Whereas white society has increasingly become governed by “clock time,” Indians have traditionally been oriented to “natural time.” “In devising a mechanical means of arbitrarily segmenting the day into regularly spaced units,” writes Fontana, white society has “made an artifact of time. . . . Our notion of time and our methods of time-keeping are the very underpinnings of our entire industrial system.” Indians, in contrast, traditionally lived out their lives in accordance with natural phenomena. Fontana makes an important point. The cultural and psychological distance separating the two
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