Understanding time, remembering the past and telling stories about it are all highly contested and cultural acts. In Indigenous traditions, storytellers and artists frequently challenge and disrupt Western perceptions of time as a linear, progressive unfolding of events. Rather, our stories and histories exist in places where time is round, open, malleable, and can fold and fluctuate. Our stories are often characterized by beings or individuals who possess the power to travel through time and into other worlds. Indigenous representations of history and time allow for this permeability and flux. Movement is a central component of our being, as Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor notes, Indigenous sovereignty arises out of the right of motion – that is, the inherent ability and vision to move.

Artists like Barry Ace, Joi T. Arcand, Goota Ashoona, Carl Beam, Lance Belanger, Hannah Claus, Rosalie Favell, Alex Janvier, Roy Kakegamic, Mary Longman, Marianne Nicolson, Meryl McMaster, Caroline Monnet, Françoise Oklaga and Jesse Oonark bring to light the ongoing movement inherent to our stories and histories, as they skillfully navigate and reshape notions of time. They help us re-envision realities.

Re-imagining time through Indigenous art is a call to action, a radical and regenerative act that asks each of us to set into motion a genuine re-thinking of the status quo and allows us, as beings, to transmit memory and concerns of the past and present to a resurgence – a creative visioning of a future that is healthy, empowered and Indigenized.