[News] A Lakota Historian on What Climate Organizers Can Learn From Two Centuries of Indigenous Resistance

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://theintercept.com/2019/03/07/nick-estes-our-history-is-the-future-indigenous-resistance/ 



  A Lakota Historian on What Climate Organizers Can Learn From Two
  Centuries of Indigenous Resistance

Alleen Brown - March 7, 2019
------------------------------------------------------------------------

_Nick Estes did_ not intend to write a book about Standing Rock. He was 
working on his dissertation about Indigenous rights at the United 
Nations when the movement against the Dakota Access pipeline exploded on 
the edge of one of the 16 northern Plains Indian reservations of the 
Oceti Sakowin people, known by the U.S. government as the Sioux. Estes, 
a member of the Lower Brule Sioux tribe who grew up in South Dakota, 
felt he had little choice but to change his plans. He traveled home to 
the Dakotas and wrote much his book sitting on his aunt’s couch, drawing 
on oral histories shared by elders and relatives and cross-referencing 
them with archival documents.

The result is “Our History Is the Future 
<https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600136/our-history-is-the-future-by-nick-estes/9781786636720/>,” 
which traces Indigenous resistance from the Lakota people’s attempt to 
deny Lewis and Clark passage down the Missouri River in 1804, to the Red 
Power movement’s demands for treaty enforcement in the 1960s, to today’s 
Indigenous-led fights against fossil fuel projects. Writing about the 
massacre at Wounded Knee, where 300 Indigenous men, women, and children 
were murdered by U.S. soldiers in 1890, Estes highlights the 
revolutionary premise of the nonviolent Ghost Dance movement the victims 
followed. With a long tradition of daring attempts at decolonization, 
Estes argues, Indigenous people represent a powerful challenge to the 
profit-driven forces that threaten continued life on the planet.

In addition to working as an associate professor of American studies at 
the University of New Mexico (and an occasional Intercept contributor 
<https://theintercept.com/staff/nick-estes/>), Estes is an activist with 
the Albuquerque-based Red Nation, which organizes around a range of 
issues, including fracking 
<https://therednation.org/2018/02/26/greater-chaco-is-not-for-sale-fighting-trumps-colonial-land-grab/> 
near sacred sites and Diné communities in New Mexico’s Greater Chaco 
region, child detention on the border, and urban police violence against 
Native people. Estes spoke to The Intercept about Native activism after 
Standing Rock, the Green New Deal, and the rebirth of Indigenous culture 
that the mainstream media is missing. This interview has been edited for 
length and clarity.

*Could you explain what you mean by the title phrase of your book, “our 
history is the future”?*

I look at the Ghost Dance prophecy 
<https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/wounded-knee-healing-the-wounds-of-the-past-_7JaVVZtnk67BjngDh7pvg/>, 
which was an anticolonial uprising among particularly Lakota and Dakota 
people on the northern Plains in the late 19th century, but also a 
widespread spiritual movement that went up the west coast of Canada and 
down to parts of what is today Mexico. If they were completely harmless, 
then the United States wouldn’t have deployed its army against starving, 
horseless people at Wounded Knee. The reason it represented such a 
threat was not because Lakota and Dakota Ghost Dancers were going around 
and murdering white settlers — it was because it was a vision of the future.

When you subjugate a people, you not only take their land and their 
language, their identity, and their sense of self — you also take away 
any notion of a future. The reason I chose this name is because in this 
particular era of neoliberal capitalism, it’s easier to imagine the end 
of the world than the end of capitalism. The argument I’m making is that 
within our own traditions of Indigenous resistance, we have always been 
a future-oriented people, whether it was taking up arms against the 
United States government, whether it was taking ceremonies underground 
into clandestine spaces, whether it was learning the enemy’s language. 
This pushes back against the dominant narrative that Indigenous people 
are a dying, diminishing race desperately holding on to the last 
vestiges of their culture or their land base. If that were the case, 
then I don’t think we would have an uprising such as Standing Rock or, 
today, Line 3 
<https://theintercept.com/2019/01/30/enbridge-line-3-pipeline-minnesota/> or 
Bayou Bridge, 
<https://theintercept.com/2018/08/22/recent-arrests-under-new-anti-protest-law-spotlight-risks-that-off-duty-cops-pose-to-pipeline-opponents/> or 
the immense amount of mobilization 
<https://theintercept.com/2018/05/31/missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women/> around 
murdered and missing Indigenous women.

*You write about the idea of accumulation of resistance, which “is not 
always spectacular, nor instantaneous, but that nevertheless makes the 
endgame of elimination an impossibility.” What does that mean for 
Indigenous-led movements today?*

Growing up as a Lakota person, your heroes are Crazy Horse 
<https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/native-history-crazy-horse-killed-by-u-s-soldier-while-in-custody-kfcdXtkF1EKgIZwqAMFN4A/>, 
Sitting Bull 
<https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/native-history-sitting-bull-shot-by-indian-police-his-legacy-remains-OoLDPEGJhUmPDFpaslTopQ/>; 
they’re also [American Indian Movement activists] Russell Means, Madonna 
Thunder Hawk, also Phyllis Young. We don’t necessarily choose those 
circles of resistance. We’re born into it, because we are still 
colonized people. The tradition of resistance within the Oceti Sakowin 
dates back to the first arrival of Americans. We weren’t stupid people — 
we knew what they were about, and we came to know the United States, 
after Lewis and Clark trespassed through our territory in 1804, as a 
predator nation. Those people who first met Lewis and Clark told their 
children, and their children told their children.

To be Indigenous is to be political by default, because we’re not 
supposed to be here, first of all, and second of all, we’re Indigenous 
because of the land we sit atop, and the land we protect, and the 
territories we protect, and that means that we will always be in the way 
of development. There’s no neutral stance that Indigenous people can take.

I love somebody like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the fact that she 
herself is a water protector and her campaign began at Standing Rock. I 
also recognize the limitations of her position in Congress. Obama 
couldn’t stop the pipeline; none of the people he appointed in his 
administration could stop the pipeline. We have to recognize that 
Indigenous movements in places like the northern Plains can do things we 
cannot expect politicians to do — things that only Indigenous movements 
like NoDAPL can do. It’s false to assume that power lies somewhere else.

*The Intercept’s coverage of NoDAPL focused on the collaboration between 
police and private interests and the criminalization of Indigenous 
resistance. How does Standing Rock fit into the more quotidian role of 
police in Indigenous people’s lives?*

In the past, Indian people in certain communities could not leave the 
reservation without a pass. They could not leave without permission from 
an Indian agent. To leave the open-air prison was to be an outlaw, and 
you were subject to being captured or hanged or imprisoned. Even though 
that may not be true today, culturally and socially it’s still a 
practiced norm. In Albuquerque and places like Rapid City, South Dakota, 
one of the common refrains that police say when they’re enacting 
violence on Indigenous people is “Go back to the reservation 
<https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/eureka-officer-native-american-reservation-video-13034769.php>.” 
Indigenous people are seen as not belonging even on their own homelands.

I would say that the everyday forms of violence are much more deadly 
than the police violence that happened at Standing Rock, even though it 
was brutal, and it caused a lot of trauma. [Police] intensified the 
things they had already mastered. They already knew how to profile 
Indigenous people — they’re border-town cops. This is Morton County, 
just north of the Standing Rock Indian reservation. For a while, they 
had Red Tomahawk, the guy who killed Sitting Bull, on their State 
Highway Patrol patches. They embrace that history; they’re not confused 
about the role that they’re playing. They’re just the modern iteration 
of the 7th Cavalry 
<https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/wounded-knee-healing-the-wounds-of-the-past-_7JaVVZtnk67BjngDh7pvg/>.

*In your book, you describe a disaster that the Oceti Sakowin people 
faced that perhaps holds some valuable lessons for organizers 
confronting the climate crisis. Could you explain the Pick-Sloan Plan 
and the flooding of Indigenous land?*

I think about this strong push toward the Green New Deal — and I agree 
in principle and in spirit with the Green New Deal — but I also kind of 
cringe a bit. The Pick-Sloan Plan at the time was one of the largest dam 
projects in history. In 1933, the federal government began to construct 
a massive dam near the Fort Peck Indian Reservation of the Assiniboine 
and Sioux people (the Nakota people). It was a public works project 
during the Great Depression designed to provide relief and employment to 
white workers in Montana and the surrounding region. As a result, 
hundreds of Native people were displaced, and thousands of acres of 
their lands were flooded to essentially save the settler economy from 
itself. This has been a historical phenomenon in the United States: 
Whenever there’s a crisis of legitimacy for the status quo for the 
capitalist system, it’s oftentimes Indigenous lands that are sacrificed.

The inspiration for the Green New Deal really began in the camps at 
Standing Rock, where Ocasio-Cortez started her campaign. But we have to 
remember the pitfalls of fixing settler economies at the expense of 
Indigenous lands. Sometimes I feel that the burden of transition is 
placed on Indigenous people. I see that with these transition plans — 
now the Navajo nation is going to be producing 
<https://www.fastcompany.com/40577931/solar-is-starting-to-replace-the-largest-coal-plant-in-the-western-u-s> solar 
power to fuel the entire Southwest. OK, so has it really changed from a 
resource colony? Because the Navajo nation was producing coal that 
powered the whole Southwest, and now it’s producing oil to power the 
global economy in the United States.

I think it’s useful to look at the dams, which were applauded by 
everyone in the United States. John F. Kennedy came and gave a speech, 
and my grandmother was actually in the audience. My grandmother talked 
until the day she died about what it was like to shake hands with John 
F. Kennedy, but, at the same time, he was there to celebrate the 
destruction of our homeland. So there’s always this trade-off. That 
means we have to address the primary contradiction, which is settler 
colonialism, if we’re going to honestly and justly transition out of the 
current carbon economy.

*You close the book with a demand for the emancipation of the earth from 
capitalism. We’re at a crisis point ecologically, and a lot of people 
are looking to the Green New Deal as a central point of organizing. What 
do you think is required for something like this to be a meaningful 
vehicle for justice?*

The interesting thing about the way the Green New Deal has been framed 
is that it’s a “pragmatic” environmental policy. There are elements that 
are missing from the Green New Deal that should be fought for. The deal 
omits <https://theintercept.com/2019/02/07/green-new-deal-resolution/> a 
clear commitment to keeping fossil fuels in the ground, and it needs to 
reject carbon-pricing schemes that simply privatize the air we breathe 
and allow the industry to keep extracting, transporting, and burning 
fossil fuels so long as it has a “green face.” Those are things that 
Indigenous communities have been fighting for, and I don’t know why 
they’re not in there.

The other thing, going back to that pragmatic language — pragmatic for 
whom? We have 10 years 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy-environment/2018/10/08/world-has-only-years-get-climate-change-under-control-un-scientists-say/>. 
What is pragmatic about extending the behemoth of fossil fuel 
capitalism? It’s either us or them, and there’s nothing pragmatic about 
sustaining the system, because the system is destroying us. It’s an 
issue of race and class in the sense that the most vulnerable are always 
going to be the poor brown people of the earth, the humble of the earth, 
and we recognize that.

This shouldn’t be a capitulation to power to sell it to the Nancy 
Pelosis of the world, who unabashedly is calling herself a capitalist. 
She’s not interested in undoing these systems. So it’s something we 
should fight for, but it’s also something we should recognize as limited 
and flawed in some ways, and we should demand more and really redefine 
the parameters of what a “pragmatic” response to global climate change is.

*You’ve talked before about the lack of Indigenous authorship in 
mainstream media. In the wake of **Idle No More* 
<http://www.idlenomore.ca/story>*, Native authors became more a part of 
Canadian media, but that hasn’t happened in the U.S. to the same degree 
in the wake of NoDAPL. Do you see that changing? *

Increased representation of Indigenous people in media and the popular 
imaginary in Canada occurred because of the Idle No More movement and 
the federal government’s Truth and Reconciliation process, which 
actually required certain reforms at universities or in media rooms 
<https://www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/Saskatchewan%20Office/2016/11/Decolonizing%20the%20Media%20%28final%29.pdf> 
to open up spaces for Indigenous people. But this isn’t Canada; this is 
the United States.

Not only do we suffer a lack of representation in the news media, but we 
also suffer a lack of representation in writing and telling our own 
stories. That doesn’t mean that non-Indigenous people can’t write and 
tell our stories with integrity and credibility, but there’s 
unwillingness to really engage that disparity. I do think there are 
strides being made in certain newsrooms across the country, but there 
isn’t a national effort to change that. And this is happening in a media 
landscape where things are changing rapidly. There’s a precarity in 
journalism where a lot of people are freelancing and driving down the 
costs of stories. I’ve heard all of these things from Native journalists 
themselves. And some of them, journalists that I really respected, 
couldn’t find a place in a major newsroom, so they ended up just leaving 
the profession altogether.

I think right now, Indian Country is in kind of a rebirth of culture, of 
media and art and political activism — but the irony of it is you 
wouldn’t know by opening up the New York Times. We’re only a news story 
when it’s a white woman claiming 
<https://theintercept.com/2018/10/19/elizabeth-warren-dna-native-americans/> she 
has Native American DNA, or when a bunch of white Catholic school boys 
taunt 
<https://theintercept.com/2019/01/24/covington-maga-hat-native-american/> a 
Native elder at the Lincoln Memorial. I used to be a little bit cynical 
about this, but I’m actually much happier now, because I do see those 
changes happening even if they’re not being noticed by the mainstream.

*Tell me about the Red Nation and your organizing work in New Mexico.*

We formed the Red Nation back in 2014 after the killing of Kee Thompson 
and Allison Gorman, also known as Cowboy and Rabbit. They were two 
Navajo men who were brutally murdered 
<https://www.abqjournal.com/433805/suspect-says-two-homeless-men-were-told-to-eat-mud.html> by 
three young men on the west side of Albuquerque. It was at the tail end 
of this upsurge in protests against police violence in Albuquerque, but 
one thing I noticed was there wasn’t a lot of concern around police 
violence against Native people. There were some elements of the movement 
that were focusing on it, but by and large, it was erased. I remember 
[AIM co-founder] Dennis Banks came to one of our Red Nation events, and 
we were talking about border-town violence, and he was like, “The 
American Indian Movement was founded first and foremost to end police 
brutality. That was 50 years ago, and we’re still doing it today.”

We are an Indigenous feminist organization. This generation of young 
Native people are doing things that weren’t hip or cool in the ’50s and 
’60s and ’70s, during the Red Power movement 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBU_GdSc--E>. They’re addressing things 
such as heteropatriarchy and the use of tradition in their own 
communities as a tool of oppression. A lot of our young people are 
nonbinary, they’re gender nonconforming, they’re queer. They’re 
two-spirit [an umbrella term for Indigenous peoples who do not subscribe 
to Western gender binaries and heteronormative sexuality]. That element 
of our societies was one of the first things to be almost annihilated 
and extinguished, because it represented an alternative political order. 
There’s a reason why these generals and politicians chose our men to 
sign treaties and negotiate. They used our men as a tool of conquest. So 
we’ve inherited that in our own communities. It relates to the work that 
we do with our unsheltered relatives on the street, who are cast out of 
their communities for being trans or queer.

We have comrades and relatives around the world, so we try to be in 
alliance with those movements as well. We have groups studying what’s 
happening in Venezuela right now with the U.S.-backed coup, and we have 
people working on Guatemala. We’re not really doing anything new in that 
regard. We’re building upon the work of the Red Power movement and the 
American Indian Movement and, as I detail in my book, its close 
relations with the Palestine Liberation Organization. There’s a reason 
why there were Palestinian flags flying at Standing Rock.

-- 
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