Two worldviews – at least – collide inside me. One is the pace and rhythms of the Gregorian calendar, driven by the relentless pressure of the Protestant work ethic, forged in the toxic urgency of late-stage capitalism, and sculpted by the various forms of supremacy and oppression. The other is the pace, rhythm, and cycles of earth, waters, sky, body.

I learned this latter world of time at the pace of a river. In 2021, I was blessed with the opportunity to raft what the Paiute people who have lived along the rim call Kaibab, colonially known as the Grand Canyon. For 21 days, I was immersed in the life of Ha'gthayah — the big river, or “a lot of water coming through,” as it it is known by the Havasuw `Baaja, the people of the blue green waters, who have lived in the canyon since time immemorial. 

I learned that surrendering to the movements and speed of the river did not mean moving slowly; indeed, sometimes the rapids carried me so swiftly downstream I didn’t have capacity for rational thought, and could only respond instinctually to quickly changing conditions. Other times were more languid, a chance to rest, laugh, and play. The worst were the (many) times I found myself stuck in eddies, watching my companions float by effortlessly as I worked as hard as I could while barely moving at all. 

Even in these moments of being caught in an eddy, it was a profound gift to be in a place where clock time had no meaning, where a worldview that breaks time into hours, minutes, seconds, could fall away. Life took on a coherent rhythm, one that felt true in my body.

Remembering the world of time that is the river, I feel the collision of times. I know I am not alone in longing for a different rhythm than what modernity provides. And I am grateful for the opportunity to practice rehabilitating and reimagining time in community, as part of the Re-Calling our Ancestors collective. Re-Calling our Ancestors is community exploration and ritual inquiry into ancestral recovery, truth-telling, and repair; we offer educational and healing space for committed white, white-passing, and white-assimilated anti-racists to deepen their practice of ancestral connection. Since our beginnings, our team has learned that time-travel is at the center of our work: recollecting ancestral lineages for their relevance in the political present and for the sake of flourishing futures. We are in a prayer of ‘when?’ as much as we make offerings of ‘what?’ and ‘how?’  We have been dedicating ourselves to the work of mending the violence which white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism have waged on bodies, on land, and our experience(s) of time, guided by these questions: 

• What can ancestral calendars, seasonal festivals, and iterative ritual practices teach us? 

• How can we navigate our contemporary lives with guidance and grounding in relation to time? 

• In what ways do ancestral cycles connect us to past, present, and future? 

Where are we? When are we?

I write this piece on the couch my partner inherited from his grandmother, in our little home on stolen Methow lands, amidst the expanses of bitterbrush above the Methow River, right by the tiny airport that doubles as a smokejumper base in fire season. It is in this area that Methow survivors of early settlement efforts were rounded up by the US Army and forcibly marched out of the valley and into the Okanogan Valley to the east, in 1886.

I draft these words in early September 2024; the moon is still new enough that a crescent hasn’t yet appeared in the sky but might tonight. The Methow people know this moon as the Time of the Salmon Return; my Slavic relatives understand it as вересень, veresen — the moon of purple heather. The days are still hot enough outside for me to try to avoid midday sun, but the nights have grown longer and much cooler, enough that I want a sweatshirt in the mornings. The harvest is coming in, and hunting season is just around the corner. Virgo season is fully upon us, inviting us to become present to the ever-changing nature of the earth and our bodies.  Today is day 922 since war broke out in Ukraine, and 333 days since Hamas attacked Israel and Israel responded with horrific and unrelenting violence. It’s 61 days until the presidential election in the United States. I’m a week behind the due date to have a draft for my team.

All of these realities — and so many more — inform this essay. What I might say on the topic of Ancestral Time-Keeping on a different day, and/or on different lands, would be informed by different realities. Such are the nature of time and place.

How I Arrive to This Conversation 

I come to this conversation about Ancestral Time-Keeping, and its relationship with the work of dismantling white supremacy, as a student and practitioner of culture. Culture — defined by the dictionary as “the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another” — includes all of the material things which unite a group, like food, technology, and clothing, as well as language, expectations of behavior, religion, worldview, and more. Culture shapes not just the way we see the world but our navigation of and embodiment of worldviews. Being a student and practitioner of culture means that I’m constantly trying to make sense of the lifeways of my community (and other communities), and working to create alternatives away from violence, hierarchy, and division, and towards healing, liberation, justice, and peace. 

I first began to understand the importance of time in the work of culture-building when worlds of time collided like lava meeting ocean waves. This was 2008, at a community gathering on Hawai’i, where a significant breach in protocol brought the gathering to a screeching halt, catalyzed by a clash of two different understandings of time. This experience ruptured my understanding of the very essence of how time works (or more basically, my understanding that there even were different ways that time works). 

The experience impacted many of those present, as well as others who learned of the incident afterwards. Out of it, an emerging intergenerational, multicultural, and multi-racial community recognized that in order to come together, we must develop shared language, maps, and protocols to account for different cultural orientations, including different experiences of time — as well as our understanding of protocol. When Youth Passageways, the organization that was seeded at this gathering, emerged five years later (and I stepped into the role of founding staff member), the experience led us to create “Cross Cultural Protocols in Rites of Passage: Guiding Principles, Themes, and Inquiry.” This living, evolving document includes this statement regarding Different Perspectives/Perceptions of Time:

We strive to become sensitized to different perceptions of time within and between different cultures. We recognize that ceremonial time differs from linear time and our work and schedules are designed with that awareness. We strive to set and keep to agreements of time and space, including agreements that at times, time will be fluid and processes will last as long as required. We commit to holding a long view of time, which holds in our awareness many generations of ancestors as well as future generations to come.

A few years later, it led us to identify “Respect for Time and Place” as one of Youth Passageways’ four core values, with these commitments: 

• We listen for the wisdom and guidance of the earth, giving attention to the impact of time and place, honoring the seasons and natural cycles.

• We hold as truth that time is circular, cyclical, expansive, and serves as our ally.

• We uphold our work as doing our part contributing to the past, present, and future generations.

These experiences and collectively-articulated understandings prepared the soil for my own emerging understandings, and offered me foundational practices to help these understandings begin to take root and grow. Alongside other frameworks, tools, and practices, these orientations inform our work at Re-Calling our Ancestors.

Theoretical Considerations in the Discussion of Ancestral Time-Keeping

The story of what happened at that gathering highlights the significance of what sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel calls “time-maps” – mental constructs complete with whole social topologies. Through time-maps we are oriented to hills, valleys, edges, and centers, “full” and “empty” times that structure our collective understandings of time. As philosopher Charles W. Mills explains, we “rely… on these maps and how they enable us to locate ourselves in the intersubjective time of our group.”** Time-maps make up our internal experience of seasons, cycles, and change, but also frame how we understand these aspects of time on a cultural level.

Time-maps are foundational to chronopolitics – understanding of political power is affected by our understanding of time and history, and vice versa. Mills notes that just as there are contested geographies and geopolitics, there are contested ways of relating to time, and contested chronopolitics. In other words, the way we experience time is ancestral and historical, impacted by our socio-political context, and invested in norms and values. How this works can be experienced in a variety of ways.

One, we inherit time-maps. We received our temporality — knowingly or unknowingly — from the past. These time-maps might be quite specific - a yearly flow in my family marked by Christmas and a December 31/January 1 “New Year” as important celebrations where all work stops, for example. Or they might be quite general: a lunar ethnic calendar as opposed to a solar civil one, orienting to time as polychronic or monochronic time, or a rural agricultural temporality compared to an urban experience of time.

Second, we exist within time-maps. Jenny O’Dell describes an important aspect of how this works under capitalism in detail in Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, in her discussion of something she calls ‘entrainment.’ She notes that “[t]his phenomenon, in which one adapts her temporal rhythms to those of someone or something else…often plays out on an uneven field of relationships that reflects hierarchies of gender, race, class, and ability.”*** O’Dell offers the example of a woman running a café in a small village in Java. The café is open in the middle of the night catering to tourists. This café owner has entrained herself to the wishes of the tourists who want to climb the Ijen volcano in time for the sunrise. Time is classed, raced, abled, gendered, and colonized. Within the dominant culture, we live in the era of human-centered time. Even more specific than human-centered, we live within white, Christian, cismale, able-body-centered time. This is our dominant time-map.

Third, we practice time-maps. Whether consciously or subconsciously, the way we ‘do’ time is always the perpetuation of certain commitments that are shaping present and future realities. We can choose to practice time-maps driven by capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy; and we can practice time-maps rooted in cycles of earth, sky, and water. And of course, we can practice active engagement in integrating the two (more on this below). 

Temporal Assimilation & De-Assimilation

Building individual and collective awareness about how we can and do inherit, exist within, and practice time-maps allows us to take steps toward de-assimilating from whiteness - the primary goal of our work at Re-Calling our Ancestors. 

For example, many of us have absorbed cultural stories like time is linear, uni-directional, fixed, and scarce — or cultural truisms like time is money – since our earliest memories. Remember being taught to read a clock as a child? Remember having that brilliant idea and being told 'there's not enough time' to pursue it? Remember the first time you heard the phrase ‘youth is wasted on young’? Remember the feeling of anxiety racing through you when you thought you might show up late to work? Remember how hard it was to wrap your mind around what happened yesterday, what will happen in a week? 

All these and more implicit teachings situate us in the time-map of dominant culture. From our earliest conditioning, we were attuned to the time of colonialism, ableism, white supremacy, and capitalism. We have been entrained into intolerable speeds and orientations of productivity driven by racialized capitalism, and we have been assimilated into notions of time rooted in white supremacy. At Re-Calling our Ancestors, we call this ‘temporal assimilation.’ 

Imagine, for a moment, what it would be like to grow up without ever encountering a clock. What would be different about how you understand and experience the world if you had never heard an alarm go off, nor oriented your internal rhythm to a school bell or a timeclock in your workplace? The clock, the alarm, the time sheet - these can be understood as ritual tools casting particular spells. What spells have they cast on you, on us? What are the spells we can and do cast to draw forth another story? What are the ritual tools we can use to cast such spells?

Our people did not assimilate into whiteness alone. Our people became white as they collectively yoked themselves to the dominant culture, and distanced themselves from those marginalized by the culture. They did this together, and so we must undo this together. De-assimilating from whiteness invites us to establish kinship ties with the many other beings with whom we co-exist: between ourselves and the plants, the moon, the cycles of the sun, our bodies and the body of the earth, with our ancestors, with other people with whom we share practices born from life-affirming time-maps. 

Apprenticing to Ancestral Time-Keeping

The work of ancestral recovery, racial justice, and regenerating culture asks us to show up in continuous, iterative cycles of learning, growth, and embodiment. Re-Calling Our Ancestors calls this apprenticing. Throughout our courses, we offer multiple modalities for apprenticing to the themes we are studying. We offer a few below as invitations to ourselves, and to you, in the task of apprenticing to Ancestral Time-Keeping. 

Communal Engagement:

The work of de-assimilating from whiteness is inherently communal, so we invite you to consider: Who are (or could be) your communities of practice in the work of temporal de-assimilation?  What solar/lunar calendars do you share with your community? What ongoing cycles of activity, rest, reflection, and integration are included in the ways your community engages together? 

As I consider these questions, I think about… 

• autumn seasons of harvesting and preserving fruit with my mom;

• rooting a fundraising campaign within the cycles of the moon with my work teams;

• committing to a weekly practice of sabbath with my partner;

• hosting seasonal community gatherings on the cross-quarters.

Each one of these is a relational practice of temporal de-assimilation. 

Reflection:

In the spirit of drawing upon the technologies of our ancestors, I offer the Quaker practice of the Query – questions to guide reflection and spiritual inquiry. Queries have no right answer, nor is finding an answer necessarily the goal. Rather, Queries are generative questions to invite deeper contemplation. In this spirit, we invite you to spend some time with the following questions, making notes, noticing sensations, verbalizing out loud, drawing pictures, or otherwise scribing what emerges through these Queries:

• What time-maps have you inherited? 

• What time-maps do you exist within - are you entrained to? 

• What time-maps do you practice? 

We invite you to draw or create your own time-map(s). 

Study:

Intellectual understanding and critical analysis is a key element in our efforts to dismantle time-maps rooted in white supremacy, and in our efforts to feed and tend ancestral time-maps. Toward these ends, we have begun to compile a list of resources related to ancestral time-keeping. We invite you to engage with these resources - and add to them as we develop a repository for our collective learning.

Practice: 

Altarwork:

Our practices at Re-Calling our Ancestors include tending to altars. These altars are culturally specific, aesthetically varied, and personally significant—there is not a singular approach. However we engage with them personally, we understand altars as portals that bring awareness of ancestral accompaniment, and as a method of working with energies we are calling forth in our lives. 

As you explore what ancestral time-keeping means for you and your anti-racist practice, we invite you to create and tend an altar calling forth ways of keeping time outside and beyond dominant time-maps. This may include seasonally-relevant items gathered from the wild world. You may adorn your altar with… 

• one or more time-maps that you’ve created

• items (like clocks, calendars, etc) with whom you’re wishing to transform your relationship

• other items that you’re calling on for their support in relating to time differently

We invite you to creatively and intuitively craft and tend this altarwork, perhaps for a moon cycle or a season.

Somatic Practice:

Lineages of anti-racist somatics practitioners have taught us that we embody systems of white supremacy, the legacies of cultural assimilation, the wisdom of our ancestral traditions, and so much more. Re-Calling Our Ancestors is guided by the political strategy and cultural prayer that our somatic selves (i.e., our bodies) can be remade for the sake of flourishing — our brain’s wiring, the ways we posture ourselves and move through space, and the felt sense of our corporeal experience can be the site of transformation. How we inhabit our bodies can be how we work towards collective liberation.

As we work to cultivate nourishing and connected time-maps, we invite you to practice noticing how different ways of relating to time are experienced in your body. 

What sensations are stirred when you look at the clock? 

What about when an alarm goes off? 

We invite you to consider spending a full day without a clock, and making note of your sensations at the end of this day. 

Earth Intimacy:

We believe that reconnection with the more-than-human world is crucial to our work as white and white-assimilated folx. Foundational to the logic of whiteness is a renunciation of animate and earth-cherishing traditions. Whiteness engenders false stories of separation, disconnection, and superiority, while the natural world exemplifies a clear truth of interrelationship. As we recall our interdependence and kinship with all life, we invite accompaniment from intelligences far greater than those curated by the myths of whiteness. 

As is accessible with you, we invite you into a daily tending of the moon throughout a full cycle of waxing and waning. This may involve… 

• Learning the name of the moon and their phases in an ancestral tongue, and/or the language of the first peoples of the lands you are on

• Each day or night, take a moment to bring your awareness to the moon, noting their current phase, whether you are able to see them with your eyes or not

• Perhaps you wish to introduce yourself to the moon if you haven’t yet done so 

• Perhaps you share more about your particular longings at this time, and invite partnership from the moon in finding new ways to be in relationship with ancestral time-maps 

• At the completion of this moon cycle, we invite you to craft and offer the moon a token of gratitude for the deeper cycles they make possible: a word of gratitude or song, a breath, or an offering of natural fibers

Closing

As I come to the end of this piece, weeks have passed and I find myself on the other side of the autumn equinox. The past days of working on this draft have been accompanied by a maple tree, who started the week with just a blush of red on the crown and is now a glorious fiery sight.  It’s time to harvest rose hips and make soups and syrups to stave off the coming cold season. The moon is waning, arriving later and later into the sky each night, and the salmon are beginning their return to the Methow River. Libra season has arrived, bringing attention to balance and justice, inviting keen and strategic thinking - and marking my dad’s coming 80th birthday, a significant milestone in my family. Next week the Jewish High Holidays begin. Election day is less than 6 weeks away, just on the other side of the cross-quarter between fall equinox and winter solstice. 

All of these, and many more, serve as landmarks in my time-map… 

The cycles continue, and different worldviews continue to collide inside me. So many questions and areas for further exploration remain - the work of a different day, or a different season. For now, to close, I offer you these words from our Re-Calling our Ancestors invocation:

may we presence ourselves

– breathing, feeling,

heart beating, here –

in this work of alchemy,

in the arc towards abolition, 

in each moment we find ourselves

as we heal between and across times.

may we be accompanied:

by the elements and beings

of those lands waterways places where we dwell

– may we be tethered and nourished 

through the mysterious web that connects us to all life.

may we be accompanied:

by the witness of stars and planets,

constellations and the cosmos beyond

– may we be held in remembrance 

of cycles and turnings, of seasons and changing skies.

may we be accompanied:

by all that weaves us to wellness

and allows for our learning

– may we be attentive and opened to the edges

of ourselves, of our consciousness, of our practices.

may we accompany:

one another on this journey,

nourishing, supporting, and challenging each other 

leaning into our interdependence and risking our autonomy

re-learning unwavering solidarity in service of co-liberation and repair.