Beyond Settler Sovereignty: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination by Mark Rifkin (review)

Mark Rifkin's Beyond Settler Sovereignty offers a series of important critical insights as it brings the theoretical body of queer temporalities into conversation with the field of Native American and Indigenous studies. In the first chapter, Rifkin relies upon non-Native theorists like Henri Bergson, Lauren Berlant, Albert Einstein, Johannes Fabian, and Elizabeth Freeman to lay groundwork for understanding settler heteronormative conceptions of time; he then engages Native American and Indigenous studies scholars like Kevin Bruyneel, Mishuana Goeman, Deborah Miranda, Audra Simpson, Dale Turner, Robert Warrior, and others to build parameters for understanding how Indigenous formulations of time might differ and proceeds to debunk the myth of a "global 'coevalness'" (21). In fact, Rifkin warns, to insist upon a shared experience of time between settler and Indigene "reduces the immanent trajectories of indigeneity (processes of Native becoming) to a set of points—the supposedly shared now of the present, modernity, national history, and so on" (26). In this chapter, Rifkin also sets up important theoretical concepts that he will track throughout the book like storying and backgrounding.

In his second chapter, Rifkin opens with an anecdote about viewing the film Lincoln and its silent portrayal of Seneca hahësnowa:nëh (Chief) Ely S. Parker, a representation that he finds ultimately stands for Native peoples' struggles for sovereignty and the ways in which Native American identity precludes inclusion in a national narrative that centralizes the Civil War as integral to becoming. For Rifkin, Lincoln's imagining of the Civil War and its meaning can be better apprehended by analyzing "how periodization participates in the storying and unfolding of national time, giving shape to the present and the sense of its potentials by reactivating . . . an inherent perceptual tradition" (50). Rifkin traces a process he calls the emancipation sublime and uses it to denote the war's meaning as a vehicle for making apparent the state's inherent democracy, a process that disallows Native peoples' inclusion in the "temporality of the union" (51–52).

Rifkin's argument is convincing in many ways, but would be helped by spending time on the intersections of "the union" and Parker's role in both it and the Iroquois Confederacy, given the founding fathers' employment of Hodinöhšö:ni:h governance as a template for designing US democracy. This concern is a minor quibble in a book spilling over with impressive insights about Indigenous temporalities and their relationship to sovereignty, however. Rifkin concludes the chapter with an analysis of non-Native depictions of Indigenous military actions in the 1862 Dakota Conflict as "temporally exceptional" (67).

In the third chapter, Rifkin analyzes how allotment sought to impose settler temporality upon Native people through its enforcement of nuclear family structures, individualized land ownership, and participation in a cash economy and its dismantling of traditional forms of governance and cultural expression (namely clothing, language, religion, gender). Focusing upon John Joseph Mathews's novel Sundown, Rifkin argues its main character Chal's "feeling of queerness" as he comes of age attests to "the emergence and persistence of modes of perception, experience, and memory that link Osage people to that place" (98–99). Rifkin explores the Osage mineral estate as furnishing "a basis for common experiences of time" and reflecting a "duration of peoplehood," in spite of allotment efforts to divide Osage lands and dissolve these ties. Rifkin concludes that Mathews's portrayal of Osage people during the "Great Frenzy" gestures toward Osage ways of occupying the land that emphasize silences and "becoming," and depicts signal markers of Osage temporalities that run counter to American development narratives.

Rifkin's fourth chapter centers on portrayals of the Ghost Dance in Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer and Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens in the Dunes, focusing on the role of prophecy, cross-temporality, and asynchrony in Indigenous temporal formations that he terms prophetic temporality. Rifkin sees Alexie's deployment of the Ghost Dance as an...