Is the Eighteenth Century a Colonizing Temporality?

This essay queries how the temporal foundation of “eighteenth-century studies” is an obstacle to the goal of “indigenizing” knowledge. It argues that the most basic organizing principle of the field—periodization—is anathema to Indigenous modes of knowing. In order to indigenize we would need to abandon chronology and begin from the perspective of land and space. What might such an approach look like? The essay includes first-person descriptions of experiences from the land in which the author lives, Treaty 6 territory in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.