COLLAPSING TIME: INDIGENOUS STORYTELLERS AND THE ‘EVERYWHEN’

Bronte Gosper

Too often, Indigenous voices encounter over-mystification, Indigenous testimonies are romanticized, and the ever-nodding head of (often well-meaning) non-indigenous listeners belabours our freedom of expression. What is their demand? Why is an Indigenous story more relevant when it is a story of suffering? The conditions of settler colonialism seem to ensure that its expectations reproduce themselves again and again, shapeshifting through the public imaginary. How can we escape this? The uniquely non-linear narrative structures used by my narrators have powerful discursive implications. Aboriginal voices, once set loose in the polity, are subject to the settler pull to foreclose stories of colonial imposition and suffering and in doing so place ‘the past’ definitively in the past, making way for a united future. The mirage of a delineated settler past and future builds an edifice supplanting Indigenous experiences and understandings of time and reality. W.E.H Stanner in 1956 wrote that time, in Indigenous conceptions tied to the Dreaming, is most accurately understood as the ‘everywhen’. My narrators were collapsing time in their approach to storytelling and in doing so, refusing colonialism. How can these oral histories shape our understandings of time and how is this, in itself, a form of activism? In my documentary and accompanying writing, refusing colonial time comes to be a way of asserting Indigenous sovereignty and an Indigenous temporality through oral history.

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