Indian Time: Temporality, Gender, Mobility

Abstract

Native people in what is now colonially known as North America speak of “Indian time” to refer to the way time moves differently from colonial temporal registers in native spaces, communities, and stories. Indigenous social movements across Abiayala assert the right to self-determination, autonomy, or sovereignty by evoking the “millennial cultures” of Indigenous people. To claim a political logic of origins embedded in phrases like time immemorial is to be involved in time politics. Indigenous politics asserts firstness—as First Nations or original peoples—to challenge colonial and settler forms of recognition that rely on a temporal logic that centers settlers’ arrival while locking Indigenous people in a time trap in which their authenticity—indeed often the definition of who is counted in Indigenous—does not change (Barker 2011). Indigenous rights are evoked in political declarations not only through the millennial cultures of Indigenous peoples but also through their continued presence and the fight for their futurities, which is part of the struggle to dismantle a genocidal trope that renders Indigenous cultures as perpetually fixed in the past. For example, Mexico imagines the temporal emplotment of the nation as starting with the grandeur of Indigenous cultures, which quickly disappears in a linear narrative of conquest, colonization, independence, revolution, and modernity. Indigenous peoples are