In the Vox podcast In a Nutshell, hosts Jara Majerus and Antonia Leise take a deep dive into the university's most interesting, strange, and exciting research. Every two weeks, they invite Radboud researchers to talk about their favourite topics – explained in bite-sized episodes. In today's episode, Antonia talks with Laura De Vos about Indigenous perspectives on the world – and why time might be a spiral.

Time seems to be a pretty straightforward affair – or is it? What if history would not move ahead, but function as a spiral, like Indigenous understandings of time suggest? And how does this influence the way we can relate to nature?

The tenth episode of In a Nutshell is dedicated to Indigenous perspectives on nature and time. This week’s guest, Laura De Vos, will explain how this can inform Indigenous activism – and why always looking seven generations into the future might also be a good policy for Western environmental policy.

Laura De Vos is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Arts. They teach Indigenous Studies and American Studies courses and are currently researching North American Indigenous social movements.

Would you like to learn more about indigenous ways of viewing the world and a spiralic understanding of time? Then follow Laura’s tip and read The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline.