Recent years have witnessed growing interest in the role of temporality in political life. Research on social movements, collective action, memory politics, political imagination, prefiguration, anticipation, and future-making has highlighted how political actors construct narratives of the past, experience the present, and envision alternative futures. Similarly, scholarship on Indigenous politics has increasingly examined the significance of historical memory, intergenerational responsibility, ancestral relations, resurgence, and decolonial futures in Indigenous political thought and practice.
Despite these advances, the temporal dimensions of Indigenous collective action remain insufficiently theorised. Existing studies have often focused on particular temporal orientations without systematically examining how Indigenous actors mobilise and contest relationships between past, present, and future. Moreover, dominant theories of political action frequently rely on linear, progressive, or developmental understandings of time that may not adequately capture Indigenous temporalities and their political implications.
This panel seeks to address these gaps by bringing Indigenous politics into dialogue with broader debates on temporality and political action. In doing so, it aims to deepen our understanding of how political struggles are shaped by competing relationships to time and of how Indigenous actors particularly reconfigure connections between past, present, and future in the pursuit of collective self-determination.
Therefore, this panel invites contributions that examine how temporalities are mobilised, contested, and enacted in Indigenous political life, encompassing both conventional and unconventional forms of political action and praxis. We especially welcome contributions addressing – although not limited to – the following topics:
• The collective mobilisation of Indigenous histories (i.e. memory politics)
• Indigenous experiences of truth, reconciliation, and redress processes
• Competing interpretations of historical treaties and agreements and their political ramifications
• Temporal dimensions of resistance, resurgence, refusal, and survival
• The temporalities of Indigenous responses to crises and emergencies (e.g. pandemics, climate change)
• Experiences of waiting, urgency, interruption, and endurance in Indigenous contentious politics
• Indigenous futurisms and political imagination (e.g., constitutional transformation, climate justice, future-oriented dimensions of sovereignty)
• Non-linear, cyclical, relational, or entangled understandings of time in Indigenous political action
• Everyday practices enacting desired Indigenous futures and alternatives (i.e. prefigurative politics)
• Conflicts between state and Indigenous temporal narratives
• Temporalities of reconciliation and decolonisation
