Disclaimer: This transcript was generated automatically. Although it was carefully reviewed, it may still contain errors and may not correspond exactly to the recorded audio track. Time stamps are indicative and may not correspond to the edited audio-video recording provided.
Keri Facer (00:01)
So, hello everybody, welcome back. As regular listeners will know, this podcast series is focusing on the relationship between time and justice and sustainability transitions. In particular, we're interested in questions of temporal justice, temporal violence, and more generally the way that time plays a role in structuring and foreclosing possibilities for change. And today we've got three fantastic scholars ⁓ who are working through these questions in particular in relation to the question of Indigenous and colonial temporalities. So, welcome Frida Buhre, Matthew Scobie and Catherine Dussault. We're delighted to have you here. Frida is an assistant professor in rhetoric at Uppsala University in Sweden. She studies how different groups in society make sense of climate change and is particularly interested in how notions of time can be used as rhetorical tools to mobilize and persuade in politically charged situations. Frida is Sámi and Swedish with family relations in Inari, one of the Sámi regions in the north of Finland. And she works at the intersection of rhetoric, environmental communication, critical time studies and Indigenous studies. Her co-written paper that I love, it is called Braiding Time, Sámi Temporalities for Indigenous Justice, and it's a must read for thinking through the relationships on Indigenous and colonial time. Matthew Scobie is Kāi Tahu and a senior lecturer at University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He is a critical accountant, which I think is a fantastic job description, which means he's looking at how to hold organisations and businesses and governments accountable for their social, environmental, cultural and economic impacts. He's got a specific focus on Indigenous development and decolonisation, and in particular, he's looking at how to imagine and create positive and just futures. Regarding time and just transition, Matthew's work explores how Kāi Tahu temporalities are both enabled and constrained by aspects of New Zealand's political economy, including the crucial role of the past in reconstructing the future and the highly politicized roles of history and archives in Indigenous political economy. And our last guest, Catherine Dussault, is associate professor at the University of Ottawa, Canada. She's a member of the Wendat First Nation, Canada, and grew up on the Nionwentsïo which I think, Catherine, you might correct my pronunciation on, which literally means our grand and beautiful territory. Her work is at the interface of Indigenous anti-colonial studies and the sociology of science, where she examines the politics and practices of research conducted by and for Indigenous peoples. Her work focuses in particular on Inuit knowledge, and she's working with the Inuit of Nunavut in the hope of establishing new forms of research governance in the region. So, we have three amazing guests who are
going to really help us think through this question of the relationship between Indigenous and colonial temporalities today. It's really exciting. Welcome all three of you to the podcast. So, let's get into it. First of all, just to open the conversation, it'd be great to have a sense of how you got into the research areas that you're working on. Maybe tell us a little bit about what brought you to be curious about the questions you're working on at the moment. Let's start with Frida.
Frida Buhre (03:22)
Okay. Well, thank you, Keri. for giving us this opportunity It's a great fun to be here. Yeah, I guess The reason that I came to this research interest was more pragmatic than anything else. The way I see it is that our contemporary culture and our contemporary society just has a lot of problems and a lot of difficulties in the way that we organize society. There lots of inequalities, lots of violence, lots of harms done to humans and non-human life. So, we want alternatives, right, to contemporary society. And I figured, well, why not then look at societies, cultures, and peoples who have, for various reasons, existed partly outside of the current system. I was curious about alternative sites or alternative cultures where they're not structured around property rights or value and profit. And that could just give us clues about how we could structure society differently. And that's how I came to Indigenous culture and Indigenous resistance. So, I mean, the reason for that is partly because it's something that lies close to my heart because I'm a Sámi myself. But it's also that for about 500 years, Indigenous communities and societies have been able to sustain alternative ways of life despite very violent ruptures to their way of organizing society, economics, culture, and so on. So, this resilience or what Indigenous scholarship sometimes refers to as survivance, the co-enactment of survival as resistance, was a thing that I became interested in. That led me to art as a site of resistance, because at least in the Sámi context, and perhaps Matt and Catherine can speak of their contexts, art has been bit more protected from colonial violence than other ways or other parts of society, Indigenous or Sámi society. So, when language was prohibited or religion was prohibited, when societal relations were destroyed, art can still exist. So, it offers a site or a practice where you can find clearly articulated perspectives. So, that's why I ended up with the Sámi storytelling and Sámi art as a site of resistance, as a way to find alternatives to our current way of organizing society.
Keri Facer (06:02)
Thanks, Frida. That's a wonderful history and story of why you might turn to these perspectives and your work on Sámi art as a site of resistance is something we're going to get into later in the show, I hope. Matt, tell us a little bit about how you have ended up being this critical political accountant. Seriously, the best job title ever. Love it.
Matthew Scobie (06:32)
Yeah, well, I guess my exposition might be a little bit more kind of introspective or bordering on selfish than Frida's but we'll talk about where I came from maybe and how I got to be here. So, started off as a musician. That was always going to be my thing but wasn't good enough to be financially viable so I needed a really safe backup plan. And I thought accounting is like the safest thing you can possibly study within contemporary capitalist society anyway. So, I did that and then I ⁓ discovered kind of more critical perspectives on accounting, like where the workers show up in the annual reports expenses, where does nature show up in the annual reports? Not at all. And kind of moved from there. And that kind of brought me into this concept of accountability. And at the same time I was kind of reconnecting with with Kāi Tahu or Ngāi Tahu. So just for listeners abroad, Ngai or Kāi . So, Kāi is just the Ngāi Tahu dialect, which which pronounces the NG as the K, but Ngai or Ngati typically means people of, so people of Tahu or descendants of Tahu. And because I'm a descendant of Tahu, I wanted to figure out how I could be an accountable researcher, right? So, you move from accounting to accountability. How can I be an accountable researcher? And that starts off with knowing our histories and how we came to be here. So, a really important part of Ngāi Tahu identity is the Ngāi Tahu claim and the first kind of petition of grievance against breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi. We could talk about that more later. Was lodged in 1849 and that was eventually settled in 1998. So, you have this kind of a 140, 150 year struggle for that settlement and that has this really strong kind of temporal element. all the funds we have now from that settlement have to be accountable to those past generations that fought for that claim but they also have to be accountable for the future generations about who the claim is for. So, without wanting to move from accounting into temporality that's where I've ended up. So, that's how I got here.
Keri Facer (08:50)
Thanks, Matt. And I mean, I find this attention to the role of treaties and to the role of treaties, both in relation to past and future generations, particularly important in all of your work. Thinking about treaties as temporal mechanisms is something that is going to be worth us digging into more. Thanks. And finally, Catherine. How did you end up working in the place that you're working on, the topics that you're working on?
Catherine Dussault (09:16)
The reason I got interested into these topics is both from the heart and the reason, I guess. I'm a scholar who comes from the colonial Indigenous studies, but also the social studies of science. So, I was really trying to merge these interests together, but also to answer some questions that I felt were left off, especially when it comes to Indigenous ways of doing research. there's this common understanding that we should conduct research differently when we do it with Indigenous peoples. And also the appeal upon Indigenous knowledges is now a commonplace in research. However, there is a fundamental ambiguity of the concept, but also how concretely we should do that research. And it also escapes, in a way, the scrutiny of a formal definition. So, I guess the first intent in my research was to give some clarity by bringing in Indigenous perspectives. So, that's why I got interested on discourses that revolve around Indigenous knowledge in research, which led me to engage more and more with the question of governance in research, but also in other aspects of social life, because my research is slowly transitioning towards these questions too. I feel that the reason why I get to work on what I work is also through the relationships that I built. So, for instance, through my doctoral research, I got to meet amazing people and build friendships. Friendship maybe is a counter point or counterbalance to extractive research practices and introduce new forms of temporality to any research. This led me to build partnerships with different Inuit organizations that now seek to transform temporalities in research. And I'm working in partnership with them specifically. But yeah, I guess like it's really my positionality too, as an Indigenous researcher, that I want to amplify the voices of Indigenous peoples in general, but also the value of Indigenous research that is being done. So, for me, this is like the path toward a just transition, also on an epistemic level.
Keri Facer (11:46)
Thank you, Catherine. I can hear this sense of accountability and relationality and interconnectedness as a kind of recurring theme, which comes really to this question. I know in all of your work you're not just studying time in Indigenous communities, you're actually mobilizing different conceptions of time and you're trying to think through and with different conceptions of time. So, I wonder if you can help us understand that a little bit. Going to Matthew perhaps, you mentioned already this sense of an accountability framework that is accountable both to past generations to ancestors and to the future. Maybe you could talk me through a little bit how you understand temporality from the perspective of the communities that you are part of and that you're working with.
Matthew Scobie (12:35)
Yes, I can try my best to do that. So, kind of core to understanding Māori everything is this concept of phakapapa. So, P-H-A-K-A-P-A-P-A in kind of English written language. And that's a structured genealogical relationship with all things. And what that means is, in terms of history, what is more important to Ngāi Tahu and te Māori is the who rather than the when. So, when Māori are recounting their history, usually in oral traditions, sometimes historians were kind of confused about these people that were seemingly kind of a long time apart kind of working together and that was because this phakapapa collapses or a better word is coalesces all the generations into this kind of living present inside oneself, right? So, you have all of that phakapapa inside of you. The obligations to the past and the obligations to the future and that extends to nature as well. So, when I give a full pepeha, I would talk about my mountain and my river in that phakapapa is a structured genealogical relationship between all things and ancestors are kind of embedded and imbued in the landscape. And, so, that phakapapa is like an assertion of rights but in Māori practices and understandings rights come with obligations. so you can't just have a right that you can sever and buy and sell on a market. Those rights come with significant obligations. So in accounting terms, phakapapa kind of moves us from having like a right or an asset to quite intense liabilities, right? Because you have these ⁓ calls upon from nature and from past generations and from future generations to behave in certain ways. So, yeah, living with ancestors in the present is a way to exercise these accountabilities and bring this kind of temporality into our current behaviours.
Keri Facer (14:44)
Thanks for that very clear summary. The phrase that lands with me from that is this idea of coalescing times, and these questions of who matters rather than when. And you could see this kind of completely screwing with some linear text based models of history. So, yeah, there's a lot to explore in this. Frida, how does this relate to your work in Sámi settings?
Frida Buhre (15:08)
Well, it does very much resonates. I should probably recognize there are multiple ways of conceptualizing time in Sámi society. And it's all implicated in contemporary society, of course. So, we're also governed by the clock and we also work with deadlines and so on. So, these all get merged together, right, in the way that Sámi life is formed. But I do think that when I look at the artwork and the attempt to articulate something distinct there, a layered time is the best metaphor I've come up with, where each moment is not only its own like moment in a linear progression of past, present, future. But each moment is layered rather on a vertical scale. The past and the histories and experiences of the past are imbued in the present and, so, are also the hopes for the future. And I was actually wondering, Keri, if I could read a little bit from a book that just came out in English translation. So, I thought it was nice to perhaps just showcase or to bring in the artists that I'm working with. The book is written by Linnea Axelsson, and it's called Aednan. It's a Sámi epic on the energy transition and hydropower constructions in Sweden and how it ⁓ affected Sámi families in these areas. It has multiple people being the speaker. And this particular speaker is in contemporary society and she is engaged in resistance struggles of various kinds. And the word that you need to know to understand this is that kolt is the dress or the Sámi traditional attire. "With courage, I have worn my kolt today. I hang it out to air. My children are sleeping, suspect nothing. In discussions and meetings we fight, the kolt and I. With its colors, it opens up the Swede's eyes. Broaches rattle, they beam upon my breast. An outwoman's sewn armor of broad cloth and silver. It calls upon them to regard me when I speak on my children's behalf. Now they're sleeping soundly on soft pillows, unknowing. We play in the world, my children and I, but the kolt stands at the ready. For each new growth ring, it will fight. For every cracked branch of the family tree, it will bear witness and remember. There it hangs, already awaiting the next flow." So, I thought that this is a good passage to perhaps just think about time and the way that time is felt and time is material, that it's in the clothes and that the material objects remembers and helps us fight and conduct a fight and stands as a witness to historical experiences. So, maybe this is a way to say that the time is intergenerational, the time is layered, that every moment bears witness to both past and future generations. So yeah.
Keri Facer (18:49)
Thank you, Frida. That's an incredibly powerful image, the image of the cloth and the dress mediating and holding all those times in one. It feels like a constellation in some ways. And that reminds me of what you've written about, Catherine, which is you were talking about the concept of 'vik', and to me it's the sort of time and materiality as I understand it, and it cannot be separated in language. So, could you talk us through that? Is there a connection there with what Frida and Matthew have been saying?
Catherine Dussault (19:24)
Yeah, exactly. Like when I was hearing them and especially like Frida, when you mentioned how time is material, I guess for Inuit it's encoded into language because, as Keri said, how language is constructed, there's this like morphing. So, this part of the word that is called 'vik,' which means at the same time, time and place. So for instance, where I work, Nunavik, Nuna is the land, but also like the water, the mountains. So, it's basically the territory and vik is meaning at the same time, like time and place. So, it's like encoding everything material, but also like temporal. And this is something we see in the way people refer to what has to be done in order to survive. I think for Inuit and especially for elders, there's this sense of how to survive, what is survival, what is necessary. And for them, when I was asking them about time, what has changed because we talk a lot about how our lives now are being guided by the clock. Well, they tell me that they were even more guided by the clock, by the seasonal clocks or by the sila, like by the climate, by what the weather was allowing them to do. So, when also I was asking them, how do you say time in Inuktitut, they would say pivitsak, which means the place where it will be done. So, it's not necessarily about the time or only the time. It's also where it's going to be. And it's like this because when they would travel long distances, they would count with certain markers of the land and not necessarily like only temporal aspects. So, this is a way to showcase that, for Inuit, it's really timespace together at the same time, they cannot be divided. And I think this is so interesting because also it's a way to show how, everything is not in a position like on the one hand time and the one hand space, but what can be static, what does move, what stays there and what is dynamic. And also like if we look into mythology, this is how for them that time and space have been created through this interaction between day and night, but also different like species that it varies depending where you're from, like in the Arctic, but through the fight, the struggle between two different animals, basically. So yeah, for me, it's really like embedded in that. And I think that nowadays there's this way of conceiving time that exists, but there's also other conceptions of time that bounce back into the culture. so I'm not Inuit. I'm not Inuk. I'm Wendat. I'm First Nation and First Nation have in Canada, this half joke, half saying that there's such a thing as Indian time, which can be on the edge racist if you're not Indigenous to say that. But I guess this is this way of saying that time is circular and because past, present and future are a bit meshed together, it's a bit hard to be ruled by the clock, actually. And I feel that this conception of Indian time also bounces back into Inuit culture and it creates some forms of arrangements that are really interesting to see and really unique to the place. I think also because they have to conjugate like with their conception of time that is more traditional. Like I have to say that elders some of them were born on the land and they have like this traditional way of living. Like they have experienced it, but the newer generation were born like in modern houses. So, there's also this discrepancy between generations and some of them have entered wage labor. So, it makes that sometimes you feel that you are living between two worlds with two different ways of conceiving time and space and that it's really hard to conjugate them. And sometimes it feels that you are constantly in between, but also constantly failing at both because maybe they are incommensurable. It's hard to pinpoint like how to describe it because like it's really connected to a way of living, but like a way of living that is in action. And I think this is something that is really important for Inuit, like everything is experience based. So, it's really something that is embodied. And of course this includes like storytelling because like you make the experience of stories and you engage the people who listen in to the story, when you share the story. But I think like it's something that is more shown and embodied than something that you can really like talk about and express.
Keri Facer (24:43)
Yeah, I mean, what I can hear from all of you is such a sort of searching for a different relationship with time from westernized, but without simplifying, without unifying, without saying, it's all one thing, or it's all simple, or it's all stuck in one place. What I hear your work doing is kind of exploding and proliferating and enriching our conception of what time is. As we're thinking about questions of sustainability, Catherine, which you've just been talking about, the idea of having place separate from time almost implies the idea that you can have a dead planet. I mean, temporality is clearly about life. So, what I can hear you say when you're saying we've got time and place connected is this is a deep commitment to a conception of a living way of being. Is that correct? Does that make sense?
Catherine Dussault (25:34)
Yeah, I think it fully makes sense. I think it also goes hand in hand with the way of conceiving agency. Agency is given to human but also to non-human persons. And I think it shows up until how we conceive what's around us, how we engage with it, but also how certain things cannot be dissociated from one another. We always mention like Indigenous ontologies are holistic and I think this is what we mean by it, that if you take something it's like everything goes together with it. Like you cannot just tackle one aspect of it and then hope for the best with the rest.
Keri Facer (26:14)
Matt, Frida, do you have any reflections on this issue? I in particular, I suppose there is this question, can we think of something that could be understood as Indigenous temporalities across your three very, very different parts of the world you're working in? Or is that something that should be resisted? Or what's your position on that? The three of you have come together to work together and you're using a framing of Indigenous temporality, but are there risks in that? I mean, I'm thinking about the way in which this kind of seven generations thinking gets picked up and used by, you know, business advisors massively oversimplifying what's going on? Matt.
Matthew Scobie (26:54)
Yeah there's huge risks of kind of like, 1) kind of liberal tokenism and then, 2) kind of this like blunt force commodification. But I'd also be clear that, I was certainly raised in a Western context. I pass as white and I have lots of what we'd say Pakeha or New Zealand, European phakapapa inside me. Those braid together. So, for me, this is still like engaging with new knowledge ⁓ as much as it's not necessarily embedded in my upbringing. So, yeah, if others have written about this and put this on the text, I will engage with that and feel less worried about kind of pre-commodification or pre-tokenism, but it's certainly been picked up across the seas. The key is to talk about Indigenous temporalities, right? So, we always talk about Indigenous temporalities in our work, both separately and together. And it's so easy to fall into, you know, you get seduced by how much there is in common, but that can kind of obscure how many wonderful, beautiful differences there are and complexities and contexts and those sorts of things. So, yeah, Indigenous temporalities is the key word we try and keep using and Māori temporalities and Ngāi Tahu temporalities too, because we are in this settler colonial context.
Keri Facer (28:21)
Thanks Matt, Frida?
Frida Buhre (28:24)
I was also in a similar way brought up in the south of Sweden, far away from Sámi land and the Sámi. So, also coming to this question, trying to learn rather than having any firm answers to what this might mean and also what it might mean in the contemporary moment that we're in. Perhaps one thing that unites us is that our cultures, we're not dominant Western capitalist societies. So in that sense, we have different relationships to the world and to time than what might come out of a conception like that. And I think for me, it's just a very material explanation to that. If you have another economic and societal organization, you will end up with a different, or at least somewhat different conception or way of using time. I mean, we just sharing stories among ourselves, There is that dimension of interrelationality and the uneasiness to separate time in units that are separate from each other and that are separate from land and people.
Catherine Dussault (29:28)
Everyone engages with the seven generations without really thinking what it means and how it can be done, like on a practical level. It's used by everyone, by people who basically use it to maybe, earn a grant, but also by Indigenous scholars who are really critical. And I think that one way to understand that is because colonial domination creates this effect also of homogeneity amongst the colonized, right? So, sometimes an answer to tackle down colonialism is to answer as a united voice and to say, we, the colonized, we, the seven generations. So, I think there are really like bounces like back and forth between these ways of conceiving culture, culture through the eye of the oppressor also. But I think there's this understanding among Indigenous peoples that we cannot only understand culture through that eye of the oppressor and that creates something also that is so homogeneous that it loses and like dissolves all the singularities that makes actually our strength and what we want to shed light on. So, the response to it, for many Indigenous scholars, is through the question of the capacity of generating and regenerating. And there's this artist and scholar, Leanne Simpson, who really focuses on that question of regenerating, like to maintain a resurgence in face of global colonial onslaught. And she calls it aanji maajitaawin, which means like to start anew and to regenerate. So, for her, it's really the capacity to transform the colonial exterior and also the response to that colonial exterior, but from within. So, to think from, I guess, native or Indigenous ways of flourishing. And I think like also non-indigenous scholars like Mamadou Diouf who's ⁓ an African scholar. He talks about dominant knowledges and he says like the only reason we have to call it that way is because Eurocentric dominant knowledge, they absorb every other knowledge and try to integrate it to their own. So we have to name it that way. It's normal that the first step maybe it's a response towards that. And I think we have to keep this in mind, and also as Indigenous scholars, try to think how to work the tension between like addressing a response that can't tackle like this colonial exterior but also interior, but also think the specificity and think the singularity of the voices. And I think it's really something that is super difficult but I think it's the only way to think of a way of theorizing or social actions that are like embedded in sociality and social actions, but at the same time try to transform it.
Keri Facer (32:56)
What I can hear you talking about is a political and an epistemic strategy of choosing when to singularize and when to specify, when to operate collectively and the right and the commitment to resist getting locked into either the specific or the general to be able to move between those positions. That to me seems like a really powerful both political and intellectual move I wanted to get to the paper that the three of you are writing together. So you're writing a piece of work around the concept of "Time back". And maybe you could just say a little something about how you got to that as a topic for yourselves, but also actually how you see time having been taken from Indigenous peoples through colonialism.
Matthew Scobie (33:48)
Starting with how we came together, two wonderful co-leads of a British Academy funded global convening grant on the Times of a Just transition, connected us and ⁓ very early on in the project, just as kind of all Indigenous scholars working on similar but very different projects and all kind of early career scholars. And going into these groups can be quite intimidating at first, so, it was nice to be connected before we all met up in person. So, then we started talking and realised that what we were doing had all these interconnections. We just thought how about we write together and combine some of these insights and we'd all in different ways kind of come to this concept of taking time back. "Time Back" plays on "land back" and ocean back and cash back and water back which has all been published. I have found a paper by a Māori scholar that uses time back specifically so made sure that was included in the paper at the very last minute once I found that, but yeah kind of kind of play out these different contexts, these different temporalities and these different violences that they were kind of resisting against but always centering their agency and resistance where possible.
Keri Facer (35:08)
So, the concept of land back and water back is tied to the idea that land and water and so forth have been taken from Indigenous people. You're operating with that metaphor around time, that time has literally been taken. So maybe you can help us drill down into what that means in practice. Like, is this a metaphor? Is this a literal thing? Where are you going with that argument?
Matthew Scobie (35:08)
Mm-hmm. Okay, well, I'll just go really briefly and then I think it would be a good point to bring in the other two because we all have specific cases of that happening and understand that better than each other, grounded in our own context. So, I came at it from a very kind of materialist perspective and this has actually not ended up in this paper. So, for me it was like we actually have quite a lot of land back and we've got quite a lot of rights to harvest back during the kind of settlement struggles, but we don't have time to go to the land, right? The land is very far away from where we live and work. We need wages. We need to work in particular places where there is industry and offices and so forth, right? It can actually cost a lot of money now to get to the land to do the practices. So, we need to earn cash somehow to pay that money to get to the land. And, so, we don't have so much autonomy over our time. And having the time to work with and be on the land was a big challenge. I'm certainly not the first person to think that. It was just what was coming up in my research with Ngāi Tahu food gatherers in particular. And there are lots of Māori scholars who have worked on temporality that I'm building on, lots of Indigenous scholars who have made these same kind of points. I'd like to hand pass over maybe to Frida to talk specifically about how time was taken in your context and maybe the nuance between time and temporality that we're trying to balance.
Frida Buhre (37:10)
Yeah, mean, to answer your question, Kerry, it's both a metaphor and a very real thing. For many Indigenous contexts, actual real lifetime in a very concrete sense of years lived was taken, either through genocide or imprisonment or years in different institutions like the boarding schools. So, there's a very literal sense that time was taken. so I'm gonna talk about Matthew's scholarship here, but there's also that thing that when land was taken, the value of that land has continued to increase, generated enormous amounts of wealth over time. And that was also taken and that's not usually recognized. Matt, correct me if I'm doing this wrong. but basically, like the years of not having owned land has also been stolen and the very real value of that land or resources, other forms of resources. So, in that sense, it's very concrete way that time has been stolen. But it's also on a perhaps cultural narrative or rhetorical level, time has also been stolen in the sense that histories have been erased, memories have not been recognized in public settings or public institutions. For me, it was very much so because I'm a rhetorician, so I work with political rhetoric. How do you mobilize? How do you get people engaged to political issues? So, I was looking at this Sámi civil rights movement in the early 20th century, And what caught my interest was that a lot of people who responded to this movement, like a lot of majority Swedish journalists or politicians, were sympathetic. They were not overtly negative or overtly saying no to the claims of the Sámi activists. But they always responded, "Oh, this is very nice and heartwarming, but you will disappear as a people. And that's very sad." And it was very blunt. And I'm putting it bluntly here, but it was also very blunt in the material. you can call this like a temporal violence, that by saying, ok, but you belong to the past, so therefore whatever you say in the present moment, has no consequences. It cannot generate any political response from us, any sort of responsibility to treat you as a citizen in the contemporary moment. So, I think that was a way that time was stolen on a very rhetorical level, but it had very material consequences. Yes, that's one thing. ⁓ Catherine, do you want to fill in on the perhaps the seasonal? The season's being stolen...
Catherine Dussault (40:06)
Yeah, well, think like, I work in Nunavik. I work in the Arctic and also the seasons are really important, as Frida was saying. And I think that in Nunavik, it's really both a metaphor and something practical in the sense that if land is taken, time is taken. So, because land was taken and also because land is still being taken for so many reasons, like resource extraction, the contamination of soil and water, but also through these treaties. I don't know if we will get to talk about this. But like land is being taken and, therefore, time is being taken also. There's this idea that maybe used to do things a certain way, but they cannot do it now anymore because of entering wage labor, but also because of the climate crisis. It is true that certain species are either inaccessible or very hard to access or there are bans on the harvesting of these species. So like we say, but this is something you used to do and not something you do now. So, there's this form of denying of who they understand themselves to be nowadays that is not legitimated in all, I guess, institutional spheres, but also sometimes through the discourses of different categories of actors. So, I think it's something that is really complex and I have to say, however, that this is not something that people engage with would name that way. They would not say, time is taken away from us. They might say it in the context when they really specifically talk about the possibility or not to conjugate different injunctions like to pay for the household, to pay for the food, pay for gas, and then be a good harvester, then be a good sewer, then all these things. They might say something like that. But I think they really think much more in terms of land and water being taken away from them. ⁓
Keri Facer (42:28)
It's so powerful hearing what you're all saying about time taken, time lost, temporal violence. I can hear a a really strong and really powerful narrative of loss there, really visceral account of loss. And particularly, mean, Your point, Frida, I think is a really fascinating one as well. The idea that if you're not seen as having a future, then you lose a voice in the present. So this sense of the locating of people in different temporalities, not only in terms of marginalization now, but by removing a particular image of the future, it kind of profoundly impacts political voice in the present. But let's not stick with this account of the violence and what was taken because I know all three of you are mainly focusing on questions of resistance and questions of finding different ways forward or out to try to avoid a temporal metaphor from these situations. Maybe one of you could begin by sharing where you're seeing really powerful sites of opportunity and resistance to these practices of temporal violence.
Matthew Scobie (43:39)
And, so, for us, yeah, there's the Treaty of Waitangi, which was signed in 1840 by 500 Māori leaders. Also, there were three Ngāi Tahu leaders who signed that. There's two versions of the treaty. There's the Māori language version that Māori signed, and there's the English version that Māori didn't sign. So, Māori take the Māori language version as the authoritative text. These have quite strong rights for Māori, both texts. But it was completely breached anyway, regularly breached and still is to this day, by the hour, right? I think New Zealand's probably asleep by now, but they're dreaming of ways to breach the treaty. And, so, this meant this claim that was lodged in 1849 was carried across all these generations. And so all of these generations gathered new evidence of the Crown wrongdoing and so Ngāi Tahu had quite concrete histories of what had happened, carefully documented, that the Crown didn't have and maybe the Crown got rid of them, maybe the Crown didn't bother keeping the records, but this new myth kind of emerged that New Zealand was settled peacefully. Ngāi Tahu sold their lands, that was silly of them, those kind of things, right? But we had very careful, and that's a royal we, I was not involved personally, but many of my distant relations were, kept these records, right? And when the claim was settled, we had a bunch of historians, really good historians, whole generation of Ngāi Tahu kind of scholars trained as historians for, you know, whatever reasons, but it might be a ⁓ political act, who then asserted the importance of maintaining this evidence base. And, so, we have the Ngāi Tahu archives. And again, I don't have anything to do with that directly, in awe of what they do. And It basically reveals how important Indigenous histories are and kind of interdependent archives are as preserving this because you can contradict these kind of dominant claims that represent dominant interests with having a sophisticated kind of archival system and evidence base. So, that was kind of that history that was erased that Frida mentioned. It was kind of taking the historical narrative back and that has this really strong temporal element because for Ngāi Tahu it's not about the when, it's about the who. And, so, there were all these whos that were collecting the evidence, all these whos that were contradicting the Crown's claims in Ngāi Tahu. It kept good evidence of that and of established archives to continue to do that.
Keri Facer (46:17)
Thanks, Matt. Catherine, I know that you're working closely on questions of treaties and their implications as kind of temporal technologies as well. Maybe we could drill into that in your setting as well.
Catherine Dussault (46:28)
In Nunavik it's played out differently, but they're really seminal to understanding representations of the land because there are different treaties that concern different areas of the land. So, there's not Nuna anymore, but there is like Nuna the terrestrial land and Nuna the water. And there's also underground. So, there's this legal division So, people, when they think about their land, they really genuinely make this distinction between the terrestrial and the marine region. These treaties, like the first one was signed in 1975 and the other one in 2007, So, these treaties really structure, as I said, the representations, but also like who can talk and make decisions about these terrestrial and marine regions. So, when there is like a co-management table, for instance, to decide like how we can manage the Caribou or the Beluga populations and so forth. But there's really this understanding that the knowers, the people who know about the land, are the harvesters, the men. So, now it makes that when people try to have a voice and say something about the land, whether it may be the water or the terrestrial land, mostly the people who are going to be engaged in these processes of decision making, but also in research because like researchers tend to ask questions to harvesters, to hunters, much more than a woman, for instance, who traditionally harvest much less. Well, nowadays, like this representation of who's a good person to know something about these things are men hunters and not women, despite the context of like the climate crisis and women in that case, like they know as much as men because they observe like the land nowadays. So I guess like the treaties really introduce also a certain division of labor and they also create new forms of injustices because it's a way to, I don't know, solidify what people have represented in Nunavik maybe 50 years ago.
Keri Facer (49:06)
That's fascinating. it keeps coming up on this series, the relationship between gender and time. what I'm hearing from what you're saying is not a fairly familiar argument about time and labor, but actually also time and representation and the way in which these treaties are crystallizing or sedimenting in time, particular sorts of gendered relations in places that don't then allow them to shift. So, I think it's fascinating that you're both working on treaties. what happens if we think about treaties as temporal technologies, as technologies that kind of intervene in relations and fix some, and then open others up and allow other relations to emerge? Really interesting stuff. I am going to have to move us on unfortunately because there is too much more to talk about. So, I want to come to you, Frida, in terms of the forms of resistance that you're working on, which is the artistic practice. And in particular, the artists that you're working on around the questions of the kind of the underground worker in the tapestries and the figure of the mole and the bringing of the past into the present. Can you say a little bit more about this? Bringing into this conversation.
Frida Buhre (50:16)
Yes, sure. so maybe I'll just give a little bit of background on the... I mean, just maybe to connect to what Catherine and Matthew were saying that in Sapni there are no treaties. We have that difficulty of like the legal process is just in its very initial stages, just last few years. so the courts have not been a very good arena to proliferate, as Sami rights But art has. So there's let me just bring up one example of Britta Márakatlába, who's a textile artist, very well recognized. She does these very long and very big artworks where she weaves different stories, some histories and some methodologies, but also like histories of colonization, history of extraction, history of climate change, and mining, which is very big extractive industry in Sapmi. So in all of her artwork, there are these figures from the underground. They might be ancestors. They might be godlike creatures of some sort. They are often female. And for most Sámi, we don't talk too much about the people of the underground because they are so powerful. But I think it's interesting that they surface to the above ground here and there in her artwork constantly, because her artwork is so historical in the sense that it tells the narrative. So, it's very temporal in that sense. And the people in the underground sort of continue to be part of every frame. So, you have what happens above ground and you have what happens underneath ground. And they're kind of synchronous in the way that the art is depicting events. And then I was reading this Indigenous scholar, Nick Estes, who has written a really beautiful book on Standing Rock and resistance there. And he was bringing up the figure of the mole in Marx. Estes uses it as a metaphor to argue for the importance of everyday practices as practices of resistance. That if you survive, or if you enact Indigenous ways of life in the way that you cook, or in the way that you talk, or in the way that you weave, or in the way that you go about your daily life, it kind of creates this tunnel network that opens up for that moment when the resistance surfaces above ground, that it has this protective network where it can go back and hide if the revolution didn't really work out well, basically. So, you have to like nurture these tunnels of like the underground and, for Estes, it's a call to uphold these everyday practices. And I just simply wanted to add maybe also that they could be understood as a temporal metaphor, that the underground is to sustain relationships with the past. It's also a way to dig these tunnels of resistance.
Keri Facer (53:39)
And you're giving us that, I mean, I think the your example there is, is a really helpful parallel to the work on treaties, because it's, it's foregrounding, as you say, the everyday practices, the underground, the things that are not necessarily as visible in practices of resistance, where you have the kind of spectacular moment of a treaty negotiation, for example, on one level, and then you also have the ongoing everydayness that is less visible. But I want to ⁓ pull this now also to questions of the future in your work Where do you see the connection?
Matthew Scobie (54:15)
Yes, we have a future, we have to, but how can we create like a framework where future generations can hold us to account for our actions today that has some kind of like concrete kind of hooks or monitoring and have been, you know, exploring that for a few years now and still haven't figured it out within our own temporality traditions. There is a future strategy for Ngāi Tahu and it's necessarily political. It's called mō kaori and that comes from the proverb associated with the claim right, from 1849, mo tātou, mō kaori a muri ake nei, for us and our children after us. And that's children in a very wide sense. It's not necessarily direct descendants. It's understanding all children. And so, yeah, the future strategy is mō kaori thinking about 2050 and what things look like. And it's so complicated because it's in this settler colonial context. We have the kind of rhythms of the three year kind of democratic process and this massive whiplash in terms of respect for the treaty among the different kind of political parties of the state. And we also have, you know, these investments within capitalism, which are subject to the typical criteria of capitalism, future discounting and quarterly reporting and annual reporting and quarterly budgets and annual budgets, right? And so, yeah, there are all these kind of challenges of trying to bring these temporalities to life in this context. But really, it is about these obligations to past generations and future generations and uncertainty. So, I remember going to one of our like primary kind of knowledge keepers that I know personally at least and I was kind of like how do you think our tūpuna, or our ancestors thought about the future? And he was just like, they didn't. And I was like, okay, maybe I shouldn't have like signed up for this project but we'll persevere and we'll keep going. There's lots of useful metaphors like wayfinding is a really important metaphor in Māori society because Māori did come from the Pacific, right? So, one of the most like profound kind of intense intergenerational migrations across this Pacific Ocean using stars to navigate and in these amazing waka, or large canoes, you know across the most kind of vast oceanic continent there is on the planet And, you know, all the uncertainty associated with that, right? In just having your coordinates and heading towards them or heading away from something. There's plenty of metaphor to work with. What it means in the contemporary context is the harder thing I'm trying to think about.
Keri Facer (57:06)
If I compare that with a sort of modernist framing of the future, which is you come up with this brilliant idea and you create a blueprint and then your job is to work backwards from it and just kind of create it completely ignoring the fact that the world changes on an ongoing basis, So you end up with violence inevitably with that sort of model. Whereas what you're talking about there is a relation to the future of both accountability and kind of dynamic positioning. You are moving and adapting and responding to what's going on. So, to me, that seems like an incredibly interesting and very helpful way of thinking about futures.
Matthew Scobie (57:41)
Eruera Tarena and Awhina McGlinchey who are part of Tōkono Te Raki, they're actually leading this Futures project. The last thing around futures is this idea of ⁓ Ka Mua Ka Muri, walking backwards into the future. And we've heard that in a lot of different kind of traditions and Indigenous traditions, but basically you can't discount where we've come from in thinking about the future strategy and that's probably the most important thing that's come up I think for them is using that as one of the navigational coordinates.
Keri Facer (58:16)
Thanks Matt. Catherine, is there anything you'd like to come in on on that one?
Catherine Dussault (58:21)
Well, maybe just one word, but it's a bit heavy and political. When we think about the future, ⁓ especially when we think about the fact that we have experienced and still continue to experience colonialism, dispossession, and ethnicized, one basic thing is the right to exist. And it seems to be very basic, but it's denied. Like just on May 5th was the day to remember our sisters who were stolen, murdered, disappeared in Canada. And like just yesterday, there was another murder by police in Nunavik where I work. And this is systemic. And the violence is against others, but also against oneself as we know. So, the capacity to exist, to generate life... So, generation is also important as a verb, not only as a noun, like the concept of sociological generation, but also to generate life, capacities to live the way you want to live, but simply breathe. In a context where the colonial violence is atmospheric, I think that this is an act of resistance to survive as we say with like this mirror also, but I think it's something that is more difficult than people who are privileged could think. So, I just want to say that when we think about future, we have to think about the capacity of living.
Keri Facer (59:56)
Thanks, Catherine. That's such an important and powerful intervention and one that is completely ignored in most modernist futures thinking, the fundamental right to continued existence. You're all focusing on collectively on this question of time back. What does time back look like for you?
Frida Buhre (1:00:14)
It would mean that, first of all, we got our past back. That to me is like the first step, the one that I cannot sort of bypass somehow. For the storytellers that I work with here or whose work I engage with, it seems also to be the thing that needs to happen first at least. That what happened needs to be acknowledged. It needs to be memorialized in different ways, which in the Nordic context has just been completely ignored, completely silenced. There's no recognition of what happened until very, very recently we've seen some discussions. So, that to me is like the first step. But I also think that I do want to keep this very concrete sense of time back means also resources back and the stop of extractivist industries. There's no life when those practices continue, like the mining industries, the clear cutting of forests. There's just like no way that life can regenerate in a context like that. So, for me, it's about the past, but it's about like the present needs to be fixed pretty straightforwardly. Yeah. And from there, I think there might be paths or decisions to be made ahead. Those would be my two first steps in taking time back.
Keri Facer (1:01:47)
Thanks, Frida. Matt, Catherine?
Matthew Scobie (1:01:51)
Certainly it's reparations. If land was taken 100 years ago and that land has accumulated value then reparations need to kind of match that so reparations are an important part of time back, but for lots of people that we care about both now and the future but particularly in the past, they're never getting their time back, right? And that's heartbreaking and tragic. So, that creates kind of more obligations on us to do the best that we can with the time that we have. The big part is just autonomy over our time, right? So, the reason I didn't write up that particular case study I started with is because it's like, well, how do you decouple from wage labor? That's another, you know, ⁓ lifelong research agenda. So, let's just focus on the archives for now. But yeah, autonomy over time and that requires the needs of life to be kind of served in a different way that aren't necessarily accessed through commodified wages on commodity markets. And that's kind of a big picture thing for us to think about down here. So, yeah, just wanted to acknowledge that lots of people are never getting their time back and that creates huge obligations on us and everyone today and in the future to kind of honour that in whatever way we can.
Keri Facer (1:03:07)
Thanks Matt. Catherine, any last comment or?
Catherine Dussault (1:03:21)
It's important for me to highlight the importance of governance and the capacity to govern their own lives, political organizations and relationships with one another and with oneself and with other nations as something that is so like a key element for sustainable futures. And maybe I will blink at the concept of seven generations. Like, I think maybe it's important to think like about the seven generations and to involve them in every action we make now and to adjust, like to accept the transformation as the process of including the seven generations in our present.
Keri Facer (1:04:10)
Thank you, all three of you. You've brought a really powerful conversation together. The work you're doing is so important. What I can hear is some really profound radical demands. And with our old word radical of the going to the root, the going to the underpinning assumptions of how lives are organized, governed, managed. I can hear you talking about time back being at literally a matter of life and death. And it brings a real power and weight. So, thank you for taking the time to talk with us today.
