Living in and out of time: Youth-led activism in Aotearoa New Zealand

Introduction

Time is fundamental to understanding what motivates and sustains activists. Addressing past and present injustices to create more just futures is the central premise of most social movements. Two social movements for change are emblematic of different relationships with time: the struggle to resolve and repair injustices against Indigenous people and the struggle to avert environmental disaster, which haunt the future of the planet. In this article, we draw on research with young activists in these social movements in Aotearoa New Zealand: Protect Ihumātao seeks to protect Indigenous land from a housing development, and Generation Zero, a climate action group, is focused on achieving a zero-carbon future. Research with two groups ² led by young activists (aged from their teens into their 30s) demonstrated how different constructions of time were in play.

In the literature about time and social movements, we noticed the presumption of a universal concept of time, unless the article was about Indigenous conceptualisations specifically. In other words, time is assumed to be ontologically neutral and often goes unmarked as a culturally specific construct, unless it is ‘Indigenous time’ (Winter, 2019). An ontologically ‘neutral’ conceptualisation of time is recognisable as ‘western’, or more specifically in New Zealand where the research was conducted, as ‘settler-colonial’ (Bell, 2014; Kidman et al., 2020). Notable deconstructions of dominant conceptualisations of time exist, but these still depend on the reproduction of a binary logic of Indigenous/non-Indigenous time for their intelligibility (Nanni, 2017: 3; Rifkin, 2017: 17).

Activists in our study reproduced and disrupted dominant conceptualisations of time in dynamic ways, which are generative for thinking about social movements, social change and intergenerational justice. Our article is one response to Indigenous scholar Stewart-Harawira’s (2005: 251) plea for ‘an urgent revisioning of the way in which we understand the past, present and future’ as necessary to any attempt ‘to secure the survival for ourselves as well as the rapidly diminishing life forms of this planet’. Indigenous scholar Christine Winter (2019: 1) argues that how we envision time affects ‘our view of intergenerational environmental justice’. She advocates for thinking of ancestors, the living and future generations as part of a recurrent spiral of time rather than as a form of competition between current and future generations over resources (Winter, 2019).

Indigenous conceptions of temporality are diverse yet fundamentally different to the linearity of settler-colonial time (Awatere Huata, 1984; Bell, 2014; Mika, 2015; Nanni, 2017; Rameka, 2016; Winter, 2019). Māori ³ perspectives of time are encapsulated in the proverb ‘I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past’ where past, present and the future are intertwined (Rameka, 2016: 387). There is an ethos of ‘gifting to future generations’ to reciprocate what has been inherited from ancestors, where ‘ancestors are more than human, more than genetic, more than physical’ (Winter, 2019: 13). Linear time frames intergenerational relationships as competitive and antagonistic: competitive because resources used now will deprive future generations and antagonistic whenever past generations are blamed for the state of the planet (Head, 2016; Stewart-Harawira, 2005; Winter, 2019). Linearity is often sensed as progress, eschewing consideration of how things can get worse rather than better (Head, 2016; Keenan, 2014).

Our aim is twofold. First, we demonstrate how activists in two social movements articulated different temporalities, which shaped their goals and actions in important ways. Second, we argue that explicitly identifying and theorising activists’ articulations and sensations of time is fundamental to understanding the way they see themselves in relation to other generations, their ethical imperatives for action and beliefs about how best to achieve social change.

Activists’ sensations and articulations of time constitute temporal frames of reference or temporalities, which include the feeling of time’s unfolding and the possibility of disrupting dominant temporalities. Analysis of activists’ multiple temporalities requires researchers to engage in temporal translation. The temporal translation reported in this article was a collective effort informed by dialogue amongst Māori and settler research team members and by dialogue amongst Māori (Stewart-Harawira, 2005; Winter, 2019) and non-Māori scholars (Nanni, 2017; Rifkin, 2017). Although the teams are well-versed in settler-colonial temporalities that predominate in New Zealand society, we were inspired by Stewart-Harawira’s call to explore what temporal ‘revisioning’ might mean in practice. Our attempt at temporal ‘revisioning’ contributes to building a language that facilitates an appreciation of temporal diversity amongst activist groups and expands the ways intergenerational justice is imagined.

The article proceeds as follows: we review the literature with particular attention to the role of time in activism for Indigenous rights and climate justice. Second, we explain our methodology and provide more detail of our analytical framework. Third, we provide context about Protect Ihumātao and present our analysis of the multiple temporalities activists engaged in. Fourth, we do the same for Generation Zero. The final section highlights our key theoretical insights and conclusions.

Indigenous and climate activist temporalities

Time is integral to the history of colonisation and the urgency of climate change. Time is also a practical issue for activists: when to take action and how long to devote to campaigns. But how time is conceptualised and how it influences activism is often invisible. We argue that time is often taken for granted as a linear, chronological concept in the social movements literature, unless it is specifically conceptualised otherwise. An important source of alternative conceptualisations of time can be found in the literature by Indigenous scholars (Kidman et al., 2020; Mika, 2015; Rameka, 2016; Stewart-Harawira, 2005; Winter, 2019) although their work is yet to permeate the social movements literature.

Scholars who write specifically about Indigenous activist temporalities are important exceptions to this general pattern. Keenan (2014: 169) describes how Indigenous Australians suffer from ‘the inevitable linear temporality of unending colonial rule’. Indigenous Australian activists disrupt colonial rule, creating moments of decolonisation, where networks and understandings extend beyond the moment, claiming a future that undoes the historicisation of Indigenous peoples (Keenan, 2014). Soguk (2007: 10) argues for the importance of rescuing ‘time from its linear chronological captivity’ in his analysis of the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico. Soguk’s (2007: 10) conceptualisation of time defies chronological capture: ‘the past [is] in the present, rendering it an agent of the present’. McNamara and Farbotko (2017: 21) describe how the Pacific Climate Warriors articulate a palpable temporality in which their ancestors and future generations are present at the same time: ‘My cries were more than my own cries – I felt my ancestors…I felt the shuffling feet of our future generations’. Temporal priorities and potentialities shift when activists explicitly reorient themselves in non-chronological narratives (Goloff, 2017). Conceptualisations of moments of decolonisation, of time as an agent, and the past, present and future as overlapping, generate other ways of thinking about time which challenge colonial temporalities (Nanni, 2017: 6).

But these alternative conceptualisations are often crowded out by linear conceptualisations. A particularly potent chronological narrative is one that portrays the planet on a linear trajectory to an apocalyptic future (Brown, 2016; Kenis and Mathijs, 2014). Such a narrative erases how Indigenous peoples have already faced the end of the world with ‘the violent incursion of colonial ideologies and actions’ (Todd, 2016: 3; also see Keenan, 2014; Lear, 2006). Nevertheless, the prospect of a climate-altered world preoccupies climate activist groups, who engage in considerable debate over the value of ‘apocalyptic’ arguments (Cassegård and Thörn, 2018). Apocalyptic discourses orientated to the future have been criticised as depoliticising in contrast to messages of hope as moblising (Gregg, 2019; Harré et al., 2017; Head, 2016; Pearse et al., 2010; Pihkala, 2017). Orientations to the future ignore the current impacts of the changing climate, particularly on the Global South, drawing attention to abstract futures rather than present, material conditions (Cassegård and Thörn, 2018; Diprose et al., 2019; McNamara and Farbotko, 2017).

Children and young people’s voices are often strategically deployed to create ethical imperatives for climate action (Cocco-Klein and Mauger, 2018; Diprose et al., 2019; Holmberg and Alvinius, 2020). This deployment implies a linear conceptualisation of time where children and young people are coupled with the future to make appeals for urgent action to avoid burdening future generations with the consequences of climate change (Cocco-Klein and Mauger, 2018; Diprose et al., 2019; but see Sukarieh and Tannock, 2014). In an analysis of Greta Thunberg’s speeches, Holmberg and Alvinius (2020: 88) note how she ‘blames and shames world leaders’ but does not ‘demand responsibility’, which instead is transferred to younger generations.

A linear conceptualisation of time that burdens children and young people with the responsibility to solve climate change for their future and future generations diverts attention from the responsibilities of other generations to solve the climate crisis (Diprose et al., 2019; Nairn, 2019; Randall, 2005). The focus on children tends to narrow the ‘timescape’ to privilege generations in close proximity to each other, within particular national borders (Diprose et al., 2019: 160). Instead, Diprose et al. (2019: 160) explain how we need to extend the timescape of intergenerational responsibility and include ‘distant’ others – human and non-human – who live elsewhere. The conflation of children and young people with the future diverts our attention away from other forms of life affected by climate change, reinforcing an anthropocentric interpretation of the crisis (Diprose et al., 2019; Head, 2016; Hoskins and Jones, 2017).

Activism to address colonisation and climate change is often discussed separately, yet these issues are intimately connected. Widespread human impact upon the environment and the climate is strongly linked to the expansionary, extractive and exploitative nature of colonial capitalism (Lewis and Maslin, 2015; Todd, 2016). Activists working to address the injustices of colonisation and climate change often see these injustices as interconnected (Chakrabarty, 2009; McNamara and Farbotko, 2017; Todd, 2016). Indigenous rights activists have a longer history of sustaining their activism than climate activists, whose activism has become more evident over the past three decades (Head, 2016; Todd, 2016; Walker, 2004). Indigenous peoples have endured and struggled against injustice over centuries of colonisation, often fighting anew to recoup political and social change (Bell, 2014; Lear, 2006). The experiences of Indigenous activists who have maintained these struggles could inform climate activists seeking to sustain their activism in the face of the unpredictable unfolding of a climate-altered world (Head, 2016; Keenan, 2014; Randall, 2005; Walker, 2004).

In the following analysis, we explore activists’ articulations and sensations of time to identify their underlying concepts of time and unpack what different conceptualisations of time mean for intergenerational justice. But first we explain how we conducted the research and elaborate our analytical framework.

Methodology and analytical framework

Protect Ihumātao and Generation Zero (Auckland) were two of six activist groups involved in the research reported here. We focus on these two groups because they are emblematic of different emphases in their relationships with time: Protect Ihumātao seeks to resolve and repair past and present injustices against Māori, and Generation Zero addresses climate change. The study was designed to explore the following: activists’ motivations for joining groups to create social change, what sustains groups over time, and each group’s vision, via three key methods. First, two in-depth activist history interviews – a year apart – focused on activists’ experiences growing up, catalysts for joining their group and what sustained their activism over time. Second, ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation at meetings, campaigns and events (in-person and online), provided information about group processes over a period of two years. Third, each group was also invited to present their vision for social change as a ‘living manifesto’, which could take the form of film and/or written documentation depending on group preferences, with funding support from the research. Time was articulated in different ways, which influenced participants’ ways of ‘doing activism’. Not everyone in our study explicitly referred to time, so we interpret participants’ rationales for taking action as well as particular events, practices and visions for change, as indicating relationships with time.

Protect Ihumātao participants included Māori and Pākehā (the dominant settler group), a greater proportion of women and a range of ages (from 20 to 71 years) and socio-economic backgrounds, with many supporting dependants. Generation Zero (Auckland) participants were mainly Pākehā, with a small number from different parts of Asia, a greater proportion of men, all were aged in their 20s and from relatively privileged socio-economic backgrounds, with no dependants. These demographics indicate access to different kinds of temporalities and ways of thinking about involvement in activism. For example several Māori participants from Protect Ihumātao spoke of having no choice about taking action. These participants felt that it was their responsibility to seek justice on behalf of their ancestors and descendants, which often entailed putting paid work and careers on hold. However, one Generation Zero participant explicitly acknowledged he had a ‘time advantage’ for engaging in activism because he had a well-paid job and no dependants. Some participants’ real names are used (with their permission), while others have code names or are not named if there is a risk of identification; we do not distinguish between these approaches to ensure anonymity of those who chose that option.

We developed an analytical frame based on Rifkin’s (2017: 19) conceptual terminology. Temporalities or temporal formations are constituted from activists’ articulations and sensations of time, such as ‘the felt presence of ancestors’ and ‘a palpable set of responsibilities to prior generations and future ones’ (Rifkin, 2017: 19); feeling time’s unfolding and the possibility of experiencing time differently while present at the same meeting or event. We examine how different articulations of temporality shaped activists’ sense of purpose and their actions. In what follows, we explore the temporalities that participants from Protect Ihumātao and Generation Zero articulated and implied, and how different temporalities engaged with and potentially altered each other (Rifkin, 2017: 17).

Protect Ihumātao: Activism orientated towards intergenerational responsibility and temporal sovereignty

An overview of formative events is sketched here to provide context (also see Hancock et al., 2020). The land at Ihumātao was confiscated from Māori in 1863 by the New Zealand government and ended up in private ownership (O'Malley, 2019). In 1985, the Māori claim for the return of this confiscated land was heard via New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi settlement process, which was set up to address historic land claims, but was not resolved. In 2014, Fletcher Building purchased the land to build houses. The building consent process was fast-tracked by the New Zealand government’s Special Housing Area legislation, justified by the housing crisis in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, where Ihumātao is located.

Protect Ihumātao is a multi-generational political movement for Indigenous justice, led by a group of six cousins with ancestral links to Ihumātao. In 2015, these cousins, aged in their 20s and early 30s at the time, met to discuss the government-approved private enterprise proposal for a housing development. They established a group called SOUL (Save Our Unique Landscape, later known as Protect Ihumātao) to stop the housing development at Ihumātao, which is also a culturally significant archaeological site.

From 2015 to 2019, SOUL expanded to include Māori and Pākehā members of nearby communities. Late in 2016, a small group led by Pania Newton, one of the six cousins, occupied a house on the disputed land and established Kaitiaki Village. Kaitiaki is a Māori concept, which encompasses notions of environmental guardianship and stewardship. A host of initiatives to care for the land and educate children, young people and the wider community about the issues was followed. Alongside these initiatives, SOUL sustained their efforts to persuade local and central governments and related entities such as the Environment Court and Heritage New Zealand to stop the housing development, increasing their momentum and urgency towards the end of 2018 and the first half of 2019 (also see Hancock et al., 2020).

On 23 July 2019, the small group of occupiers (up to 10) at Kaitiaki Village were evicted by a large contingent of police (more than 100), provoking an immediate response from SOUL, mana whenua (Māori with ancestral links to the land) and their supporters. SOUL had prepared by strategically locating caravans and movable gardens at the intersection of two key roads, one of which led to Kaitiaki Village. The small group of occupiers and their supporters claimed this intersection, while the police formed their frontline to prevent any return to Kaitiaki Village. A wider call for more supporters to protect Ihumātao went out via multiple media and the numbers swelled each day; one kaumātua (elder) said they had served 20,000 meals (fieldnotes, 27 July 2019). The shift from ‘saving’ to ‘protecting’ the land was reflected in the name Protect Ihumātao. Success in attracting so many supporters was attributed to SOUL’s earlier work in building and educating a broad network about the key issues since 2015. Three days after the eviction, New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, halted the housing development until a resolution was found.

The many protectors and supporters created Reclamation Village on the road intersection and (re)claimed more and more of the surrounding land over the following months. Reclamation Village enacted a Māori time-space which collided with the settler-colonial time-space of the police frontline. This time-space was determined by Māori tikanga (protocols), negotiated amongst those who called themselves ahi kā because they had ‘kept the fires burning’ through their occupation since 2016, others who referred to themselves as mana whenua because of their ancestral links with the land and the Kīngitanga. The Kīngitanga is an Indigenous monarchy established in the 1850s to unify Māori tribes against encroachment on their land by British settlers. At Ihumātao, the current King, Tūheitia Paki, raised the Kīngitanga flag declaring it would be lowered when a resolution was reached. At the time of writing towards the end of 2020, a small number of protectors are still present on the land, awaiting New Zealand’s newly elected government’s announcement of a resolution.

The research reported here joined this timeline in 2018. The first author (Nairn) contacted Pania to discuss the possibility of including SOUL in research about youth-led activism in Aotearoa. Fieldnotes from her first visit to Ihumātao inform the following summary, where past and present tenses are consciously mixed.

Pania invited me to acquaint myself with the whenua (land) at Ihumātao. As I drive, large signs warn that the proposed housing development is on stolen land, reminding me that this idyllic place is contested. I turn at the intersection on to Ihumātao Quarry Road, and drive between painted concrete pillars guarding the entrance to Kaitiaki Village; flags, including tino rangatiratanga (Māori sovereignty) flags; and more painted protest signs. The main building at Kaitiaki Village is a red barn repurposed as an information centre and place for people to meet. A small maunga (volcanic cone) presides over Ihumātao, which is part of land that juts out into the Manukau Harbour, and the wind is ever-present, giving life to the tino rangatiratanga flags and whistling in the barn roof.

Sensations and articulations of different temporal frames are evident in this summary. Time and space and place are intertwined from a Māori perspective (Kidman et al., 2020; Mika, 2015; Rameka, 2016; Smith, 2013). The land bears traces of time: land flattened for the first settlement, stone fences for early farming, concrete pillars painted with protest slogans, evidence of Reclamation Village, including the house on the corner of the intersection, which was used by the police but is now occupied by a small number of protectors.

We turn now to how participants from SOUL articulated time as they spoke about their purpose and actions during the time of the research (2018–2020). We focus on the perspectives of Māori protectors in this section, to articulate a temporality defined by Māori participants, rather than by settlers, and to demonstrate how this temporality interrupted settler-colonial temporality (Keenan, 2014; Rifkin, 2017). In taking this approach, we do not assume all Māori, or all Pākehā, use the same temporal metaphors and engage in the same temporal practices but work with participants’ perspectives to make temporalities other than the dominant settler-colonial temporality visible (Hoskins and Jones, 2017; Mika, 2015; Rameka, 2016). Many participants articulated their responsibilities to ancestors and future generations as the motivation for taking action to protect Ihumātao, which are also articulations and sensations of time (Rifkin, 2017: 19).

We begin with Torerenui a Rua Wilson (16 years old) whose speech was filmed as part of Voices of Ihumātao (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o0SA3X_5CI) which is also one of the living manifestos located on the research project’s website. Torerenui refers to her ancestors as being alongside her in the present: ‘I tried to keep quiet but my ancestors wouldn’t let me’. In her speech, Torerenui imagines her ancestors enduring the eviction of 1863 and talks of herself enduring the eviction of 2019, reminding listeners how settler-colonial violence recurs across time. She recites the whakapapa (genealogy) of Māori resistance movements, including SOUL and Protect Ihumātao, which brings all these movements together in time and space, producing an affective sense of time. Torerenui finishes by reminding her listeners that Ihumātao is not a commodity, ‘it is my tūpuna whenua’ – ancestors and land are one. Torerenui embodies the struggle in her ancestors and current generations and emplaces this struggle at Ihumātao (Winter, 2019).

Qiane co-founded SOUL with her cousins. Like Torerenui, she felt she had no choice but to act on behalf of her ancestors. Qiane had to negotiate her responsibilities to ancestors as well as to her own child and whānau (family) over the five-year campaign, which weighed on her in ways that she perceived as different to her university peers:

My tūpuna [ancestors] chose this for me…then I did have my break and I did have my baby and then I did get called back again…and then you just get back into the flow of things and this is what you’ve gotta do, but it’s hard… sometimes you're just like, ‘Man…why can't I just have an easy path?’ (laughs) Why can’t I just be like the girls that I went to uni with…and just worry about what I’m gonna have for dinner instead of…worrying about trying to fix the world (laughs) (interview, 2019).

Qiane’s words convey the hard work of intergenerational responsibility and sustaining action over time: ‘of worrying about trying to fix the world’. From Qiane’s perspective, her responsibility to ancestors was one of her university peers, who were mainly Pākehā, did not have to carry.

Like Torerenui and Qiane, Pania was motivated by intergenerational responsibilities to take action. She imagined justifying her actions to future generations and fulfilling her obligations to ancestors:

when my nieces and nephews grow up, and when I have children, I want them to be able to look back, win or lose, and see that their Aunty, Mum did everything in her power to prevent this development from desecrating their whenua. I want them to be proud of what we did. I want them to be inspired and motivated. I want to give them hope that whatever injustice they might face in their lives, that they can overcome it…so hope and…the legacy that I will leave one day and the legacies I am trying to fulfil that were left to us by our ancestors, and our elders. I often think about the Wai 008 claim ⁴ that was heard here on our marae in Ihumātao in 1985, it amazes me that claim is still not settled, and we still suffer the same issues (interview, 2018).

Past, present and future generations are evoked by Pania when she refers to ancestors, elders and children. She defies the implicit linearity of past–present–future, drawing them together in the articulation of her purpose and legacy. The emotional work of sustaining action in the face of the longevity of settler-colonial injustice is palpable – ‘we’re still suffering the same issues’. These participants flout the linearity of settler-colonial time by constantly reminding their audiences of who they are fighting for and how they are challenging settler-colonial injustices across time.

SOUL, and later Protect Ihumātao, also engaged with settler-colonial temporalities over the five-year campaign. Working within settler-colonial temporalities was evident in the local and central government timelines and processes that SOUL had to navigate:

…the steps and the processes and the gazillion letters and the how many times we’ve been to Wellington [location of New Zealand’s parliament] and how many times we've been to submission hearings and how many times we’ve been to the local board and how many times we’ve been to the Environment Court and how many times we've been to the Māori Land Court…but we have to be patient (group interview, 2019).

The time-consuming legal processes of central and local governments acted as a form of control. SOUL’s engagement and patience with these settler-colonial legal processes demonstrates how they attempted to play by settler-colonial rules and timelines (Hancock et al., 2020). But those with the power to make decisions – central and local governments – made no move towards resolution until the police eviction in July 2019 and the extraordinary show of support for the protectors that followed.

The eviction was a stark example of how settler-colonial control and violence continues. Despite SOUL’s attempts to build relationships with Māori liaison police officers, the eviction of a small number of people living at Kaitiaki Village by police was in effect ‘a contemporary confiscation’ that echoed the confiscation of 1863 (group interview, 2019). Although SOUL had

worked in good faith…and we lived in hope, with all the court hearings, with all the submissions, with all the beautiful work that’s been done by everybody who’s contributed their time, that justice would see the light. And the light’s not being turned on yet. We’re getting there. But it’s slow, and what that looks like, we don’t know (group interview, 2019).

Past and present confiscations were intertwined, the sense of time taken to achieve justice is slow and what justice might look like was uncertain.

Settler-colonial temporalities nevertheless were resisted in important ways, which can be understood as claiming temporal sovereignty (Rifkin, 2017: 186–187). Māori took control of time-space at Kaitiaki, and later Reclamation, Village. Kim was one of the occupiers at Kaitiaki Village. During an interview two weeks before the police eviction in 2019, she eloquently deconstructed settler-colonial time (Nanni, 2017: 10).

We’re learning that because we don’t owe anyone time…we are responsible solely for our own energy level and we get to spend that energy however we see fit. That deconstructs the whole system of what we’ve been trained and educated to believe, you know, we’re told that we have to be at a place by nine o’clock, be finished that task by five, eat by eight, get our kids in bed by nine, we’re trained and educated that that is the way you have to live, and we’ve just deconstructed that entire thing. I stayed up until 1:30 in the morning weeding by fire-light, by a fire that I lit, by firewood that I cut, you know (laughs)…There’s no rules, there’s no schedules, there’s no rosters, there’s no ‘due at time’, like there’s none of that (interview, 2019, speaker’s emphasis).

Here, Kim describes how she and others at Kaitiaki Village were learning new ways of living their time and energy, a form of temporal sovereignty (Rifkin, 2017), which directly challenges clock time (Nanni, 2017: 10). In the same interview, she explained how the temporality the occupiers created collectively at Kaitiaki Village was important for their shared action and purpose: ‘We’re all there for the same reasons, we’re all there with the same values’. Shared action, purpose and a sense of temporal sovereignty created an ‘unbreakable bond’ amongst the Kaitiaki Village occupiers, a bond that was important as the small group at Kaitiaki Village, the larger SOUL group, and ultimately, all those under the banner of Protect Ihumātao, responded to the police eviction according to their agreed philosophy of ‘peaceful, passive and positive resistance’.

Another articulation of temporal sovereignty was encapsulated in a comment overheard during the first weekend of the larger-scale occupation at Reclamation Village: ‘tikanga before TV’ (fieldnotes, 27 July 2019). The protectors’ media personnel were trying to control the urgency of media demands. ‘Tikanga before TV’ was another way of saying Māori protocols governed time-space and were prioritised before settler-colonial institutions such as mainstream media. But the unequal power relations between Māori and settlers mean that it is no easy matter for Māori to claim and sustain temporal, and other forms, of sovereignty (Bell, 2014; Keenan, 2014; Rifkin, 2017). Within the time-space of Reclamation Village, Māori and settler-colonial temporalities could not be easily delineated, rather these temporalities engaged with and potentially altered each other (Rifkin, 2017). Just as there were multiple forms of media – mainstream, Māori, independent filmmakers, social media users – articulating and shaping the narrative about Ihumātao, there were multiple temporal frames – Māori and settler-colonial and non-human – shaping the experiences of all who came to Ihumātao. The protectors’ creation of Māori time-space at Ihumātao, despite the impositions of settler-colonial temporality, demonstrated temporal sovereignty and intergenerational responsibility in action.

Generation Zero: Activism orientated towards young people’s responsibility for averting apocalyptic climate change

Generation Zero emerged following New Zealand’s 2011 election of a government that did not take climate change seriously. Approximately 700 young people from New Zealand and other Pacific nations attended a Power Shift conference in Auckland at the end of 2012 and established Generation Zero. Generation Zero has since worked to convince central and local governments to adopt policies and practices to reduce New Zealand’s dependence on fossil fuels. Climate change now occupies a central place in New Zealand’s public discourse, and Generation Zero has contributed significantly to this, along with climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and the School Strike for Climate movement (Hayward, 2020; Holmberg and Alvinius, 2020). The group was a driving force behind New Zealand’s Zero Carbon Act legislation, passed by all political parties in November 2019, based on Generation Zero’s blueprint developed two years earlier.

We worked with Generation Zero’s Auckland group, which contributed substantially to the nationwide Zero Carbon Act campaign during the time we conducted the research (2018–20). Generation Zero (Auckland) is also well known for their scorecards rating candidates standing for local and central governments on their plans to address climate change and their advocacy for public transport and cycleways. To facilitate work on national and local campaigns, Generation Zero (Auckland) comprised two subgroups which met weekly on different nights: one focused on the Zero Carbon Act and the other on transport in Auckland. While some members devoted themselves to one group, others were involved in both, and one member also coordinated a university group. Two of the authors (Nairn and Showden) attended weekly meetings whenever they could, and their temporal sensations and articulations are conveyed in the following summary of fieldnotes:

The intensity of time involvement demanded of Generation Zero members was palpable although we experienced it intermittently. A slice of time over March/April, 2019, was emblematic. Two face to face weekly meetings; zoom meetings to coordinate national Zero Carbon Act work; a social gathering; a national weekend hui (meeting) followed by an Auckland version of this hui for local and university group members; multiple streams of work continuing from the national hui; and planning for the Climate Challenge conference for high school students in May. The prospect of running another Climate Challenge prompted loud groans: this annual event required time, capacity, and resources.

Participants also articulated time as intensified and compressed: ‘it is like kind of an all-consuming 24/7 kind of thing…you have to do it every day’ (Steven, interview, 2019). Olivia described how:

being a volunteer…[is] not really any contractual agreement which says “you work 9 till 5,” but rather “this is what we’re doing, let’s go and change the world together, give us as much time as you can, and you let us know if you can’t” (interview, 2019).

Intensified, compressed, linear time structured Generation Zero’s actions and heightened their sense of urgency, which also provided a frame for evaluating how much, or how little, time older generations dedicated to addressing climate change. We shift our analysis here to the implications of climate activists’ emphasis on responsibility to future generations, where the timescale is often limited to proximate generations (Diprose et al., 2019: 160). ‘The future’ and ‘future generations’ offers a ‘convenient shorthand for invoking intergenerational responsibility’ but ‘we need to find ways of framing caring for the future more inclusively’ across ‘timescales well beyond human life-spans’ (Diprose et al., 2019: 165).

The articulation of the future as though it primarily belongs to younger generations, yet is threatened by the actions of older generations, was often conveyed colloquially as the desire to build ‘a future that’s not shit’ by participants. Generation Zero’s orientation as a ‘youth-led’ movement, maintained by the ‘ageing out’ of those in their late 20s, is an understandable response in a world where older generations are slow to take action. Dewy articulated Generation Zero’s youth-centric vision for the future:

We want to represent the youth and together create a New Zealand we want to live in and deserve…We've shown through leading the Zero Carbon Act campaign in lobbying the government to pass the Act that youth are empowered and continue to take charge of our present and future by putting in place the policies we need (interview, 2018).

Dewy advocates for young people to take charge, but this has the unintended consequence of allocating responsibility to young people to solve climate change, an impossible burden, which we have previously critiqued (Nairn, 2019; also see Randall, 2005).

The consequences of articulating the future as belonging to young people in turn construct young people in opposition to older generations who threaten their futures. Lewis was one of several participants who reproduced this discourse of blame: ‘It does kinda frustrate me when older people are making decisions about my future that are going to be detrimental’. He explained how:

the older generation who are in power now, a lot of them are in council, they grew up in a time where the advent of the car changed everything…to them, that’s normal. But if you look at it in a historical context, cities have existed for millennium…they’ve been designed around foot and walking (interview, 2018).

Lewis’ frustration was a powerful motivation for his on-going involvement in Generation Zero. Although he referred generally to ‘the older generation’, his reference to those ‘in power now’ provided more specific clues to the target of his anger: those who drive cars and keep making decisions to facilitate transport by car, ignoring other forms of mobility. Liz was also frustrated about how decisions affecting the future had a narrow base of consultation: ‘like if the average person engaged is like 50 and white and male, like I don’t think that is fair, that that can be enough for a long-term policy’ (interview, 2018). The frame of a youth-centric future compromised by older generations diverts attention away from other groups (young and old) who are also disadvantaged by cities designed around the primacy and privilege of the car (Kidman et al., 2020; Ward et al., 2015).

Generation Zero can be understood as operating within, and challenging, settler-colonial temporalities of ‘business as usual’, where dominant groups – ‘50 and white and male’, in Liz’s words – make decisions that maintain the status quo. Generation Zero operated strategically within settler-colonial temporalities, taking a non-partisan approach to convince those in power (politicians and business leaders) of new ways of doing business without fossil fuels but not necessarily advocating for a complete overhaul of the dominant mode of capitalism. Even without a complete overhaul, participants such as Logan envisioned a transformation, utilising technical solutions: ‘what I would like to happen was for New Zealand to…be restorative by 2050 so we were actually pulling in a lot more carbon than we’re sending out to really re-address the previous emissions’ (interview, 2018).

Generation Zero’s achievement of the Zero Carbon Act testified to how effectively they engaged with politicians and business leaders. Young people from respectable and privileged backgrounds, like many Generation Zero members, are often taken more seriously than radical young people in New Zealand and those from less privileged backgrounds (Beals and Wood, 2012; Tawhai, 2015). Nevertheless, a generalised temporal framing of younger versus older generations obscures the groups ‘in power’ who are responsible for decisions about urban design and transport which reproduce settler-colonial temporalities of ‘business as usual’ orientated to linear clock time, privilege and profit (Lloyd, 2009; Nanni, 2017; Rifkin, 2017).

The threat of a climate-altered future, articulated by Generation Zero participants, was one that placed everyone on a linear trajectory, which they cast in either apocalyptic terms or the language of positive, technical solutions such as Logan outlined above. An apocalyptic future was articulated directly in existential terms: if structural changes did not happen fast, the generation they were part of would not live to age 40: ‘we’ll all be dead’ (fieldnotes, 2018). The language of positive, technical solutions was justified due to a felt ‘need to be the good vibes’ and ‘sell the future’ (fieldnotes, 2018) in response to the apocalyptic narrative. These articulations of time were linear and preoccupied with the future. But there is a sense of the future as a form of entitlement (one ‘that’s not shit’) and a marketable commodity (‘sell the future’). We also discern settler-colonial temporalities in action in these articulations of a future where dominant groups expect to continue to live without too much disruption (Diprose et al., 2019), although there were participants who questioned this and articulated other temporal frames.

For example Steven explained how his family migrated to New Zealand from ‘an Eastern culture, a culture kind of connected to place and land and very long deep time’ where ‘the earth has been here for a billion years’. He pondered whether people will change their ways in time to avert a crisis and considered those distant in time and place:

because if there is a crisis…that means we’re accepting of the fact that a lot of people, people who aren’t us, probably people who aren’t me, are going to have to sacrifice their lives and [won’t] have the opportunity to live a full, comfortable, playful life as…I have. In order to get to…the other side, is where we work together to bring everybody up to that vision as well…It’s been there very deeply for a very long time through Indigenous cultures as well of this kind of looking after mother earth and thinking about her in a very long, very, very long term way, so I think a sense of knowledge and like understanding of what the future should look like for all of us (Steven).

Steven acknowledged how he was ‘lucky to be born in a household that didn’t have to deal with poverty’, but he is aware of those who do not ‘have the opportunity to live a full, comfortable, playful life’ as he has. The timescape he referred to was expansive ‘looking after mother earth and thinking about her in a very long, very, very long term way’ and informed by his own and other Indigenous cultures. He was conscious of distant others who ‘have to sacrifice their lives’ – those not like him – during climate crises now and in the future (Diprose et al., 2019).

We interpret the articulations of many, but not all, the Generation Zero participants quoted here as indicative of linear, settler-colonial temporalities. Articulations of youth-centric and/or apocalyptic futures construct climate change as a distant threat, distracting us from how it affects the ‘wellbeing of people of all ages now’ especially those whose livelihoods are already precarious (Diprose et al., 2019: 165, emphasis in original; also see McNamara and Farbotko, 2017). Blaming older generations for climate change is understandable, and Greta Thunberg and other young climate activists have used this strategy effectively to amplify attention to climate change (Holmberg and Alvinius, 2020). But Winter (2019) warns against setting generations against each other because antagonistic relationships are counterproductive to finding alternative ways of living together, which works against intergenerational justice. Settler-colonial temporalities risk being privileged and individualistic (‘my future’), urban-centric and anthropocentric, excluding people who conceptualise time in non-linear ways, and steering attention away from our coexistence with non-human life forms in both rural and urban settings (Head, 2016; Hoskins and Jones, 2017; Keenan, 2014).

Living in and out of time: Concluding remarks

Making activists’ articulations and sensations of time visible is fundamental to understanding their ethical imperatives for action, how they allocate generational responsibility for creating change and the solutions they promote. Many of the participants determined to protect Ihumātao from a housing development took for granted that the past, present and future were intertwined and their responsibility to act on behalf of ancestors and descendants to address settler-colonial injustices. Their sense of time informed both how they acted and why. However, Generation Zero participants tended to reference time as a linear trajectory to a climate-altered future, often attributing the responsibility for averting the crisis to younger generations. We argue that this attribution of responsibility to younger generations to resolve climate change derives in part from conceptualising time as linear, which creates the discursive conditions for pitting younger against older generations and burdening young people with this existential crisis. Younger people led Protect Ihumātao and also felt the burden of responsibility, but there was a sense of sharing this responsibility across generations guided by an evolving relationship between people and place. The possibility of allying with individuals from the group that caused the problem was present in Protect Ihumātao (which included settler allies) but not Generation Zero where older people (politicians and business leaders) were negotiated with rather than invited in.

Many settler activists in New Zealand are not familiar with other temporal frames and unaware they operate within dominant linear settler-colonial temporalities. Generation Zero participants experienced time as pressured and addressing climate change as urgent; the burden of the responsibility to avert climate change was significant, encapsulated by Olivia quoted earlier: ‘let’s go and change the world together, give us as much time as you can’. Protect Ihumātao participants operated across multiple temporalities and the burden of sustaining action over five years to halt the housing development was acute too, described by Qiane quoted earlier as: ‘worrying about trying to fix the world’. But a multi-generational, multi-temporal frame instilled a practiced patience with the process and the ability to create and to live new timescapes in this moment. The burden of ‘fixing’ the world was nevertheless significant for Protect Ihumātao participants who endeavoured to resolve historical land confiscation and for Generation Zero participants whose goal was to reduce New Zealand’s fossil fuel dependence. Although Protect Ihumātao was a multi-generational movement, they were led by younger people, who in many cases put paid work and careers on hold to pursue their vision. Generation Zero was explicitly a youth movement and participants often juggled university and/or careers, but many had a ‘time advantage’, as one participant put it, because they had well-paid jobs and/or had no dependants. We acknowledge the consequences of burdening younger generations with the responsibility for creating change and the worry of ‘fixing the world’. As academics and members of the older generation, we are responsible too for ‘fixing the world’ and sharing the emotional burden this entails (Head, 2016; Randall, 2005).

The urgent revisioning that Winter (2019) and Stewart-Harawira (2005) advocate requires other ways of thinking about time and intergenerational responsibility. Thinking about time and how to care for the environment and human and non-human kin, stretches timescales and who we imagine we are responsible to and for (Diprose et al., 2019). We believe that non-linear, relational conceptualisations of time that incorporate human and non-human agency and allow for messiness and contingency will serve the planet better than anthropocentric, urban-centric and short-term settler-colonial temporalities. Our contribution to a radical revisioning of time and intergenerational responsibility is to invite settler activists and social movement scholars to expressly acknowledge the diverse temporalities in operation. Settler scholars have already critiqued capitalism and neoliberalism (Gibson-Graham, 2006; Gibson-Graham et al., 2013; Kelsey, 2015; Larner, 2003; Nairn et al., 2012; Raworth, 2017) and their role in exacerbating climate change (Klein, 2014; Lloyd, 2009; Schneider et al., 2010; Vadén et al., 2020), but they have not necessarily made explicit how settler-colonial temporality is integral to the problem of living ‘out of time’ with the planet. To break free of this, settler activists and scholars need to come to grips more fully with how settler-colonial temporalities are placing the world at risk.

Protect Ihumātao offers one example of what a radical revisioning of time and intergenerational responsibility might look like in practice. During our research, Māori protectors disrupted settler-colonial temporalities, creating ‘an elsewhere’ in Keenan (2014) words, where the time-space of Kaitiaki and Reclamation Villages operated according to Māori temporalities, protocols and practices. Although Kaitiaki and Reclamation Villages were relatively temporary, their significance as a time-space where people enacted ‘temporal sovereignty’ (Rifkin, 2017) for national and international audiences will be long-lasting (Bell, 2014; Keenan, 2014). On 17 December 2020, the New Zealand government announced it will buy the contested land from Fletcher Building and activate a process to determine its future. While the protectors waited for the announcement Pania described how she and others are living on the whenua (land) as though there is already a resolution: gardening, ‘living our best lives’ and being ‘the best kaitiaki’. They are living in a time where settler-colonial temporality holds sway yet living out of time by creating moments that claim and create a decolonised future (Elkington et al., 2020; Keenan, 2014). As part of the urgent project of living more respectfully with the planet, a radical revisioning of time that respects Indigenous temporalities, such as these, creates a space where a wider conversation can begin.