ABSTRACT
From a Western and capitalist ontology, time is money and finding time—or money for that matter—is becoming exceedingly difficult in times of austerity. Feminist, queer, Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Marxist critiques of capitalist labor-time have appropriately called the paid/unpaid dialectic into question, even while capitalism continues to expand in seemingly uncontested trajectories. In Anishinaabemowin or the Ojibwe-language, words are not divided into genders, as they are in romance and other European languages. Under capitalism, labor-time is abstracted into commodities and therefore the aya’iin // things are commonly imbued with meaning. As artists and cultural workers, much of our time is unpaid, even if nowhere near free time. In Indigenous communities, the profundity of elders’ knowledge is, by and large, not matched in non-Native communities.
