Surviva: A Future Ancestral Survival Guide

Interdisciplinary Native American artist Luger delivers a daring work of speculative fiction set in a future in which the wealthy and non-Indigenous have fled the Earth they ravaged. This audacious hybrid work, which adapts a vintage Army wilderness survival manual, alludes to the difficult work of thriving that follows for those left behind. Luger’s fruitful defacement of the original text dazzles and provokes; there are black-ink redactions with stray advice about soup and salamanders peeking through, and “Act like the Natives” scrawled over the top of the former military script. Also featured are mysterious figures, often in furs and elaborate horned headgear, layered over vintage sketches of bear traps, bamboo beds, edible roots, and banded snakes. Bursts of poetry (“We are vessels to hold and to share, to protect and keep safe”) serve as a challenge to non-Indigenous ideas about “survival” itself. The Army manual assumes an adversarial relationship to nature, but Luger makes a persuasive case that “union is the natural order.” This singular act of creative destruction, more thought experiment than narrative, rises like a flower out of rubble. (Sept.)