Exploring the meaning of ‘time immemorial’

Many Native American tribes use the phrase “time immemorial” to describe how long they’ve been living in North America. But how long is “time immemorial”? What does it really mean?

Indigenous affairs reporter Toastie Oaster dug into the history and significance of the phrase for High Country News. It was part of the magazine’s issue on “deep time” in the West. Oaster joins us to share what they learned.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Dave Miller. We start this week with a phrase that’s often used by and about Native American tribes, “time immemorial.” Speaking of time, we’re not starting the week. Today is Wednesday. I just realized that.

In any case, the phrase “time immemorial” communicates the depth of Indigenous existence on this continent, but in a vague way. How long is “time immemorial”? What does the phrase really mean? And is there a better phrase that could be used instead? These are some of the questions that Indigenous affairs reporter Toastie Oaster dug into for their recent piece in High Country News. It was part of the magazine’s larger issue devoted to deep time in the West. Toastie Oaster joins us now to share what they learned. It’s great to have you back on the show.

Toastie Oaster: Hi, Dave, it’s great to be back. Thanks for having me.

Miller: What prompted you to do this piece?

Oaster: I think it was one of my editors suggested I do this. This phrase of course is kicking around in my head a lot, and I was just wondering one day when we were working on somebody else’s draft, if there’s another way to say this, because we use this phrase “time immemorial” over and over and over again. It starts to feel old after a while.

Miller: As a writer you have, I imagine, some kind of pride in craft, and you want to avoid saying the same thing over and over, or cliche. Were there also moments when you just thought, wait, why are we using this, these actual words? What do they mean? Is that something that had nagged at you before?

Oaster: I suppose that was something that I felt I had a reasonable grasp on, just from speaking to elders during reporting. I felt like I had a fair sense of what it meant, but I wanted readers to understand that. And I didn’t want to be the one doing the explaining. I wanted to go ask people who were more knowledgeable than me to explain it.

Miller: How did you go about doing that? Who did you turn to?

Oaster: Well, I talked to Harvard history professor Philip J. Deloria, who’s the son of Vine Deloria Jr. And I spoke to an archaeology professor, Paulette Steeves as well. And they had some pretty interesting things to say about the phrase, and all of the work that those two little words do.

Miller: So let’s dig into it. First of all, do you know for how long this phrase has been used?

Oaster: No, I have looked into the etymology. I didn’t really go this direction in the piece that I wrote, but I have looked a little bit into the etymology and it’s traceable back to English law. But I was kind of more curious about how it’s used now, in a Native context.

Miller: What are those contexts? When in general is it used?

Oaster: Well, it’s used as kind of a concise way to just say that our communities have been here for a long time. It’s actually sort of the outgrowth of a quiet political fight over the timeline of our histories. The colonial story of our timeline says that people came to this continent about 12,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. Native stories that we’ve inherited through our cultural traditions from elders go much farther back than that. So in a way, it’s pushback to use that. It’s pushed back against the academy and the institutions of archaeology and anthropology that have been telling us for so long, things that are contrary to our own stories and histories.

Miller: You ended up going into some detail about these competing anthropological narratives about the peopling of what we now call the Americas. What are the competing narratives, to the extent that they’re even competing at this point, in terms of what scientists say?

Oaster: The competition is diminishing, I would say. For a long time, Western science has asserted that it was the end of the last ice age when people were able to cross the Bering Strait across a land bridge that appeared there. They call this the Bering Land Bridge theory or the Clovis First theory, and the idea is that that’s how people originally got to North America, and that nobody was here before the Clovis era. So they also call this the Clovis First theory, and people who are really adamant about this theory, I’ve heard people in anthropology and archaeology refer to as the “Clovis mafia.” These are people who are insistent that the continent was empty of people before the Clovis era.

Now the Native timelines don’t contest that there was a Bering Land Bridge crossing, but they contest that that’s how humans first got here. The native histories say there were already people here when the whole Clovis thing happened.

Miller: Who had always been here, or who arrived in different ways at much earlier times?

Oaster: There’s a variety of stories that I’ve heard on that. And I think that’s part of the reason that we use the phrase “time immemorial,” is we don’t know how long ago this was, we don’t have a firm date. A lot of the Native people that I’ve spoken to, including Paulette Steeves, don’t seem too hung up on having a precise date. I’m sure it would probably be nice, eventually, to know that. But for a lot of Native people, I think it’s kind of beside the point. The point is really just to say that our cultures are very, very old. And part of that is because of the legitimacy and the sophistication of those cultures that gets lost when people are told in schools that Natives came here recently,

Miller: That’s what gets lost, you’re saying, when the lesson is that Native peoples came here recently, 12,000 years in that case being recent compared to 20,000 years, or much further back.

Oaster: Yes. The phrase, it’s sort of saying like we’ve been here since the dawn of human memory, or our communities have been here since communities began to exist. And we may not know exactly when that was, but as Paulette Steeves said, it’s certainly a lot longer than 12,000 years.

Miller: To me, one of the striking aspects of the phrase is that, while it includes this word “immemorial,” that means beyond or before memory, we’re also talking about aspects of oral history that are versions of passed on memory. How do you reckon with that?

Oaster: Reckon with passing on memory?

Miller: With the phrase “immemorial,” when there are aspects of memory that we’re also talking about, often in an oral tradition, that greatly precede the land bridge, for example, that take that into account in some kind of tradition or story?

Oaster: I think it comes down a lot of times to how memory is preserved. In Western society, we tend to think of writing as the most legitimate way to preserve memory or fact, or documentation otherwise, writing being kind of the primary form of documentation.

Oral documentation is oftentimes dismissed in Western culture. But it’s important that people can make the distinction between an oral history and a casual retelling of a story or events. When I was talking to Phil Deloria, he was saying these aren’t games of telephone, these are cultural stories that were memorized. They were told and retold again and again under the careful instruction of elders. And they were recited with a sense of responsibility to the community. And that’s how we preserved these memories, or how our ancestors did. From a Native view, that’s a legitimate form of documentation. So that comes down to a very deep cultural difference.

But of course now since the footprints were found near White Sands, New Mexico a few years back, I think that was in 2021, those footprints are 20,000 years old. So now, Western science is coming around and saying OK, so there were people here. We don’t know who they were, we don’t know where they came from or how they got here, but somebody was here at least 20,000 years ago. So it’s one of these situations where it’s like Western science is kind of starting to catch up a little bit to Native teachings, and Native teachings are showing this different form of historical record and preservation.

Miller: You may be getting to this, but what have you come to see as a connection between this phrase, these two simple words, “time immemorial,” and native sovereignty or dignity?

Oaster: That’s where it gets really interesting, Dave. Because the idea that our ancestors came here across the Bering Land Bridge, by shortening the timeline and also by connecting that to the extinction of a number of megafauna that were in the neighborhood at that time, it’s a way of characterizing Native people as being very much like their colonizers. They’re settlers who just arrived here recently, and they killed everything. That’s kind of a way of taking non-Native cultural traits, and making it seem like human nature. This is what people do.

The subtext there is that it justifies settler colonialism. Because if Natives came here not that long ago and did basically the same thing as European settlers, then it’s really not so bad that Europeans came over here and settled and did a whole lot of killing.

Miller: It’s just what humans do.

Oaster: It’s just what people do. So if Natives have been here for much longer, then that raises some problems for the settler colonial narrative, because there’s suddenly this possibility that there were great civilizations here. Which of course there were, that’s supported by archaeological evidence, and lots of it. But that evidence has been suppressed, at least according to Paulette Steeves, who wrote a book about this. She said that for the past century, white academia has been suppressing archaeological information about any people in this hemisphere older than around 12,000 years ago. So it’s not that the science doesn’t support the Native viewpoint. It’s that the scientific institution has been kind of stuck on this narrative for a long, long time. It is changing now.

But this is one of those things that Native people tend to think about a lot more, because it’s diminishing to us and to our cultures. But when I talk about this with non-Natives, I sometimes hear people asking, like, well how does that justify settler colonialism? How is that a threat? There’s a lot going on in the subtext. It’s kind of an indirect dismissal of our legitimacy as long standing cultures that have a rightful claim to this land.

Miller: What do you think is most going to stay with you from your reporting on this phrase?

Oaster: Well, it’s interesting. I actually set out, as you can read in the beginning of the piece, to find an alternative to this phrase, because I was tired of using it like I said earlier. And I didn’t find an alternative. After talking to these Native academics, my perspective changed, and I realized that this phrase is actually really hitting the mark in a lot of ways. And maybe we’ll think of another way to say it eventually. But I think my big takeaway is just that these two words are actually doing a whole heck of a lot. And there are some really rich conversations that we can have around this phrase.

Miller: Toastie, thanks so much for joining us.

Oaster: Thanks for talking to me about it.

Miller: Toastie Oaster is High Country News’s Indigenous affairs reporter. They wrote about the phrase “time immemorial” for a special issue that was all about deep time throughout the West.

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