00:14Non-native scholars and museum professionals are really uncomfortable with the ways that
00:21indigenous communities collapse time in relation to objects. There's this assumption in the
00:28Western mindset that distance in time through years means distant in relationship and that's
00:35just simply not the case. It's like in Potawatomi our word for ancestor or great-grandmother,
00:41great-grandchild is Ankhokchuken and so that means simultaneously ancestor and future generation.
00:48We emphasize this notion of relationship rather than our place on some made-up linear timeline.
00:56It's that tether of relevance that's important not so much how long ago something happened or how
01:03long something will take to happen. We're talking about Anishinaabe ways of thinking about past,
01:11present and future all together in the same concept and thinking of it not in a linear way but that
01:17it's more of that spiral. When you look you can't see the beginning and the end because they're so
01:23interconnected. What you understand is where you're at in a particular place so that past, present and
01:31future are always interconnected and touching each other when you think of how a spiral works.
01:36Nikan, that's how we say brother. Nikan, what it means is my bone. It's a really powerful way of
01:44acknowledging that the bones of my ancestors are my bones, are the bones of my great-great-grandchildren.
01:52There's really little to no delineation between any of it. What's important is that these lands that we
01:59come from, we believe that's where we came from and that's where we're supposed to go back to.
