Entangled Presence

Abstract Clouds come into visible being, in the verb-oriented grammar of many Indigenous languages, as bodies opting to join this sky or river, for now. In their constant modifications, clouds highlight the recursive nature of time and space. Despite the shared focus of both queer temporality and queer ecology on existence as relational, Indigenous and queer studies are not often brought into dialogue. This article engages Jill Carter’s (Anishinaabe) and Scott Andrews’s (Cherokee) approach of “red reading,” or reading non-Indigenous texts through Indigenous perspectives, to foster such dialogue by bridging Indigenous ecologies with queer temporality. Accordingly, this article expands queer temporality in dialogue with Indigenous ecologies to generate implications for queer ecology: in particular, a theory of entangled presence. Entangled presence extends theories of queer temporality to hold spirals of pasts, presents, and futures and to affirm time as ecological kinship. The entangled presence in A. E. Housman’s cloud poem “The Merry Guide” resembles the scientific cloud writing of Luke Howard and Thomas Forster. Housman’s, Howard’s, and Forster’s invocations of clouds model entangled presence, an ecological grammar of time that amplifies awareness of ecological kinship.