ABSTRACT
Given the power of ongoing colonialism in the social processes shaping our planetary situation, how should one relate to colonialism? The chapter opens with a letter written to a parent in her year of birth almost a century ago. In the letter, the scholar considers spiral time as a non-colonial understanding of time providing intergenerational accountability. The scholar learns up from spiral time and calls it “overtone time” according to his family tradition. In considering spiral time, the letter addresses the meanings of coloniality, colonization, and their negations – decoloniality and decolonization. Within their context, good relationships are central to decolonial work, and overtone time points toward good intergenerational relationships. But what more can be said of good relationships? In order to trace the ground of them, the chapter follows out the difference between using people and relating. The logic of relating – called “relational reason” – becomes central to decolonial work, both on its way to decolonization and afterwards, dealing with colonialism’s ongoing dynamics. So the scholar introduces relational reason as a core decolonial process. One of the areas where relational reason most makes a difference is in our relations to each other and to the more than human world through lands. We can have good relationships with each other through sustaining the lands in which we live in overtone time. Lands are the mediation across time between generations and so become the site of decolonial work. How should we understand our responsibility mediated through lands?
