular futures questions as climate change transforms Arctic environments, global attention to Arctic resources intensifies, and northern communities navigate rapid change. Northern and Inuit dreaming forward imagines futures that maintain connection to land and culture while adapting to unprecedented change. These visions are essential for policy affecting northern regions.
Questions for Further Discussion
- How can societies better support long-term visioning and dreaming forward within political and economic systems oriented toward short-term results?
- Whose visions should guide collective futures, and how can visioning processes be made more inclusive and democratic?
- How can dreaming forward avoid both naive utopianism and resigned acceptance of undesirable trajectories?
- What role should traditional and Indigenous knowledge play in dreaming forward, and how can this knowledge be engaged respectfully?
- How can communities move from shared visions to collective action, translating dreams into concrete change?