The Duration of the Land: The Queerness of Spacetime in Sundown

In 1906 Congress passed the Osage Allotment Act, extending to the Osage Nation the principles of the allotment program generally.¹ This policy imaginary draws on figurations of temporality in order to remap and reorder spatial relations. Presented by officials and supporters as a means by which Indians could progress from a stunted and backward savagery toward civilization, allotment offered a vision of necessary development over time that bracketed the struggle between Indigenous and settler geopolitical formations.² Emplotting Native governance and sovereignty as merely a moment within an evolutionary process of becoming casts Indians as moving toward the achievement of liberal modernity, rather than as struggling to retain control over their territories and to maintain their self-determination as peoples. In this way the projection of (settler) futurity legitimizes the effort to transform Native sociospatial dynamics at all levels, so as to make Indigenous lands more available for non-native expropriation, occupation, and investment. However, the use of narratives of time by the state as part of realizing and validating the restructuring of Native geographies does not encompass Indigenous temporalities. If the question of “simultaneity” and the need to produce a global sense of it due to European and US military, political, and commercial aims was a central concern in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this impulse also generated considerable scientific and philosophical debate over the nature or possibility of an absolute, shared “now,” a process of intellectual ferment that provided the context of emergence for theories of relativity and the notion of “spacetime.”³ We might understand allotment as a kind of spacetime, in the sense that its developmental vision helps catalyze the reconfiguration of the sociopolitical landscape, but such an analysis opens up the question of the existence of other kinds of spatiotemporal experience that remain available for Indigenous people(s) in that “same” space.

I choose the term “spacetime” advisedly, drawing on its role within the theory of general relativity. In a Newtonian notion of absolute time it exists and moves relentlessly forward at the same pace irrespective of its contents or any relations external to it, but in a postrelativistic vision of time its movements and unfolding are shaped by extant fields of force, functioning as part of a four-dimensional manifold with space. Within Einsteinian relativity, gravitational fields create curvatures in spacetime, and those curvatures result from the interpenetrating, mutually (although not equally) influencing operation of a potentially infinite number of gravitational fields whose relation with and impact on each other, as well as on matter and energy, depend on objects’ mass, proximity, and velocity. Drawing on this notion, and the challenge it poses to any absolute conception of “simultaneity,” I am suggesting the existence of divergent lived experiences of temporality that are coconstituted with spatial formations.⁴ Chris Andersen has argued that a scholarly insistence on Indigenous “difference” from non-natives creates a situation in which “Indigenous complexity [is] reductively fixed in time and space through apparently objective, logical markers used to bear the discursive weight of our authenticity and legitimacy” (92), and he proposes, instead, “beginning with the assumption that Indigenous communities are epistemologically dense (rather than just different)” (97). The concept of density functions as a way of indexing how Native social matrices in their rhythms of persistence, adaptation, and alteration (including in responding to colonial impositions, regulations, elisions, and violence) cannot be understood simply as localized divergence from Euramerican social and political modalities, which are treated as the paradigmatic basis for understanding what space and time “really” are. My use of the concept of spacetime functions as a way of indicating the density of Indigenous phenomenologies given the ways that US efforts to reorganize Native life (such as through allotment) are layered over extant spatiotemporal formations that are affected by those efforts but are not, in that process, made coincident with settler frameworks. Everyday Indigenous experiences of space and time can be understood as dynamic, expressing forms of stability while shifting in relation to new developments, without reading such continuity-in-change (or change-in-continuity) as deviation from an “authentic...