Decolonizing Time Regimes: Lakota Conceptions of Work, Economy, and Society

One of the hegemonic forces associated with the spread of capitalism is a shift in the time sense of production from task orientation to labor timed by the clock. On the periphery of the global economy, Lakota households on the Pine Ridge reservation must make fragmentary allocations of time between clock‐based wage jobs and task‐oriented forms of production governed by social relationships. Despite a long and ongoing history of state policies designed to enforce the discipline of the clock, task orientation continues to dominate Lakota time‐sense. Rather than active resistance to or internalization of clock time, Lakota practices flout time‐values that interfere with the task‐oriented demands of more materially certain, socially embedded economic activities. Lakota conceptions of time, born of their contemporary material conditions, are better understood when theoretical concepts of work and time are decolonized to remove the assumptions that emulating or opposing Euro‐Americans is of central concern.