Climate Change, Reproductive Justice, and Biocolonialism in Future Home of the Living God by Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich

Abstract

This paper examines the intersection of climate change with postcolonial, feminist, and reproductive justice as depicted in Future Home of the Living God, a 2017 dystopian novel written by Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich. In Erdrich’s reimagined United States, a reversal of evolution signals an ecological catastrophe where familiar natural processes - such as the falling of snow and the cyclical rhythms of the seasons - have abruptly ceased, mirroring the disruptions wrought by global warming and environmental degradation. At the heart of this narrative is Cedar Hawk Songmaker, a 26-year-old Indigenous woman who becomes entangled in a state apparatus that exploits women’s bodies through oppressive reproductive surveillance, while the natural world deteriorates under a radically altered climate. By linking the collapse of reproductive autonomy to the broader disintegration of ecological balance, the novel reveals the deep entanglement of environmental and social injustices - prompting a call, as this article argues, for a reconceptualization of resistance strategies that confront climate instability, biocolonial exploitation, and gendered violence simultaneosuly. Additionally, the novel’s epistolary form - framed as a series of letters to Cedar’s unborn child - functions as a mode of resistance in itself, transforming personal storytelling into a means of asserting agency and preserving memory amid forces of systemic erasure.