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Mark Rifkin. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 277 pp. Paper, $25.99.
As Mark Rifkin suggests in Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination, Native peoples in the United States have their own modes of reckoning time that support Indigenous selfdetermination and ongoing decolonization efforts. Reading across an archive of Indigenous-produced literature, belief systems, and temporal landscapes, Rifkin deconstructs the frameworks around which settler histories are oriented and moves us toward new ways of apprehending simultaneous, and competing, experiences of reality. Mark Rifkin is a professor of English and the director of the Women's and Gender Studies program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and he is a prolific scholar whose areas of expertise include Native American literature and gender and sexuality studies.
As the master historical narrative in the United States would suggest, Indigenous peoples traditionally "vanish"-there is no other possible outcome to this story; no possible deviation from what has routinely been cast as an inevitable "truth." In the United States, as in other colonial cultures, Indigenous "disappearance" is witnessed through the consumption of historical literature that has not admitted the Indigenous perspectives, ways of being, and systems of meaning making that challenge the European American epistemologies around which fictive national "unity" coheres. As Rifkin observes in Beyond Settler Time, this dominant historiographic tradition not only labors to deny Indigenous peoples a significant historical and contemporary presence but also renders illegible...