Indigenous Futures Lab
The Indigenous Futures Lab is a hub of Indigenous research, evaluation, and relationship-building where we center Indigenous knowledges to build futures of co-flourishing.
Our Vision
The Indigenous Futures Lab (IFL) is an Indigenous feminist research and methods lab at the University of Maryland. Grounded in Indigenous feminist epistemology, the Lab studies how knowledge is created, transmitted, governed, materialized, and cared for across generations. Its work brings together research and evaluation methods, archives and information infrastructures, deathcare and ancestor relations, environmental knowledge, cultural and language reclamation, and Indigenous data and knowledge sovereignty.
A central commitment of the Lab is that making is method. Weekly Open Lab Fridays create an intergenerational space for research, visiting, teaching, making, and knowledge transmission. Beading, weaving, reading, archival work, methodological experimentation, storytelling, conversation, and collective problem-solving happen alongside one another. The Lab treats these practices as forms of intellectual work through which knowledge and relationships are made and sustained.
Meissner is Co-Principal Investigator on Transforming Indigenous Archival Search, a $3.63 million Mellon Foundation-funded initiative bringing together the University of Maryland, University of Virginia, the Indigenous Description Group, and Indigenous community partners. The project develops Indigenous approaches to archival discovery and description through knowledge governance, reparative linked data, community-controlled vocabularies, Indigenous archival training, and new relationships between collecting institutions and Indigenous communities.
The Lab is also developing a substantial program in feminist deathcare, death studies, and ancestor care. Through the Decolonizing Death Collective, cemetery and archival research, work on descendant communities, and research into institutional treatment of the dead, IFL examines death as a site where science, medicine, technology, law, archives, race, gender, sexuality, disability, environment, colonialism, and kinship converge.
This includes reclaiming ancestral life-stage teachings and ceremonies surrounding death and co-creating new practices of ceremony and care where colonialism, displacement, institutionalization, migration, or changing community circumstances have interrupted older ones. Across its work, the Lab begins from an Indigenous feminist epistemological commitment: knowledge exists in relationship, and methods create obligations to communities, lands, ancestors, other-than-human relations, and future generations.