The indigenous world does not conceive of history as linear; the past- future is contained in the present.
– Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui

The issue of temporality is intimately linked to the various conceptions of history held throughout the world. As Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui writes, history and memory spring from a people’s relationship with both time and language. She argues for a reconsideration of history using indigenous philosophy and language, particularly as relates to time. She notes that “The project of indigenous modernity can emerge from the present in a spiral whose movement is a continuous feedback from the past to the future—a “principle of hope” or “anticipatory consciousness”—that both discerns and realizes decolonization at the same time” (Cusicanqui 96). A non-linear conception of time pushes back against the often-reductive, deterministic view of history espoused in colonial discourses. Specifically, Cusicanqui demonstrates how a framing of time drawing from indigenous languages serves to re-conceptualize time:

The contemporary experience commits us to the present—aka pacha—which in turn contains within it the seeds of the future that emerge from the depths of the past [qhip nayr uñtasis sarnaqapxañani]. The present is the setting for simultaneously modernizing and archaic impulses, of strategies to preserve the status quo and of others that signify revolt and renewal of the world: Pachakuti (Cusicanqui 96)

We may draw ties between Cusicanqui’s perception of time and succession with Derrida’s Specters of Marx when he ponders, “What of the future? The future can only be for ghosts. And the past” (Derrida 45). By collapsing the past and the future into the present, Derrida illuminates anxieties stemming from the specter of communism that haunts Europe, to paraphrase Marx. In a similar way, using indigenous languages to reframe conceptions of time may enable a decolonial refiguring of history.