What does it mean to say that Indigenous peoples exist in the present? If they routinely are portrayed as in the process of vanishing, and as ceasing to be authentic if their practices deviate from a stereotypical model implicitly pegged to a particular moment in the past, the answer seems to be to insist on their coevalness with non-Indigenous persons and populations. However, this inclusion often entails being inserted into a present defined on colonial terms. This presentation seeks to trouble the pursuit of such temporal recognition by examining the dynamics and imperatives of settler time. Asserting shared modernity or presentness casts Indigenous peoples as inhabiting the current moment and moving toward the future in ways that treat dominant settler colonial frameworks as given, including within processes of “truth and reconciliation.” Instead, pluralizing time opens possibilities for engaging with forms of temporal sovereignty—Indigenous self-articulations, collective orientations, and expressions of self-determination—without first translating them into settler frames of reference.
Mark Rifkin is a professor of Indigenous studies, queer studies, and U.S. literature at UNC Greensboro, primarily researching Native American literary and political writing and their encounters with colonial legal and administrative regimes. Rifkin has written a series of books elaborating concepts of indigeneity as a source of profoundly decolonizing challenges, including Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (2017), Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation (2019), and Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form (2021)