The chapter proposes a concept of justice for future people that is mindful of Indigenous critiques of the Anthropocene and associated climate horror scenarios. I first review these critiques, which suggest that motivating pro-futural care by dreading an impending climate crisis tends to betray a privileged, often settler-colonial perspective. On this basis, I then review various Indigenous accounts of intergenerational relations, in which I find one common idea in the claim that present generations owe to descendants in part because they received a gift from ancestors. I seek to model and defend this view and its social ontology (I call it “asymmetrical reciprocity”). I then seek to show how asymmetrical reciprocity can help to decolonize the future by disallowing a linear view of time according to which a focus on the future permits the neglect of the past. Hence, climate ethics and intergenerational justice must face the history of colonialism.

a rejected inert ‘givenness’ of either reality or logic, and a pre-modern provision for thinking of reality and cognitive reflection in terms of ‘gift’. I consider whether the notion of gift, as combining ‘thing’ with ‘sign’, might resist epistemological dualisms.