It can take an enormous intellectual effort for non-Indigenous people (such as this reviewer) to grasp Indigenous concepts of time. This is partially due to what Aileen Moreton-Robinson has described as the incommensurability of Indigenous and Western epistemological approaches. In settler-colonial terms, land is a resource to be appropriated, surveyed, and exploited. Temporality is generally used to situate the colonisation event, the before and after, from a perspective where time is linear and forward-looking. By contrast, in Indigenous cosmological approaches, land, culture, and time are co-dependent and in perpetual conversation. Country and time are indivisible.
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