Mark Rifkin: Queering temporality and moving beyond settler time (ep314)
What is “settler time” and what does it mean to queer temporality? How might an expansion of who we include as family and kin help us to reimagine alternative ways of governance—beyond it taking the form of something outside and on top of, rooted in domination and control, and upholding the constructed boundaries between “the private” and “the public”?
Dr. Mark Rifkin is a professor of English and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at UNC Greensboro. He served as president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. And he's the author of seven books, including Beyond Settler Time and his most recent one, which is publishing September of this year, titled Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Inanna
“One way of talking about the forms of governance in which political life is not separated from family life is [with the term] ‘kinship’... Saying that Indigenous peoples need to be made into nuclear family units breaks up kinship forms—which serve not only as extended family but as forms of governance.”
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Transcript
Note: *The values and opinions of our diverse guests do not necessarily reflect those of Green Dreamer. Our episodes are minimally edited, and we encourage further inquiry, seeing our dialogues as invitations to dive deeper into each topic and perspective. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Kamea Chayne: To help us contextualize the lenses through which you see and experience the world, I'd love for you to begin by sharing a bit about your background and what crystallized your interest in the cross-section of Indigenous studies and women, gender and sexuality studies.
Dr. Mark Rifkin: Well, I'm a white settler, queer scholar. And [to speak to] how I [came] to Indigenous studies. So I had been interested in US literature since college and in going on to study it to get a Ph.D. in nineteenth-century American literature. And also in college, I started thinking about post-colonial theory, which is work that engages with the question of empire and the legacies of empire. And when I started thinking about these things together, then I started thinking in sustained ways about Native peoples, native sovereignties, self-determination. And that became increasingly central to my work over the course of graduate school and then in my scholarship since then. I've been interested in queer studies, queer theory, questions of sexuality and what constitutes the "normal" since early in college. That wasn't really part of my dissertation work, but toward the end of grad school, I started thinking about what would a queer analysis of the kinds of questions around Native land, Native political forms, the US effort to extend colonial authority over Native peoples. What would a queer analysis of all of that look like? And that opened toward what would become my second book, When Did Indians Become Straight? And I've been thinking about Indigenous studies and questions of settler colonialism in relation to matters of queer studies, sexuality, kinship, etc. since then.
Kamea Chayne: I was particularly interested in sharing dialogue with you because through the numerous conversations I've had on the show, it's become clear to me that our dominant extractive systems and ways of being are often degenerative and dehumanizing. And particularly we've explored on the show before how colonial world views of the environment or this "pristine wilderness", initially used to displace Native communities, tends to be rooted in a story of separation, of human exceptionalism, and supremacy, that in large part has driven us towards self and planetary destruction. And so it's led me to ponder what other colonial stories and ideals have we normalized as the ways that things must be that really deserve to be questioned, if we really want to be more imaginative in thinking about how we can co-create a future that is more regenerative and life-enhancing.
So in Beyond Settler Time, you look at the dangers of seeking to include Indigenous peoples within settler temporal frameworks. And for people hearing about this for the first time, it can be challenging to conceptualize what you mean by settler time, because time can appear to be something that is objective and shared. So how would you introduce this idea of settler time and what it means to queer temporality so that time isn't perceived necessarily in a shared sense as straight and linear from the past, present to the future?
Dr. Mark Rifkin: So when we talk about time, we often think of it as this objective metric. That time is just flowing and we are all in it, that there is this "real" sense of time that is inherently universal and inherently shared. But even if we think from the perspective of physics, from Einsteinien special relativity, there is no universal time. As Einstein talks about it, you experience time from within—what he describes as—a frame of reference. When Einstein is talking about it, it's with regard to matters of velocity. But if I'm traveling, let's say, on a train, then I'm experiencing time differently from those people standing on the platform. And because there is no "universal" way of telling time, time itself is specific to, in Einstein's terms, those physical frames of reference.
What I want to think about is what happens if we think about frame of reference, not just as a physical matter, something like velocity or movement, relative between two spaces; instead, if we think about frame of reference in terms of what we might often describe as cultural forms, but not in the sense of beliefs about time, but start thinking about the actual physical, sensuous, perspectival experience of time as actually different between different social forms; and to come at this question from a different direction.
So often in the US, Native peoples are imagined as "of the past", "disappearing", or perhaps as "disappeared". And if they are understood, as "in the present", often it's thought of as their being "residual": in the process of vanishing. And often the response to that has been to insist: "No, Native peoples are just as much in 'the present' as everyone else." But then if one starts to think, "what does it mean to be in 'the present'?" Who's setting the terms for what gets to count as "the present"?
And there are a number of Native scholars, including folks like Audra Simpson and Glen Coulthard and Joanne Barker, who have raised a number of questions about the idea of trying to include Native peoples into the nation, or the settler state, that asserts authority over Native peoples and territories, that the idea of including Native peoples seems to reproduce the ideologies of colonial occupation, that Native peoples and lands are just "part of" the US.
In a similar vein, I began to wonder, doesn't that move to say that Native peoples should be included in the present with non-Natives? Doesn't that, just like the idea that they should be included in the nation, take certain ideas as given? So if you're saying Native peoples should be included into the nation, aren't you accepting the existence of the US nation-state, the normalness of that, the naturalness of its jurisdiction? And similarly, what would it mean to include Native peoples into national history or national present? How does that effece Native peoples' understandings of their own histories, their own ways of experiencing time, their own stories with regard to their connection to the past, their own ways of envisioning and experiencing relationship to the future that are not about a sharedness with settlers, that are not about becoming part of a settler-colonial structure—the nation-state.
Kamea Chayne: And in speaking to how settlers' senses of time have been normalized, as the backdrop in which we situate and contextualize everything we know, you bring up the example of how our dominant culture uses the binary of traditional and modern. And specifically when we speak about Indigenous ways of knowing it's often framed as "traditional" knowledge, indicating that it comes from another time and therefore may not hold the same weight or credibility as knowledge that is considered "modern", or the "present". So can you expand upon this to share how the seemingly common sense of time is actually not "objective", but subjective through settler lenses and perceptions of reality?
Dr. Mark Rifkin: It's not simply that that way of understanding time is subjective. It's actually institutionalized and imposed on Native peoples. [For example, when we talk about] the difference between the "traditional" and the "modern". So, there's the idea of "the modern". So, [from there,] what does it mean then to be in "the present"? To be in the present means to be within institutions, ways of being, economies, philosophies, that are largely structured by non-Natives. So then Native peoples' knowledges, memories, philosophies, are then understood as "traditional" or somehow "from a different time". Part of the institutionalization of settler colonialism is then an understanding of Indigenous peoples as only truly Indigenous, or, in the case of the US, only "really" Indian or "authentically" Indian, when whatever is cast as expressive of Indigenous identity, collectivity, governance, is presented as unchanged coming from the past.
And so any sign that Native peoples have in fact adapted what were once "alien" forms, technologies, cultural dynamics—from the perspective of the traditional and the modern—are seen as making Native people less authentic, so that Native people are not imagined as able to change.
The problem with the idea of the “shared” present is that then change gets imagined as becoming more like non-Natives. As opposed to Native people having their own social formations—which are themselves changing, certainly in ways that are deeply affected by settler colonialism, settler occupation, forms of state intervention—but that those Native social formations are themselves not static and not simply of the past.
When we're trying to understand what counts as sacred space, [we fall back into] non-Native ideas of what traditional ritual is supposed to be; [when we're trying to discuss] Native folks' hunting rights, involving questions over a particular area, over whether or not they can use various kinds of guns or other hunting technology, [we say these are] not "traditional"; or even [when we're thinking about] who counts as Indigenous, the logic institutionalized by the US government is largely that of a blood logic, so that there's a sense that Indianness is a quality born in the blood, through reproduction... [These in themselves involve] a particular temporal understanding of Indigenous peoples, which then doesn't understand these peoples as nations, as polities, as self-governing, self-determining political entities.
So it's not just the question of understanding Native peoples as "of the past". It's also denying the capacity of Native peoples to change in ways [while still perceiving and recognizing them] as Indigenous. And it's also tying their indigeneity or Indianness to this kind of reproductive genealogical line—where, if someone who is legally Indian marries a white person and has children, then those children are, within this logic, "less Indian".
[Overall, what settler time, and a shared present, does is create] this sense that moving forward, indigeneity can only ever be lost. That either it is preserved, unchanged from the past, or it is dissipating.
And so that notion of a shared present does not necessarily undo those ways of thinking about—and legislating—what will constitute indigeneity or again, in the context of the US, what will be understood as—legally—Indianness.
Kamea Chayne: So one of the prime examples you give of a normalized temporality is the generic lifecycle organized around conjugal union and reproductive functions, which you say "positions marital couplehood as necessary for procreation itself. And thus the survival of the human species appears to depend on bourgeois family formation and homemaking." And this is not to say that people aren't free to do as they wish and believe for themselves, but through the lens of queer studies, what has been the result of the hetero-normative social dynamics of the settler culture becoming the norm that most of society and even our legal system, policies, etc. have been oriented towards?
Dr. Mark Rifkin: So if one thinks about human reproduction as tied to there being a man and a woman, they have sex, and there are children. One of the things that can happen is that that unit—the parents and child—gets understood as the primary social unit, as opposed to the idea that what you need really is you need a sperm, a uterus, and then once the child is born, you need a carer for the child, and this process of reproduction can take any number of social forms. It doesn't have to look like the nuclear family.
So then, one of the questions becomes, what's at stake in imagining human reproduction as such? [Further, what's at stake in imagining] the continuation of the species [as requiring] the nuclear family form?
Well, there's a whole lot of other stuff that's presumed in the nuclear family form, including ideas about property, about homemaking, about the idea that sex needs to be tied to long term affectionate or romantic relationships, that those are supposed to be monogamous, that the parents and child are supposed to live as a separate unit. And if you start thinking about all of these assumptions, it's notable then that the nuclear family unit is separate from other nuclear family units. They are existing as "private", or one might describe it, as "privatized" units, as opposed to operating collectively. So it's not a large leap to get from the understanding of the nuclear family form as natural and inevitable, to capitalist ideas of private property, of households as atomized forms of governance that are utterly distinct from the private sphere.
And all of these ideas about family and homemaking and property are imposed on Native peoples. But more than them simply being imposed on native peoples, it's that the argument that Native peoples did not understand "true" home and family, that they needed to be educated to live the civilized form of life. (And of course, it's ironic that the notion of the nuclear family was presented as—and to some extent, still is understood—as both necessary to the human species but yet somehow also expressive of civilization, in contrast to "less evolved" social forms.) So you have this idea that Native peoples need to be trained into "true" home and family, and this becomes a way of effacing Native forms of governance.
If you have modes of political life and collective decision making that don't separate decision making and resource distribution and placemaking, from (what might be described in conventional American terms as) family, if governance is not separate from "family" life, then if you have someone coming in and saying, "we need to teach you how to be proper nuclear families", this becomes a way of breaking up networks of governance, which were often characterized—using the anthropological language of the 19th century—as kinship.
One way of talking about the forms of governance in which political life is not separated from family life is [with the term] “kinship”... Saying that Indigenous peoples need to be made into nuclear family units breaks up kinship forms—which serve not only as extended family but as forms of governance.
And so it's the imposition of the nuclear family, of those hetero-normative ideals (which again, go along with ideas of private property, gendered relations of labor and the transmission of wealth, through lineal reproductive inheritance), [the imposition of] the idea people need to be incorporated into that system of family life, becomes a justification for erasing Native modes of governance, [thereby eliminating] the existence of Native peoples as their own separate, self-governing political entities, and for extending US jurisdiction (and Canadian jurisdiction) over them.
Kamea Chayne: Since we're at a point where more and more people are questioning and feeling our current forms of political governance do not serve our people nor our planet, hearing all of this certainly invites us to think about what societal organizing and political governance can look like beyond the current nation-state, settler framework. So just to clarify, what you're speaking to is that we currently, in the dominant culture, have a very narrow definition of family and kinship. And we also separate out our private and domestic lives from the public, which is overseen by this government that is more powerful and coming from top-down hierarchy, as opposed to if we were to expand our senses of kinship and to have governance embedded within that in of itself.
Dr. Mark Rifkin: And part of what I'm suggesting is that for many, many Native peoples, that was the form of governance. But I would also add that in many ways the private sphere is imagined through private property holding, that it's central to the idea of the "private", and to Euro-American ideas of personhood—which are largely organized around the idea that to be a self is to be self-possessed, and because I can own myself, I can own property, I am separate from other people, my property is separate from theirs... Family gets enfolded into that notion of property because they're the ones that I’m sharing my property with, separate from those other people... But then the forms of what we might describe as liberal governance, which is dominant in the US, is justified largely as the protection of people in their separate private property holding. That the idea that government exists in order to facilitate people's private property holding and to defend them in their separateness.
So notions of kinship as governance, social systems which we associate with the familial, are not entirely distinct from the functions of governance—things like resource distribution, collective decision making—those systems are not organized around private property holding. It doesn't mean that there's not an understanding of that: separate people may own things of their own, but it's different from an organized notion of property.
Kamea Chayne: And this perhaps also informs how currently governance is largely based on rigid boundaries, markers and territories. As in, if you’re in this region, you’re governed by this government here, and if you’re over there, you have a different government in place, often with differing laws and policies. So just to free up our imaginations, I wonder what alternatives we can base governance on, especially if we extend our idea of kinship to our more-than-human kin, and our lands and waters as well.
Dr. Mark Rifkin: There are a number of Indigenous intellectuals, particularly Indigenous feminist intellectuals such as Melanie Yazzie and Leanne Simpson, who have talked about the ways that ideas of kinship, ideas of reciprocity and care as fundamental social building blocks for Indigenous governance, that those are also diplomatic principles, principles of relationships with other communities and with other peoples, which extend to the non-human world.
So, for example, Melanie Yazzie talks about the existence of treaties between Native peoples and the animal nations that they are living in connection to—everything becomes one big family.
There's still a sense of political entities. But what that means is then fundamentally different. What it means to understand something as a political entity or a political order or a people is not the same as the idea of the liberal nation-state, where you have a government that is then set up over a bunch of private—presumptively nuclear family—households all on their own private property, which lie within the clearly delimited exclusive jurisdiction of this political entity. That's not the kind of imagination of political orders, of governance, of diplomacy that folks like Yazzie and Simpson and other Indigenous feminist intellectuals are articulating.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much for sharing this, and as we’re looking ahead, as we take on this more expansive understanding of Indigenous sovereignty that includes temporal sovereignty, what is the role that—especially non-Native—peoples wanting to support Indigenous sovereignty can play in truly supporting this in all forms, and not accidentally still enforcing the same colonial frameworks that we see as the norm, because that’s all that we know?
Dr. Mark Rifkin: I talk about this in the book, but…
The idea of the U.S. nation as inherently becoming freer and more true to the principles of liberty on which it was founded, and the idea that we can see this through the greater expansion of rights to various minorities who become part of the mosaic of the nation—this, as a vision, the redress of historical violence, is a fundamentally colonialist vision.
It takes the nation as given. It has this temporal narrative of development forward in time as inherently progress, inherently betterment, as a leaving behind of the past. Even in progressive and sometimes leftist circles, there can be this story of incorporating Native peoples into some vision ultimately set by non-Natives. It's again, the idea of the "shared": It's a shared belonging of non-Natives and Natives which is usually not what Native people have articulated for themselves—the terms of which tend to replicate many of the assumptions of settler colonialism.
Non-Natives need to seriously think about [these questions:] What are our political models? What are our models of justice, and where are they coming from? What are they taking for granted about how the world works and what political forms we are working in that we see as the horizon of justice or liberation? How are those political forms and those political imaginations actually part of ongoing violence against Native peoples?
How are those political forms and imaginations, to some extent, predicated on not engaging with Native peoples' own articulations of their histories, of their interests, of their philosophies? How do our vision of those political forms and imaginations edit out ongoing histories of settler occupation, of the taking of Native land, of the assertion of non-Native authority over Native people, of the imposition of non-Native social forms onto Native peoples, of the non-acknowledgment of Native peoples' own social forms and their self-determination over their futures as self-governing peoples?
[It’s about] listening to Native peoples. It's challenging non-Native assumptions about what a politics of justice looks like. It's contributing to intellectual and activist struggles led by Native peoples. And it's also talking to other non-Natives and engaging with other non-Natives in order to unsettle the ways that we, as non-Natives in everyday ways, normalize the existence of the settler state, normalize the existence of settler colonialism, normalize the occupation of Native lands, the way that those things become the given background for what we think and do, for how we imagine what a better future would look like.
We need to do the work of undoing that in our minds, in our policies, in our relations with each other and with Native peoples. In doing so, we need to take the lead from Native peoples' articulations of their own self-determination, their sovereignties, and what they as peoples see as desirable futures for themselves.
Kamea Chayne: There's so much knowledge that you shared in this conversation that I know I'll continue to marinate on after. As we're nearing the end of our time together. What else would you like to share that I didn't get to ask you about? Maybe about your forthcoming book? And are there any additional calls of action that you'd like to leave our listeners with?
Dr. Mark Rifkin: The issues around temporality which can seem very abstract, very separate from struggles over resources, political authority, land... I think I want to underline the ways that those are very much at the heart of a number of the most pressing struggles facing Native peoples. Something like the Dakota Access Pipeline and the struggle to prevent the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, part of what's at stake here is that you have Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, otherwise usually known as Sioux peoples, whose own sense of their relationship to the Missouri River extends far beyond policy temporalities, in which something like the decision around a pipeline is being made, where you're looking back, a couple of decades, as opposed to thinking back to treaties from the fifties, or relationships of care and reciprocity and responsibility that Očhéthi Šakówiŋ people have, to the region for hundreds, thousands of years. And so the question of temporality is very much at play [even though] US state does not acknowledge those forms of temporality.
Or, in another vein, the case that came before the Supreme Court last year about the existence of the Creek Reservation, Sharp v. Murphy: The question was whether the Creek Reservation as a political unit still existed. The state of Oklahoma, and the federal government, in many ways, had been acting as if it had been disestablished right at the turn of the 20th century. But then you have Creek people and the Creek nation who are saying that you have to look back to that period—which in most non-Native American legal contexts would be ancient history—to see that Euro-Americans were wrong to presume the Creek Reservation was gone, disestablished, no longer present as a legal unit. The Creek Reservation still exists.
So the insistence on Indigenous temporality is very much a part of Indigenous struggles, Indigenous articulations of sovereignty, and self-determination in the present.
***
Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much. We're nearing the end of our conversation, I just have three lightning round closing questions for you before we wrap up. What is an uplifting social media account or a publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Dr. Mark Rifkin: Everyone should read The Red Deal, which is a vision for Indigenous transformation and [which talks about] the ways that Indigenous transformation is tied to anti-capitalist movements globally. It's produced by the group The Red Nation, which is an Indigenous-led organization out of Albuquerque.
Kamea Chayne: What do you tell yourself to stay motivated and inspired?
Dr. Mark Rifkin: [I'm] trying to think about change as a process. Of course, there are particular things that one is trying to do, particular changes that one is trying to work toward. But not to think about the achievement or the non-achievement of those things as the measure of what it means to lead a kind of ethical, valuable life, but to think about the ongoing process of trying to produce meaningful change as inherently valuable.
Kamea Chayne: What makes you most hopeful for our planet and world at the moment?
Dr. Mark Rifkin: I do know that there's something kind of externally that does, because in many ways, looking around can make me really depressed. But I've been thinking a lot recently about the idea of: what does it mean for me to be a good ancestor? What does it mean for me to think about what I am gifting to the future, what I'm offering, or how I am modeling ways of being in the world or what I'm trying to make possible or capacitate toward the future? Thinking about the way I'm living, and the work that I'm doing, as oriented in that way... I think that can give me hope.
