Language, Water, Dance: An Indigenous Meditation on Time

Abstract:This essay, “Language, Water, and Dance,” offers a meditation on pandemic time by engaging with Native American histories in relation to Indigenous epistemologies and theories as well as recent events. Looking to Winter Counts and science fiction by Indigenous authors, this meditation suggests that how we think of time and reality are intimately linked to settler colonialism in the United States. The creative form of the essay mirrors the ways in which Indigenous writers and theorists describe time as a spiral rather than a linear progression of lived experience. Relationality and Dakotaness are at the center of the essay’s stories of activism, performance, and survival. A discussion of the “Native slipstream” connects science fiction to the work of water protectors and the NoDAPL movement. The recordings of events through Winter Counts demonstrate how memory and history are collectively shared processes that were also linked to colonial pressures to assimilate Indigenous peoples living in the Plains during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, further suggesting that the first pandemic to impact Indian Country was a colonial one. Concluding with a brief reading from Cherie Dimaline’s young-adult novel, The Marrow Thieves, suggests that as long as we can dream there is still hope for the world where being a good relative is at the center.