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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/03/07/nick-estes-our-history-is-the-future-indigenous-resistance/">https://theintercept.com/2019/03/07/nick-estes-our-history-is-the-future-indigenous-resistance/</a></font>
<h1 class="Post-title" data-reactid="166">A Lakota Historian on
What Climate Organizers Can Learn From Two Centuries of
Indigenous Resistance</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Alleen Brown - March 7, 2019</div>
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<p><u>Nick Estes did</u> 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.</p>
<p>The result is “<a
href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600136/our-history-is-the-future-by-nick-estes/9781786636720/">Our
History Is the Future</a>,” 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.</p>
<p>In addition to working as an associate professor of
American studies at the University of New Mexico (and an
occasional Intercept <a
href="https://theintercept.com/staff/nick-estes/">contributor</a>),
Estes is an activist with the Albuquerque-based Red
Nation, which organizes around a range of issues,
including <a
href="https://therednation.org/2018/02/26/greater-chaco-is-not-for-sale-fighting-trumps-colonial-land-grab/">fracking</a>
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.</p>
<p><strong>Could you explain what you mean by the title
phrase of your book, “our history is the future”?</strong></p>
<p>I look at the <a
href="https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/wounded-knee-healing-the-wounds-of-the-past-_7JaVVZtnk67BjngDh7pvg/">Ghost
Dance prophecy</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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, <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/01/30/enbridge-line-3-pipeline-minnesota/">Line
3</a> or <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2018/08/22/recent-arrests-under-new-anti-protest-law-spotlight-risks-that-off-duty-cops-pose-to-pipeline-opponents/">Bayou
Bridge,</a> or the immense amount of <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2018/05/31/missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women/">mobilization</a> around
murdered and missing Indigenous women.</p>
<p><strong>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?</strong></p>
<p>Growing up as a Lakota person, your heroes are <a
href="https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/native-history-crazy-horse-killed-by-u-s-soldier-while-in-custody-kfcdXtkF1EKgIZwqAMFN4A/">Crazy
Horse</a>, <a
href="https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/native-history-sitting-bull-shot-by-indian-police-his-legacy-remains-OoLDPEGJhUmPDFpaslTopQ/">Sitting
Bull</a>; 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>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?</strong></p>
<p>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 “<a
href="https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/eureka-officer-native-american-reservation-video-13034769.php">Go
back to the reservation</a>.” Indigenous people are
seen as not belonging even on their own homelands.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/wounded-knee-healing-the-wounds-of-the-past-_7JaVVZtnk67BjngDh7pvg/">7th
Cavalry</a>.</p>
<p><strong>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?</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.fastcompany.com/40577931/solar-is-starting-to-replace-the-largest-coal-plant-in-the-western-u-s">producing</a> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>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?</strong></p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/02/07/green-new-deal-resolution/">omits</a> 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.</p>
<p>The other thing, going back to that pragmatic language
— pragmatic for whom? We have <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy-environment/2018/10/08/world-has-only-years-get-climate-change-under-control-un-scientists-say/">10
years</a>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>You’ve talked before about the lack of
Indigenous authorship in mainstream media. In the wake
of </strong><a href="http://www.idlenomore.ca/story"><strong>Idle
No More</strong></a><strong>, 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? </strong></p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/Saskatchewan%20Office/2016/11/Decolonizing%20the%20Media%20%28final%29.pdf">media
rooms</a> to open up spaces for Indigenous people. But
this isn’t Canada; this is the United States.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2018/10/19/elizabeth-warren-dna-native-americans/">claiming</a> she
has Native American DNA, or when a bunch of white
Catholic school boys <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2019/01/24/covington-maga-hat-native-american/">taunt</a> 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.</p>
<p><strong>Tell me about the Red Nation and your
organizing work in New Mexico.</strong></p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.abqjournal.com/433805/suspect-says-two-homeless-men-were-told-to-eat-mud.html">brutally
murdered</a> 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.”</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBU_GdSc--E">Red
Power movement</a>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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