A recent installment of Future Ancestral Technologies project is Watȟéča, a set of mythic characters populating this imaginal future terrain. The Buzzard and Coyote regalia created and worn for Watȟéča evoke and embody the blessings and lessons of the scavenger. In Lakota, watȟéča often refers to the food you take home following a communal feast - the leftovers. Scavengers relish what the world rejects. Always on the lookout, ever-ready to snatch watȟéča from the jaws of oblivion, the scavenger eats what no one else wants, assigning ultimate value to what is on the brink of vanishing. Scavengers scrounge in order to thrive against disappearance - navigating environmental encroachment and collapse, loss of habitat, mass industrial extraction, and ecocidal expansion. Coyotes roaming the outskirts of urban centers. Vultures circling truck stops. These resourceful beings stubbornly and ingeniously survive on what is considered obsolete. I feel as though the Indigenous experience reflects watȟéča - surviving off leftovers. Our land has been seized. Our customs dismantled. Our ways of life denigrated. Our stories and languages made all but invisible in the context of colonial supremacy. Yet we survive and thrive off what remains. Our survivance as Indigenous people is represented in the performative movement choices of the animals embodied by the regalia, which I built from scavenged materials. By engaging scavengers from a mythic and reverential perspective, Watȟéča celebrates the scavengers gifts to integrate into our future cosmology. The scavenger becomes kin - teaching us critical technology for future survival. As we look to the buzzard and the coyote, we see the models and allies we need to survive into the future. There is a valuable lesson in the nature of the scavenger. They thrive by destroying death. Immune to the diseases of rotting flesh. A final dance for living bodies is to be torn apart completely.

Scavengers transform endings into beginnings, celebrating life after death. A pivotal component to rejuvenate life’s cycles. Sheltering the living from the intricacies of death’s omnivorous annihilation. Nothing shall be wasted by the scavengers because to them nothing is waste.