INDIGENOUS ORIENTATIONS

For things to be simultaneous, they must be situated within a single frame of reference, in the sense that there is not an absolute time against which all events can be measured. With respect to the contemporaneity of non-natives and Indigenous peoples, the frame for thinking their synchronicity usually is provided by settler discourses, structures, and perceptions. More than offering invidious portraits of Indians as backward and disappearing, non-native accounts, governmental and popular, treat the space of the United States as a given in which to set the unfolding of events, and in this way the political union functions as something of an atemporal container for the occurrences, movements, conjunctures, periodicities, and pulsations of history, providing the background against which the movement of time can be registered. Native activists and intellectuals have argued against the idea of inclusion within the United States, understanding that gesture as an erasure of the specificity of Indigenous geopolitical claims, rights to self-determination, autochthonous existence as polities distinct from the settler state, and, perhaps most pointedly, the ways the colonial violence of settler rule has worked through forced incorporation of Indigenous peoples into the "domestic" space of the nation. Yet the insistence that Native people(s) occupy a singular present with non-natives and that the notion of being-in-time or the potential for change remain contingent on belonging to that shared, unified "now" (which includes a shared "then" of the past) seems to eerily resemble the representation of Indigenous populations and territories as necessarily part of the United States. Asserting Indigenous people's and peoples' presence in the present, as opposed to casting them as anachronisms, does not necessarily redress the violence perpetrated through the organization of history around the coordinates of settler occupation — the treatment of non-native temporalities as the baseline for marking Native being-in-time.

Rather than approaching time as an abstract, homogeneous measure of universal movement along a singular axis, we can think of it as plural, less as a temporality than temporalities. From this perspective, there is no singular unfolding of time, but, instead, varied temporal formations that have their own rhythms — patterns of consistency and transformation that emerge immanently out of the multifaceted and shifting sets of relationships that constitute those formations and out of the interactions among those formations. As V. F. Cordova observes, "time is an abstraction derived from the fact that there is motion and change in the world." U.S. settler colonialism produces its own temporal formation, with its own particular ways of apprehending time, and the state's policies, mappings, and imperatives generate the frame of reference (such as plotting events with respect to their place in national history and seeing change in terms of forms of American progress). More than just affecting ideologies or discourses of time, that network of institutionalized authority over "domestic" territory also powerfully shapes the possibilities for interaction, development, and regularity within it. Such imposition can be understood as the denial of Indigenous temporal sovereignty, in the sense that one vision or way of experiencing time is cast as the only temporal formation — as the baseline for the unfolding of time itself. However, such compulsory interpellation of Natives into U.S. life is never fully accomplished nor fully able to displace Indigenous temporal orientations.

To speak of temporal orientation suggests the ways that time can be regarded less as a container that holds events than as potentially divergent processes of becoming. Being temporally oriented suggests that one's experiences, sensations, and possibilities for action are shaped by the existing inclinations, itineraries, and networks in which one is immersed, turning toward some things and away from others. More than a question of relations in space, orientation involves reiterated and nonconscious tendencies, suggesting ways of inhabiting time that shape how the past moves toward the present and future. In Queer Phenomenology Sara Ahmed asks, "What does it mean to be oriented? How do we begin to know or to feel where we are, or even where we are going, by lining ourselves up with the features of the grounds we inhabit, the sky that surrounds us, or the imaginary lines that cut through maps?"; she observes, "The direction we take excludes things for us, before we even get there," adding, "Depending on which way one turns, different worlds might even come into view. If such turns are repeated over time, then bodies acquire the very shape of such direction." Being oriented, having a feeling of place and self in relation to other places and selves as well as a feeling of where one is going and the pace at which one is heading there, entails moving in particular directions in line with extant patterns. This persistent (and largely unwilled) regeneration of continuity not only happens "in time" but is the substance, feel, and force of time unfolding. If one's perception of the world might be quite different depending on where one turns, we might understand the paths traced out by one's orientations — following those particular paths in those specific ways — as giving rise to a kind of temporality, qualitatively distinguishable from other experiences of time. We further might understand collective modes of orientation as a temporal formation that has its own frame of reference and processes of becoming.

Native peoples remain oriented in relation to collective experiences of peoplehood, to particular territories (whether or not such places are legally recognized as reservations or given official trust status), to the ongoing histories of their inhabitance in those spaces, and to histories of displacement from them. Such orientations open up "different worlds" than those at play in dominant settler orderings, articulations, and reckonings of time. Developing such notions of temporal orientation and multiplicity opens the potential for conceptualizing Native continuity and change in ways that move beyond the modern/traditional binary; that do not take non-native frameworks as the self-evident basis for approaching Indigenous forms of persistence, adaptation, and innovation; and that enable consideration of temporal sovereignty, how sensations and articulations of time take part in Indigenous peoples' operation as polities and their pursuit of self-determination. As Deborah Miranda observes with respect to the history of her people (the Esselen), "Story, like culture, is constantly moving. It is a river where no gallon of water is the same gallon it was one second ago. Yet it is still the same river.... Even if the whole is in constant change. In fact, because of that constant change." What does it mean to consider Native temporalities as having their own flow — as coherent yet changing, affected...