Of windows and mirrors Ambelin Kwaymullina's the tribe series, transformative fan cultures and aboriginal epistemologies

Young Adult Australian post-apocalyptic speculative fiction carries with it a number of expectations and tropes: that characters will exist in a dystopian, ruined landscape; that a lone teenager will rise up and rebel against institutionalised structures of repressive power; and that these youths will carry hope for the future in a destroyed world. In her trilogy The Tribe, Ambelin Kwaymullina (of the Palyku People of the Pilbara region of Western Australia) approaches the speculative fiction genre through transformative narratives that engage with, and demonstrate, Aboriginal Australian ways of knowing. In grounding this post-apocalyptic speculative young adult series in Aboriginal Australian epistemologies, Kwaymullina challenges preconceived and often narrow mainstream ideas of what Aboriginal cultures and literature offer the reader, and simultaneously subverts the conventions of the genre. The Tribe trilogy reimagines the genre to reflect an intersectional space of listening and hearing voices, stories, and knowledges that transcend a binary understanding of the organic and technological, the mainstream and the margins. Here the landscape is not ruined, but is rather imagined as a vibrant, thriving space of survival. The single teenage leader of the rebellion draws on the support of her community, and her connections to all beings in the world are pivotal to her ability to make change. While the teenagers lead the rebellion-alongside supportive adults-it is the underlying Aboriginal Australian ways of knowing that guide and feed the themes of hope, survival, and connections, for the future. Through this process, Kwaymullina allows readers to interact with the novel's ideologies on a number of levels as they become complicit in shaping and reshaping meaning. Kwaymullina finds organic intersections between the natural and technological in the series; these same connections extend to the readers' online engagement with the series. Focusing on children with special abilities who are considered 'Illegals' and treated as such, the novels have given rise to a mob of passionate and vocal cybervoices that challenge dominant hegemonic perceptions of Aboriginal technology, epistemology and connections to land. In this paper, we argue that Ambelin Kwaymullina's The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (2012) and The Disappearance of Ember Crow (2013) from the Tribe series, and her use of Aboriginal Australian ways of knowing, demonstrates significant transformative power, allowing readers to become active agents of change in intersubjective dialogues that create new opportunities for an expanded understanding of Aboriginal Australia, where technology is in dialogue with nature.