This piece is part of a special project on deep time examining what the Western U.S. was like thousands, millions and even billions of years ago, and how that history is still visible and consequential today. Read more stories from the series.
Recently, while reading a draft of a story by another writer for this magazine, I tripped over a familiar phrase: time immemorial. If you read (or write) Indigenous affairs journalism, it comes up a lot. As in Indigenous cultures have been here since time immemorial — I’ve seen it so often it disappears into the wallpaper, an invisible cliché. But this time, I realized I had questions. Why do Indigenous affairs writers — myself included — rely on this phrase so much?
Natives have been told our whole lives — in classrooms, through academic research and in popular myth — that humans first migrated into North America around 12,000 years ago. Native histories consistently disagree, however, asserting that humans were here much earlier than that. Using the phrase time immemorial is a way to push back; it succinctly communicates longevity without quibbling over exact numbers and dates. But when overused, it can come off as pandering or sanctimonious, a dog whistle for progressives — which could irritate some readers who might otherwise care about Indigenous sovereignty and suffering. When writers appear to slip from reporting to soapboxing, they risk sacrificing credibility.
Isn’t there another way to say this? I wondered. I left a comment on the draft for the story’s editors and embarked on a side quest to find an alternative to the phrase time immemorial. First stop, Harvard.
“I take it to mean the deepest possible kind of human memory,” Harvard history professor Philip J. Deloria (Yankton Dakota descent) told me. “Beyond recorded history, beyond oral tradition, beyond oral memory, into what we call the deep past.” Western science has long asserted that humans populated the Western Hemisphere around the Clovis era — named for an archaeological site near Clovis, New Mexico — by migrating over a land bridge across the Bering Strait sometime around the end of the last ice age.
“I take it to mean the deepest possible kind of human memory. Beyond recorded history, beyond oral tradition, beyond oral memory, into what we call the deep past.”
Since the 1920s, Deloria said, anthropologists and archaeologists have connected Clovis spearpoints with melting ice and the extinction of a lot of Pleistocene megafauna. Together, they suggest a pretty tidy story of humans migrating into North America.
Non-Natives have used this narrative to undermine the legitimacy of Indigenous land title and to characterize Natives as being no different from their colonizers — just another batch of recent arrivals who kill everything in sight. “It was a very anti-Indian way of seeing things,” Deloria said. The Clovis-first story and the Bering land bridge theory quietly and conveniently justify settler colonialism.
But correlation is not causation, and the idea that the Bering land bridge is how humans first reached the Americas is now under increasing scrutiny. Still, it has persisted as scientific canon in education and popular thought alike. “It was elegant because it lined up so well,” said Deloria. “But the problem with it, the trap that these guys laid for themselves, was if you found anything that was earlier than that, the theory was screwed.”
And that, I learned, is exactly what happened.
IN 1963, AT THE CALICO EARLY MAN SITE in California’s Mojave Desert, world-famous archaeologist Louis Leakey studied a cache of what looked like stone tools — including flintknapping debris, blades, piercing tools and hand axes — that he dated to over 20,000 years ago, possibly even hundreds of thousands of years ago. But instead of overturning the Clovis-first story, the findings kneecapped Leakey’s professional reputation, and his marriage.
“Even the most well-known global expert on human evolution got called a crazy old man when he published on this, and that site is still denied by a lot of people,” Algoma University archaeology professor Paulette Steeves (Cree-Métis) told me. In her book The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere, Steeves asserts that for the past century, academia has not just ignored but vigorously suppressed archaeological evidence of pre-Clovis humans in the Americas.
And not just at the Calico site: There’s the Monte Verde site in Chile, the Cactus Hill site in Virginia, the Gault site in Texas, Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania, Chiquihuite cave and the Hueyatlaco site in Mexico. The latter particularly infuriates the colonial-minded, as it’s potentially hundreds of thousands of years old. “It’s bias,” Steeves said. “It’s embedded racism.” And it’s persistent: “To this day, when you do publish on an older site, before it’s even published you are going to be severely, severely critiqued.”
In the past century, any archaeologist publishing about pre-Clovis sites in the Americas was committing “career suicide,” Steeves said. Many scientific findings simply didn’t get published. Much of this evidence ended up characterized as pseudoscience, alongside ancient alien theories. Even today, some non-Native scientists continue to explain away Leakey’s findings, arguing that the Calico artifacts were carved by the elements rather than humans.
But cracks are now showing in the settler-colonial narrative. When Science magazine published a 2021 report on 20,000-year-old human footprints near White Sands, New Mexico, it signaled institutional support for pre-Clovis human habitation here. “These findings confirm the presence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum,” the report’s authors wrote. The academy can no longer deny that someone was here during the last ice age, and before the makers of the Clovis spearpoints.
“Time immemorial is saying ‘since the beginning of our people as a cultural group, as a community, and we don’t know how long that is,’” Steeves said. “And maybe it’s not important to us, but it sure as heck, in North and South America, is a lot more than 11,000 or 12,000 years.’”
Other disciplines also provide scholarly support for time immemorial. Some linguists, for instance, believe the language families of the Americas would have taken at least 30,000 years to develop. DNA researchers, Deloria told me, have found links between Indigenous South Americans and Austronesians.
Although civilizations rose and fell in North America, the oral histories preserving their legacies carry little currency with Western science, since they’re not written records. But oral histories are not just legends or fanciful tales, and they’re certainly not schoolyard games of telephone. They were memorized under the instruction of elders, Deloria said, and retold with a sense of responsibility toward the community.
“Time immemorial is saying ‘since the beginning of our people as a cultural group, as a community, and we don’t know how long that is.’”
The physical monuments of North American civilizations buttress the older timelines of the oral histories: The weathered remains of the tamped-earth step-pyramids of Cahokia and Poverty Point on the Mississippi River, which are now referred to as “mounds,” but once supported wooden temples overlooking cities; the remains of the Hohokam canals on Arizona’s Salt River, hundreds of miles of technologically sophisticated agricultural irrigation in a system that Popular Archaeology says “rivaled the ancient Roman aqueducts”; and the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, a series of earthen constructions that aligned with solar and lunar cycles.
Deloria said this is all evidence of North American Classical civilizations. But instead of designating a classical period in North American history, settler narratives routinely skirt this evidence, too, omitting it from classroom curricula and the popular imagination. Historians, Deloria noted, usually reserve the term classical for early Western European cultures. European Americans are allowed to lionize their predecessors, while North Americans are not. “If the Mediterranean gets to have Greeks and Romans, then we get to have our equivalents of Greeks and Romans,” said Deloria. By establishing the longevity of North American cultures, the expression time immemorial illustrates their sophistication as well.
I LIKE TO REPORT ON good news in Indian Country. But when there’s good news for us, hateful comments often follow. It’s strange to me. I feel proud when I think of Poverty Point and the Mississippian ancestors who built the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, a religious culture that spread across the Southeast and even up to the Midwest and included the temples of Cahokia. They were part of a fruitful civilization that enjoyed the kind of freedom, abundance and stability that most contemporary Americans don’t seem to believe ever existed anywhere on Earth. If America taught our histories in its schools, would Americans hate us less?
Our histories, which live on both in the soil and in our continued existence as cultures, undermine colonial stories like Clovis-first and the Bering land bridge populating the Americas. Without those stories, the Empire’s legitimacy erodes — and the other stories they prop up, like white supremacy, American exceptionalism and the so-called “New World,” begin to collapse.
Not only were we here long before America, with its relentless, shortsighted oppression disguised as progress and its hateful, ahistoric vitriol, we will still be here long after it’s gone. Arguing over the numbers with degree-wielding “debate me” bros is a fool’s errand. Time immemorial sweeps the debate itself aside and makes space for our ancestors to speak their silent gravitas from beyond the grave, prophesying a future so beautiful it defies the colonized imagination. Though I’d initially set out to find an alternative phrase, time immemorial was revealing its power. “It’s really important right now to decolonizing settler minds, to decolonizing education, and to decolonizing ourselves,” Steeves told me. “I hear some tribes say, ‘Oh, we’ve been here 10,000 years.’ You don’t know that you haven’t been here 50,000. So don’t say 10,000. Say ‘time immemorial.’”
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This article appeared in the January 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Our place in history.”
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