Timing Canada by Huebener Paul;

Author:Huebener, Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2015-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

4

Imagining Indigenous Temporalities

The Elvis clock says the time is seven-thirty, but it’s always either an hour ahead or an hour behind. We always joke that it’s on Indian time.1

Eden Robinson

Talk to her of post-modern deconstructivism

She’ll say, “What took you so long?”2

Beth Cuthand

In chapter 1 I briefly traced the idea that Indigenous representations of time tend to emphasize the circular or concentric shape of temporal existence. In the words of Wendat scholar Georges Sioui,

The Circle is at the centre of our Aboriginal thinking … We believe that the day, the lunar month, the year, even human life itself, are ­circular phenomena, and that there are cycles of many years, representing the circular reality. We also believe that all circular phenomena have four parts, or movements: spring, summer, fall and winter; morning, noon hour, evening and nighttime; infancy, youth, maturity and old age. Also, most things in nature are round, or rounded: the sun, the earth, the moon; the rocks, after prolonged action of the elements; plants, trees, fruits, seeds, vegetables, the bodies of humans and animals, the nests of birds, their eggs – in brief, almost everything is round.3

There is something compelling about Sioui’s sense of conviction, but part of the danger in speaking about “the” or “our” Aboriginal way of thinking is that such language homogenizes diverse individuals associated with many different First Nations, Inuit, or Métis identities. As Daniel Heath Justice says, Indigenous literary traditions speak through many voices, and “insistence on artificial purity erases the real and valid life experiences of many Indigenous people throughout the Americas, and it assumes a static, monolithic Native identity that belies the diversity of history and experience of the thousands of Indigenous Nations in this hemisphere.”4 Still, Sioui’s claim that “all along, our societies have faced an ideological impasse because of our different understanding of time, of history, therefore, of life,”5 has much to offer in a consideration of how contested temporalities have functioned in settler-Indigene relations. Indeed, if Sioui is correct, divergent representations of time are in fact central to the long history of settler-Indigene conflict and misunderstanding. But it is important to remember that no single “understanding” of time is adequate to represent the views of all people of Indigenous (or European) descent. Bearing this limitation in mind I will trace some of the differing representations of time, and contested visions of the place of Indigenous peoples within time, that have been advanced in what is now called ­Canada. My aims here are to show how these models have both informed and resisted the embattled history of settler-Indigene relations, to identify how temporal discrimination is closely tied to the ongoing colonialist project, to recognize Indigenous representations of time as meaningful in their own right and not merely as “others” to the Western norms, to emphasize the limitations of the supposed distinction between circular and linear models of time, and to identify literary works that have questioned and reshaped representations of Indigenous temporality.

This latter concern is especially crucial. While Canadian

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