In his new monograph, Mark Rifkin considers the temporal location of indigenous peoples in the American imaginary, an issue that he acknowledges to have not just literary significance but also considerable political and legal ramifications. Rifkin locates his study in relation to two persistent problems in the way that temporal schema are often applied in understanding indigenous writing and experience. First, he reminds us, there is a long-standing discursive tradition of treating indigenous people as anachronistic and premodern. This tradition generates a variety of problems, ranging from primitivist stereotypes to damaging standards of authenticity. In many ways, these are problems well known in the field. Rifkin's key intervention in Beyond Settler Time, however, is to challenge the long-term efficacy of decolonization strategies focussing primarily on asserting the contemporaneity of Native peoples – efforts to include them in “settler time.” Pursuing mere temporal recognition within the frameworks established by Western settler colonial states, he suggests, undermines important efforts to index and foreground the plural temporalities that characterize the experiences of many indigenous polities. Working in a manner parallel to recent work by Glen Coulthard and Audra Simpson (both of whom question the wisdom of pursuing political strategies based on recognition and reconciliation), Rifkin argues that indigenous assertions of “temporal sovereignty” must be supported by new forms of critical and theoretical praxis.Footnote ¹

Framing his new project rather modestly, Rifkin notes that in Beyond Settler Time he is “offering less an explanation than a hermeneutic” while suggesting that his musings have an “inherently speculative quality” (4). Such a formulation rather understates the complexity and erudition of the book's opening chapter, where Rifkin articulates with considerable theoretical sophistication the importance of interpretive practices that ensure “Native peoples’ varied experiences of duration can remain nonidentical with respect to the dynamic of settler colonial foundations” (3). It is true, nevertheless, that the heart of the book is to be found in the analysis that dominates the three remaining chapters. Each of these chapters endeavours to explore a different form of temporality and set of temporal problems, primarily through close readings of canonical literary texts. Chapter 2 considers the place of American Indians within the historical narratives built up around the US Civil War, narratives that frame said conflict as a step in a national teleology of democratic unfolding. Opening with a reflection on the silent presence of Ely S. Parker in the 2012 Stephen Spielberg film Lincoln, the chapter unfolds into a rich meditation on the enduring strategies for indigenous erasure that characterize the settler colonial project. Rifkin weaves together discussions of Lincoln's execution of the Mankato 38 during the Dakota War of 1862, Parker's prewar involvement in Seneca resistance to removal and subsequent career as an advocate of legal engagement with the settler state, and Charles Eastman's literary efforts to challenge the periodization of American history in his Dakota autobiographies. Taken together, these commentaries highlight the enormous challenges for decolonization created by the narrative and political structures that came into full potency during the nineteenth century. Chapter 3 shifts the focus to the experience of allotment among the Osage in the early twentieth century and presents John Joseph Mathews's novel Sundown (1934) as a complex form of literary resistance to the temporality of assimilationism. Rifkin's close reading of that text highlights Mathews's ability to register the contest between different temporalities in a particularly charged political context. Sundown mobilizes and juxtaposes three different modes of time to give a sense of the “density of experience” in Osage country during and after Allotment (128). In doing so, Rifkin suggests, the novel indexes persistent Osage resistance to efforts to reduce the scope of their being to better allow them to be absorbed into the colonial state. Rifkin's final chapter considers the nature of prophetic temporality, explored through the history of the Ghost Dance and its later literary reinterpretation in Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer (1996) and Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens in the Dunes (1999). Rifkin puts forward an indigenous understanding of prophetic time, which he presents as a challenge to teleological conceptions of history. Indigenous prophecy indexes a worldview where past, present, and future are collectively and mutually constitutive, as opposed to lining up in evolutionary, and linear, causal chains. Within that context, and in diverse ways, Rifkin sees Alexie and Silko reexpressing the Ghost Dance's emphasis on the communal power of rejuvenation in the face of Euro-American “necropolitics” (the capacity to dictate, discursively and institutionally, who may live and who must die).

It is impossible in a brief review to do justice to the full richness of Beyond Settler Time. Rifkin is meticulous in positioning his own work in relation to other scholarship, and while at times this forces the reader to work through the extant discourse surrounding a particular novel or text to get at the new interpretive kernel, that work is always rewarding. It is probably true that the points where readers might be most likely to disagree with, or at least deviate from, Rifkin's conclusions are highlighted in the short Coda that ends the book. There we are reminded of Rifkin's discomfort with critical models that seem to accept, if not champion, strategies of engagement with the colonial state. In concluding the book, Rifkin argues explicitly for suspending the question of how temporal sovereignty, as he has discussed it, “could or should be operationalized as part of juridical apparatuses and processes” (180). Rifkin's position here aligns in many ways with Glen Coulthard's arguments in Red Skin, White Masks (2014), and locates him alongside a number of critics interested in challenging the efficacy and validity of more pragmatic scholarly approaches to decolonization. There are, I think, compelling arguments on both sides of this debate. Rifkin's ability to highlight new contexts in which this deeper conversation about the nature of critical praxis can register, however, is one more reason why Beyond Settler Time is a valuable contribution to the field of indigenous studies.