Everywhen

Australia and the Language of Deep History

Ann McGrath, Jakelin Troy, Laura Rademaker

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781496227287
• eBook ISBN: 9781496234360

Everywhen is a groundbreaking collection about diverse ways of conceiving, knowing, and narrating time and deep history. Looking beyond the linear documentary past of Western or academic history, this collection asks how knowledge systems of Australia’s Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders can broaden our understandings of the past and of historical practice. Indigenous embodied practices for knowing, narrating, and reenacting the past in the present blur the distinctions of linear time, making all history now. Ultimately, questions of time and language are questions of Indigenous sovereignty. The Australian case is especially pertinent because Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are among the few Native peoples without a treaty with their colonizers. Appreciating First Nations’ time concepts embedded in languages and practices, as Everywhen does, is a route to recognizing diverse forms of Indigenous sovereignties.

Everywhen makes three major contributions. The first is a concentration on language, both as a means of knowing and transmitting the past across generations and as a vital, albeit long-overlooked source material for historical investigation, to reveal how many Native people maintained and continue to maintain ancient traditions and identities through language. Everywhen also considers Indigenous practices of history, or knowing the past, that stretch back more than sixty thousand years; these Indigenous epistemologies might indeed challenge those of the academy. Finally, the volume explores ways of conceiving time across disciplinary boundaries and across cultures, revealing how the experience of time itself is mediated by embodied practices and disciplinary norms.

Everywhen brings Indigenous knowledges to bear on the study and meaning of the past and of history itself. It seeks to draw attention to every when, arguing that Native time concepts and practices are vital to understanding Native histories and, further, that they may offer a new framework for history as practiced in the Western academy.
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• The Languages and Temporalities of “Everywhen” in Deep History
• Part 1
• 1. Standing on the Ground and Writing on the Sky: An Indigenous Exploration of Place, Time, and Histories
• 2. Bugarrigarra Nyurdany, Because of the Dreaming: A Discussion of Time and Place in Yawuru Cosmology
• 3. Old Dogs and Ice Ages in Noongar Country
• 4. Songs and the Deep Present
• Part 2
• 5. Yirriyengburnama-langwa mamawura-langwa: Talking about Time in Anindilyakwa
• 6. Australian Languages and the Deep Past
• 7. Time, Language, and Thought: What Language Can Tell Us about Our Concepts of Time
• Part 3
• 8. Innovation, Continuity, and the Punctuated Temporality of Archaeological Narratives
• 9. Across “Koori Time” and Space
• 10. Early European Mariners at Cape Keerweer: Bespoke Variations of an Aboriginal Legend
• 11. Time and Eternity: Aboriginal and Missionary Conversations about Temporality
• 12. On the Shores of the Narinya: Contemporary D’harawal Interactions with Ancestral Knowledges
• Contributors
• Index
• About Ann McGrath
• About Laura Rademaker
• About Jakelin Troy
• Series List