Abstract

White settlers began to establish Christian schools in what is now Wisconsin in 1661. Through examining the papers of Benjamin Stucki, the headmaster of the Winnebago Mission Home—a Wisconsin boarding school in which many Ho-Chunk, Oneida, Chippewa, and Potawatomi children (and others whom were of mixed ancestry) were indoctrinated into Christianity—the author argues manipulation of chronos affects decolonial kairotic moments. Undergirding this argument is the conviction that manipulation of chronos tampers with perceiving settler colonialism’s everyday exigency. The mission school’s rhetorical obscuring and replacing of settler colonialism’s exigency with one (or multiple) they manufacture is a settler exigency. In this process, settlers segment, omit, and create new timelines that distract from the past violence that is undoubtedly stretching into the present. Through manipulating time, what surfaces as the new problem (i.e., not settler colonialism) is the Indigenous person’s vulnerability. The implications of rhetorically manipulating time are therefore central concerns in decolonial goals and coalitions.