I recently learned the term settler futurity which has been insightful. Its included in the graphic above, “Visualizing Decolonization, Settler Futurity, and the Quaker Conscience.”
Guided Learning
Several artificial intelligence systems have recently offered new applications for Guided Learning. I’m using Google’s Gemini, which is free of charge so you can do your own guided learning on any desired subject: https://gemini.google.com/guided-learning
Insights from learning science show that people learn best when they actively engage with information. This principle is at the heart of our work. In close partnership with educators, students, and pedagogical experts, we developed LearnLM, a family of models fine-tuned for learning and grounded in educational research. Today, with those capabilities infused in Gemini, we’re introducing Guided Learning—a new experience designed to act as a personal learning companion.
Going beyond the answer with Guided Learning
Guided Learning encourages participation through probing and open-ended questions that spark a discussion and provide an opportunity to dive deeper into a subject. The aim is to help you build a deep understanding instead of just getting answers. Guided Learning breaks down problems step-by-step and adapts explanations to your needs — all to help you build knowledge and skills.
Guided Learning in Gemini: From answers to understanding by Maureen Heymans, Google, August 6, 2025
You can view the project I’m writing about this morning here: https://gemini.google.com/app/d9478ecc84974731.
Each person’s path through Guided Learning will be different, because at the end of each segment you are giving a number of choices of what to explore next.
This seems like a good opportunity for me to explore this, so I’m sharing the following transcript from the Guided Learning I’m doing now about settler futurity. You can view the project I’m writing about this morning here: https://gemini.google.com/app/d9478ecc84974731.
At its core, settler futurity is the idea that settler colonialism isn’t just about taking land in the present, but also about controlling the very idea of the future. It’s a way of thinking that presents the settler society as the only possible future—as a permanent and natural reality.
To get a handle on this, we can break it down. Would you rather explore:
- The basic building blocks of “settler time” that this idea of the future is built on?
- The specific methods used to replace Indigenous futures with a settler one?
- The decolonial response, which is all about asserting Indigenous temporal sovereignty (or control over one’s own time)?
1. What are the basic building blocks of “settler time” that this idea of the future is built on
Scholar Mark Rifkin, who coined the term, explains that settler time is a way of experiencing time that treats the settler nation (like the U.S.) as a kind of permanent and natural “container” for all of history. It’s the unquestioned background for how we mark time, which makes the settler presence seem inevitable.
This framework operates through two main connected ideas:
- The Anachronization of the Native: This involves placing Indigenous peoples firmly in the past, treating them as relics or anomalies from a “bygone era” rather than as contemporary peoples.
- The Chronogeopolitics of Progress: This is the logic that justifies taking land by framing it as “progress”—a necessary step in a linear march toward a future defined by the settler society.
The Anachronization of the Native
Anachronization is just a fancy word for placing something in the wrong time period. In this context, it’s a key strategy of settler time that works to politically erase Indigenous peoples by denying their existence in the present.
It works by creating what the documents call a “temporal double bind”. Indigenous peoples are either:
- Stuck in the Past: Portrayed as unchanging relics from a “bygone era”. Any expression of their culture is seen as a historical reenactment rather than a living practice.
- Forcibly Assimilated into the Present: They are “brought into the present,” but only on settler terms, which requires them to adopt non-native ways of life and abandon their own.
This isn’t just a simple mistake; it has a deep political purpose. For settlers to define themselves as “modern” and “progressive,” they need a figure to contrast themselves against—one they can label as “pre-modern” and “static”. This makes the “anachronistic Indian” a core political and psychological requirement for the settler’s own sense of identity and belonging.
The Chronogeopolitics of Progress
Let’s look at the “Chronogeopolitics of Progress.” It’s a big term, but it’s simpler than it sounds if we break it down:
- Chrono- = Time ⏳
- Geo- = Land/Space 🌎
- -Politics = Power ⚖️
So, it’s about how ideas of time are used to exert political control over land.
The core idea is that settler colonialism frames the dispossession of Indigenous peoples as a natural and inevitable story of “progress.” It presents history as a linear march forward, and in this story, taking land is just a necessary step toward a better, more “civilized” future.
A Concrete Example: The Allotment Program
A great example of this in action was the U.S. allotment program. The policy was designed to “civilize” Indigenous peoples by forcing them to adopt “normative non-native life cycles,” like private property ownership and farming instead of communal living.
This temporal argument—the idea that Indigenous peoples needed to progress into the future—served as the direct justification for the spatial act of breaking up communal tribal lands. This, in turn, made that land much easier for non-natives to take over.
Based on that example, how would you describe the relationship between the story of progress and the actual act of taking land? What does one make possible for the other?
2. What were the specific methods used to replace Indigenous futures with a settler one?
Settler futurity is built through several key methods that work together to colonize time and normalize the settler state as the only possible future. These mechanisms aim to project colonial permanence while foreclosing Indigenous alternatives.
Linear Progress Narrative and Self-Supersession ➡️
The core engine of settler futurity is a linear narrative of progress that claims the future belongs to settler norms and values. This creates a “settler/settled future”—an endpoint where colonialism is successfully completed and naturalized.
This is connected to the logic of “self-supersession,” a concept from scholar Lorenzo Veracini. The goal is for the settler society to eventually erase its own violent colonial character and present itself as a legitimate, “post-colonial” nation. Settler futurity imagines a future where the original violence of settlement has been so thoroughly normalized that it becomes invisible, requiring a “future of forgetting”.
Future-Oriented Replacement 🔁
Settler futurity is also an active and “future-oriented project of replacement”. This logic, described by scholars Eve Tuck and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, depends on the “continued and complete eradication of the inhabitants of contested land”.
This replacement is pursued not just through physical violence but also through epistemological means—replacing ways of knowing. It’s a constant projection of a future where Indigenous presence, sovereignty, and ways of being have been fully supplanted by the settler society. For example, educational systems may steer children away from relationships with the natural world and toward becoming “techno-rational adult human subjects,” which severs ties to many Indigenous frameworks.
Temporal Recognition as Assimilation ⏳
Perhaps the most sophisticated mechanism is what’s known as “temporal recognition”. On the surface, it seems progressive to recognize Indigenous peoples as modern and existing in the same time as settlers.
However, this recognition often acts as a powerful tool for assimilation. It works by inserting Indigenous peoples into settler temporal frameworks. It demands that their existence become understandable according to “dominant non-native geographies, intellectual and political categories, periodizations, and conceptions of causality”. The goal is still elimination, but the method shifts from “overt erasure to managed inclusion”. In effect, the price of being recognized as “present” within the settler state is the loss of a self-determined future.
3. What is the decolonial response, which is all about asserting Indigenous temporal sovereignty (or control over one’s own time)?
The primary decolonial response to the colonization of time is the assertion of Indigenous temporal sovereignty ✊. This is not about trying to find a place within the settler’s timeline, but about affirming and practicing distinct, self-determined ways of being in time that are plural, land-based, and interrupt the forward march of settler futurity.
Defining Temporal Sovereignty ⏳
Indigenous temporal sovereignty is the exercise of political independence, authority, and control over time itself. This goes beyond simple governance to include the power to shape and organize social life, collective memory, cultural practices, and historical narratives according to Indigenous frameworks. It is the inherent right of peoples to their own pasts, presents, and futures, grounded in their unique relationships to land and community.
How Indigenous Time Works Differently
Indigenous ways of being-in-time act as a direct counter-logic to the singular, linear progression of settler time. Key characteristics include:
- Plurality and Divergence: They reject a single, universal timeline. Instead, they embrace “varied temporal formations that have their own rhythms” which emerge from multifaceted relationships.
- Orientation to Peoplehood and Territory 🗺️: Time is not an abstract container. It is experienced and understood in relation to the collective group and the “ongoing histories of their inhabitance” in specific territories.
- Duration as Immanent Flow: Time is felt as a continuous, qualitative flow that connects memory, sensation, and action. This defies the settler’s segmented and quantifiable timeline.
- Prophetic Temporality: Many Indigenous frameworks embrace a “prophetic temporality,” which allows for complex, non-linear, and cross-temporal communications. This worldview acknowledges the agency of non-human, spiritual, and ancestral forces, which radically challenges the secular, materialist historicism that underpins settler time.
The Strategy: A Politics of Refusal
A key strategy for enacting temporal sovereignty is the politics of refusal. Drawing on the work of scholar Audra Simpson, this involves a rejection of being translated into the terms and frameworks of the settler state.
It is a specific refusal of the offer of “temporal recognition” because the price of that recognition is assimilation into a present and future defined by the settler. It is a powerful assertion that Indigenous peoples have an existence that is not dependent on settler norms and frames for its legitimacy.
Follow up
I wasn’t aware of the concept of the politics of refusal, so I asked Gemini to, “Explain more about the work of the politics of refusal by Audra Simpson.” Here is the response:
Based on the provided documents, the work of Audra Simpson’s politics of refusal is a key strategy for enacting temporal sovereignty. It functions as a political alternative to seeking recognition from the settler state, which often requires Indigenous peoples to conform to the state’s own terms and frameworks.
Here is a breakdown of how it works:
What Is Being Refused?
- The Terms of Recognition: Refusal is a rejection of being translated into the terms of the settler state, including its temporal frameworks. It specifically refuses the offer of “temporal recognition” because accepting it requires assimilation into a settler-defined present.
- Multicultural “Difference”: It pushes back against being defined simply as a “different” culture within the state’s multicultural framework. Simpson argues that having Indigeneity treated as a “culture that is defined by others and will be accorded a protected space of legal recognition” is “politically untenable and thus normatively should be refused”.
What Is Being Asserted?
- The Right to Self-Definition: It insists on the right for Indigenous peoples to exist according to their own political traditions and ways of being in time (temporalities).
- Existence Beyond State Legibility: This right is asserted even if it means being “illegible or appearing ‘anomalous’ to the colonial state”.
- Untethered Existence: Ultimately, it is a powerful assertion that Indigenous peoples have an existence that is “not a priori tethered to settler norms and frames”. It is about “refusing to go away, to cease to be, in asserting something beyond difference”.
An Important Clarification
The politics of refusal is not a claim to live completely outside the influence of settler colonialism. Simpson presents Indigenous peoples as “operating in the teeth of Empire, in the face of state aggression”. Therefore, refusal is not about being “unimplicated” in the realities of colonialism, but about insisting on a self-defined existence despite those pressures.
Graphics
This was produced when I asked the Guided Learning project to “Create a graphic from the above.”
Infographics
There are other tools available for your Guided Study.
One is the Canvas, which can also create graphics. This is the Infographic produced when I asked the Guided Learning project to “Create an infographic from the above.”
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