Abstract
In Beyond Settler Time, Mark Rifkin argues that dominant settler reckonings of time put native peoples in a double bind: “either they are consigned to the past, or they are inserted into a present defined on non-native terms” (vii). Even the idea of a shared present is not a neutral description, he argues, as it takes as given dominant non-native geographies, intellectual and political categories, periodizations and conceptions of causality. Settler colonial subjects are so absorbed in the world made by settler colonialism that they experience its temporalities and its ways of thinking about space as natural – beyond the need for questioning.
To be temporally oriented, Rifkin argues, is to be “shaped by the existing inclinations, itineraries, and networks in which one is immersed, turning toward some things and away from others,” such that the very feeling of time as continuous is a product of those orientations (2). That we are so shaped may blind us to how time passes differently for others; but the fact that the way we live in time reflects a temporal frame and not nature may also open up opportunities to recognize a plurality of temporalities – if we learn to challenge the inclinations and itineraries that form our frame. Beyond Settler Time has this dual purpose: showing settlers their own presuppositions about time and land; and demonstrating that it is possible for indigenous ways of being-in-time to flourish without being forced into temporal frames generated by settler governance. The book illuminates the significance of temporality for colonial as well as post-colonial and decolonial projects, showing how varied temporal formations “might engage with each other and alter each other without becoming – or being plotted on – a singular timeline” (17–18). By indicating for his readers ways in which we might begin to think of ourselves as inhabiting multiple temporalities, or as residing alongside others whose temporalities differ from our own, Rifkin seeks to make possible a kind of temporal equality.
One way the problem of temporal inequality surfaces is in the belief (or, sometimes, legal requirement) that indigenous persons are defined by their pure/authentic traditions held intact over time – a view that, according to Joanne Barker, “makes it impossible for Native peoples to narrate the historical and social complexities of social exchange, change, and transformation – to claim cultures and identities that are conflicted, messy, uneven, modern, technological, mixed” (Rifkin 6). The idea that indigeneity is “timeless” creates absurdities in legal and cultural reasoning, as when Native persons are sometimes found to have “lost their culture” if they like pizza or wear jeans, join the wage economy or use electricity or gas-powered vehicles. Many settler judgments about what counts as authentic betray a belief that indigeneity only happened in a deep past. That belief then supports other pernicious ideas: that harms imposed on Native groups also only happened in the past, were inevitable, or it is too late to address them now.
Rifkin’s field is literature, so he pursues his argument in that terrain, by looking at films, letters, memoirs and novels. In a discussion of the film Lincoln, he shows how Ely Parker, a Seneca Indian who served as adjutant to Ulysses S. Grant and was later appointed Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, appears in the film alongside Grant only to remain unnamed and silent. The film enacts what Rifkin calls the “emancipation sublime,” the tendency of democracies to respond to critiques of their practices of inequality by telling a story of progressive inclusion of previously excluded categories of persons. The film figures oppression of slaves as redressed by the fact of the Civil War – with the message that political inclusion is justice. But that framing ignores indigenous groups who claim a prior sovereignty and do not want to be forcefully included in US history (any more than the ancestors of the slaves emancipated by Lincoln wanted to be). Given that the only account of time settlers recognize is the one of continuing expansion of settler territory, Parker truly cannot speak. Either his speech would be incorporated into the narrative of the emancipation sublime – the story that recognition and inclusion of Native peoples expands their liberty – or his speech upsets the film’s temporal frame. Settlers do not see how their accounts of the past and of the passage of time constitute acts of imperial subjection rather than an expansion of the promise of liberty (58–59).
The power of the settlers’ temporal frame is evident whenever Native acts that do not accord with that dominant settler narrative are described as anachronistic, backward or threatening, rather than as acts that occur in a different temporal frame with different logics of determination or causality. One example of such a description and misrecognition is the story told of the 1862 Dakota War, when it is related as a criminal act rather than as a sovereign people’s reaction to longstanding unjust treatment.
Drawing attention to temporality as a frame creates opportunity. If settler colonial subjects suspend belief in western/linear time as an absolute reference, they might see that there are many different ways of being in time that have no neutral way of being articulated to one another and they might stop expecting translation from one form to another to be easy, or to be made only on settler colonial terms. Paying attention to Native American literature can help. Novels such as Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes counter the usual reading of Wounded Knee and the Ghost Dance. The Ghost Dance, for instance, is often explained as being the outcome of Native despondency, lack of resources, weakening of governance structures, etc. Its practitioners claimed it was something else, however – a prophecy. Indian Killer and Gardens in the Dunes take up this claim, laying out alternate temporalities of persistence and unending Indigenous presence. According to Rifkin, rather than endeavoring only to revise western historical description, these novels “theorize temporal sovereignty in their insistence on the limits of linear accounts of Indian history and their emphasis on how prophetic movements express non-chronological modes of Indigenous experience and collectivity” (132). Non-native scholars have often judged prophecy according to the purity of its aims (i.e., whether it was caused by outside events) or according to its success in reaching certain goals. Rifkin’s readings of Indian Killers and Gardens in the Dunes show that prophecy is better understood when it is appreciated for the ways it stretches across time, creating an alternate temporality that has the potential to open up new possibility at any time.
Domination continues in many legalized forms, which can make the continuing violence of settler colonialism more difficult to see. What Rifkin calls “juridical time” aligns with the progressive time of settler expansion and supports an unquestioned right to territory that, in another temporal frame, might be difficult to claim legitimately. If we trace the origins of property law in North America without assuming settler expansion as inevitable, what different stories or ways of dwelling together become possible? Can we call the stories the different sides would tell a shared history – and what would it mean if we did?
Rifkin argues, in the book’s Coda, for deferring juridical time or, at least for a while, suspending the question of how temporal sovereignty might be addressed in colonial legal processes. What this means, basically, is that he doesn’t show how to fix the problem of juridical time in colonial courts – which may seem like a way of evading a key question. But Rifkin’s point in arguing for deferring juridical time is that, while it matters how alternative temporalities may be heard or left unheard by dominant structures like courts of law, not everything is or should be accomplished in settler time. His argument resonates with work by contemporary Indigenous scholars such as Audra Simpson, Gerald Vizenor, Glen Coulthard, Taiaiake Alfred, Leanne Simpson and Kim Tallbear, who emphasize refusal as a mode of indigenous survivance. Specifically, Rifkin’s argument refuses to fit Indigenous time, truths or narratives into colonizing frames. To offer solutions to a whole history of Native American displacements in colonial courts is to miss the point about Native temporal sovereignty and sovereignty in general: its terms are not reducible to those of the colonizers. Rifkin shows that settlers tend to think about time in such a way that they do not recognize their role in colonialism and thus do not see that they are responsible for its continuing harms. And so his book aims not only to open up space (or time) for indigenous temporality but also to provoke the settler reader to rethink time and space for the sake of justice. As none of this is past, an inward-looking focus on indigenous renewal (what Leanne Simpson calls “resurgence”) is as necessary to dismantling settler colonial hold on the meanings of time and governance as is fighting domination in colonial institutions. And new possibility may surface at any moment.