Tulevazuksii: (Futures)

“Tulevazuksii: (Futures)” imagines ways as a karjalaine¹ to build abundant alternative futures for karjalazet.² Among many other specific place names, we karjalazet name our Indigenous lands Karjala.³ The current international geopolitical border that separates Russia and Finland cuts its way through Karjala, splitting our peoples in two. As a poetic intervention, “Tulevazuksii” weaves together childhood memories, ancestral knowledge, and everyday acts of resurgence to reclaim one’s own karjalažus.⁴ I invert the caricatured descriptions of karjalazet from Finnish popular imagination into a source of subversive strength for our people. I insist on the karjalažus of our language, stories, more-than-human relations, and foodways and foreground the active work needed to ensure futures where karjalažus continues to exist. “Tulevazuksii” serves as both a refusal of assimilation, forgetting ourselves, and forced transparency and a call to the continued work of futures building for karjalazet.