Vol. 7, Issue 2, Part H (2025)

In this paper, we explain how Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book rethinks the apocalyptic narrative through Indigenous resilience and belonging. Set in a future marked by climate catastrophe and colonial violence, the novel entwines ecological collapse with cultural loss to reflect ongoing Indigenous struggles. Wright disrupts linear notions of apocalypse, offering a cyclical vision of time rooted in land, kinship, and renewal. We draw on postcolonial ecocriticism and Indigenous epistemologies to explore how the swan symbolizes both despair and hope, challenging Western binaries and expressing the poetics of survival. We frame this vision through decolonial time - a temporality that resists Western progress narratives and centers Indigenous understandings of time as relational and ancestral. The Swan Book does more than imagine the end of the world; it insists on the presence and futurity of Indigenous life. Consequently, it reshapes how we read apocalypse, survival, and the possibilities of belonging.