Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance *[PDF]
How two centuries of Indigenous resistance created the movement proclaiming “Water is life” In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century. Water Protectors knew this battle for native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even after the encampment was gone, their anticolonial struggle would continue. In Our History Is the Future, Nick Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance that led to the #NoDAPL movement. Our History Is the Future is at once a work of history, a manifesto, and an intergenerational story of resistance. Read more
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Why Must Read Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance?
This is a fantastic book and should be mandatory reading in seminars on indigenous and American history. Estes writes beautifully to produce a damning account of colonialism that is both provocative and enlightening while rightly also challenging how other historians have written about this history. This is not only the best account of Standing Rock and the Oceti Sakowin, but will be soon be recognized as one of the best volumes in current indigenous scholarship as it centers on Lakota epistemology and memorymaking rooted in the land itself. Estes makes the forces of colonialism and capitalism easy to follow and understand, and he rightly focuses on the future-oriented nature of indigenous, anticolonial resistance. I cannot wait to teach this book and will be recommending it breathlessly for some time.
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