Laura Lee Honsig

"Temporality and the Conventions of Historiography: Writing Native North American History"

in the 21st Century Engaging with Native North American history requires engaging with questions of temporality, both on an epistemological and on a historiographical level. The cultures of many if not all Native nations are based in conceptions of time quite different than those of the Euro-American world, namely nonlinear and – often though not always – deeply connected to the Earth. That is to say that past, present, and future have a different relationship to one another, to living beings, and to the environment, worldviews that are often understood as 'cosmologies' in the existing literature. Various Native peoples' ways of understanding their own history have found relatively little currency in Euro-American traditions of history-writing, though they have influenced literary studies and Native and Indigenous studies in particular. Archaeology as well as the history of science also have established literatures on knowledge systems related to time keeping that are relevant. Nevertheless, dominant Euro-American historiography of Native North America has generally employed a linear chronology that is profoundly Eurocentric, erasing millennia of Native presence on the North American continent. Indeed, the story of Native Americans does not start in 1492 if it has a singular 'start' at all. Europeans arriving in the 15the century encountered complex Native social and political formations that had existed in changing ways for centuries, though one would likely not know this from reading most histories of North America or the age of 'discovery.' This presentation seeks to offer an initial exploration of the topic of temporality in relation to Native North America, focusing more so on Native conceptions of time and history as well as their interventions in Western academic historiography than rehearsing the long-established critique of Eurocentrism and erasure. The discussion will be guided by the central question of what these ideas mean for writing Native North American history from within academia today.