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<h1 class="reader-title">Indigenous Resistance Is
Post-Apocalyptic, with Nick Estes</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Nick Serpe - July 31, 2019<br>
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<p>Nick Estes discusses the deep historical roots of the
convergence at Standing Rock, why Indigenous peoples
have taken a leading role in the climate justice
movement, and why decolonization must be part of any
left-wing agenda.</p>
</header>
<p><em><a
href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/tag/booked"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Booked</a>
is a series of interviews about new books</em><em>.
For this edition, senior editor Nick Serpe spoke with
Nick Estes, author of </em><a
href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/2953-our-history-is-the-future"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Our History
Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access
Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous
Resistance</a><em>, published in May by Verso Books.
Estes is also the co-editor, with <span>Jaskiran
Dhillon, of </span></em><span><a
href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/standing-with-standing-rock"
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Standing
with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement</a><em>,
out this August from the University of Minnesota
Press.</em></span></p>
<p>In <em>Our History Is the Future</em>, Nick Estes, a
citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, uses the
occasion of the 2016–2017 grassroots movement against
the Dakota Access Pipeline—the largest Indigenous-led
protest movement in North America in the twenty-first
century—to look at the longer history of resistance to
settler colonialism by the Oceti Sakowin (or “Seven
Council Fires,” often referred to by the
settler-originated name “Great Sioux Nation”). While the
movement against that pipeline now also lies in the
past, Estes explains how it continues to feed movements
in motion today. In this interview, he also outlines
what climate justice activists can learn from Indigenous
political struggle, and why decolonization must be an
essential part of any serious left-wing agenda, in the
United States and beyond.</p>
<p><b>Nick Serpe</b>: In <i>Our History is the Future</i>
you cover a number of episodes in the history of the
Oceti Sakowin that connect a long tradition of
resistance to settler colonialism to the fight against
the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. Why is it important
to think historically about Indigenous resistance today,
and what was so significant about #NoDAPL, the
convergence at Standing Rock, even if the pipeline was
eventually authorized and completed?</p>
<p><b>Nick Estes</b>: U.S. history typically dates
anything about Indigenous people as happening in the
nineteenth century or before. There is not a sense of a
continuity from the nineteenth to twentieth century. But
in my research, for example, I found a key link that
carried nineteenth-century resistance into the
twentieth-century movements. The Indian Wars are seen as
beginning and ending in one century but not continuing
on with the implementation of the reservation system and
then onward to the construction of the dams in the
middle of the twentieth century. A decade after the
Wounded Knee Massacre [in 1890], Indigenous resistance
efforts attempted to bring forward their treaty claims
to a world forum at the League of Nations—that’s huge.
Often times we say that Indigenous resistance faded
after the massacre, alongside Fredrick Jackson Turner’s
frontier. That’s more of a trope of U.S. history than
reality. When I was told those oral histories it was
like this through line that tells a different story than
tragic defeat. James Mooney’s book, <i>The Ghost<b> </b>Dance
Religion</i>, for example, misinterpreted the Ghost
Dance as a millenarian revivalist movement, as more akin
to Christianity. In his account and in popular
understanding, our resistance died at Wounded Knee. But
it didn’t die.</p>
<p>This history makes Standing Rock simultaneously
exceptional and not exceptional. As an organizer and an
intellectual, I think there is purchase to that kind of
thinking: not just thinking about your movement as doing
something new but as a continuation. Standing Rock was a
reiteration our traditions of resistance: the
unification of grassroots movements with tribal
councils, the treaty councils, the reunification of our
Seven Nations, the Oceti Sakowin. Alongside all of
these, you saw the best of our diplomatic
tradition—“Lakota” means friend and ally—that’s one of
our primary tools of resistance. It was a convergence of
all of those elements—that’s why Standing Rock was a
certain kind of historical turning point, not just for
us as Oceti Sakowin but for the Indigenous movement in
America.</p>
<p><b>Serpe</b>: For many, #NoDAPL was their first
encounter with the term “water protector.” Many were
using an old concept, Mni Wiconi, “water is life,” as a
rallying cry. Beyond the obvious fact that water is
essential to life, why did water figure so centrally in
the fight against the pipeline? How does that relate to
the historic relationship between the people who have
lived on that land and colonial settlement around the
Missouri River?</p>
<p><b>Estes</b>: The invaders came by water, on ships or
upstream on the Missouri River, the Mni Sose. Our first
encounter with the colonizer was mediated by the use of
water as a highway, as a means of travel. Our first
relationship with the United States government was
mediated by the control over a water source. It wasn’t
just about drinking water, which is important, or
watering animals or plants. Water is life in the sense
that mobility is life. It gave the ability to move and
to travel, to hunt and fish. That first relationship
with the United States was also inherently a military
encounter, so we called them Mílahaŋska, which means
“long knives,” because of the sabers they carried. Later
on came fur traders in militarized units, the vanguards
of capitalism, then the Army Corps of Engineers, who
eventually determined the path that the Dakota Access
Pipeline would take.</p>
<p>In that sense, “water protector” is related to the
first encounter with Lewis and Clark in 1804. We are
still defending our rights to this water, which were
codified in our treaties and agreements with the United
States, made under our authority of the pipe, or the
Canupa as we call it, and which the United States
continually refuses to uphold. But those covenants go
back further to our original agreements with the
nonhuman world, with the White Buffalo Calf Woman
who brought us into correct relations with the water,
the land, and the animals. We call her Pte Skan Win, the
primary prophet of Lakota people who brought us our
spiritual teachings and values. Mni Wiconi precedes all
of that.</p>
<p>At the same time, when we say something like “water is
life” or “water protectors,” why should we as Indigenous
people have to perform a kind of spiritual connection
with water? It should be enough to say that every group
of people on this planet has a basic human right to
water. And access to water is an issue of class: in
Johannesburg, Delhi, Flint, Michigan, and Standing
Rock.. If we look at the major water consumers in the
Northern Plains, they’re fracking rigs, which access to
millions of gallons of fresh water every day for free,
while simultaneously polluting millions of gallons of
fresh water, and irrigation for large-scale industrial
agriculture production. They aren’t drawing water from
the river itself but from the Ogallala Aquifer, one of
the largest underground aquifers in the world. It is
currently being depleted though overuse and misuse.</p>
<p>Some of the poorest people in North America are taking
on some of the most powerful interests over the question
of access to clean drinking water. That is going to
continue to define struggles over resources for
generations as climate change intensifies. Even the
Department of Defense has identified water as a key
strategic interest and called climate change a “threat
multiplier” that will increase or intensify the conflict
over resources, domestically and at the international
level. The threat for them is climate refugees: millions
of people fleeing their homelands because of
human-induced—or rather capitalist-induced—climate
change.</p>
<p>So “water protector” has a meaning that goes beyond
what is categorically seen as Indigenous. Alexandra
Ocasio-Cortez, for example, or anybody who crossed the
security barrier at the Oceti Sakowin camp or at Sacred
Stone became a water protector in that moment. “Water
protector,” the slogan “water is life,” were popularized
by Standing Rock, and they’ve become icons of this
generation’s climate justice movement.</p>
<p>That’s a lesson we should be taking in discussions of
the Green New Deal—that the most spectacular, popular
climate justice movement in recent memory, which I would
say spring-boarded the Green New Deal, was
Indigenous-led. It continues to be Indigenous-led. So
why isn’t decolonization part of the agenda? I think
there is a miscalculation that everyday Americans can’t
hold the complexity of this nation, the fact that it is
a settler-colonial nation, in their mind while at the
same time understanding that decolonization can be
implemented in almost any progressive struggle.</p>
<p><b>Serpe:</b> In the book, you consistently take
prophecy, tradition, and different epistemologies
seriously, but the book is still rooted in a materialist
analysis of history and the current moment. Why is it
important to bring these analyses together? How you do
this without being dismissive or condescending on the
one hand, and without mystifying or romanticizing
something that has to do with people’s everyday lives on
the other?</p>
<p><b>Estes</b>: Indigenous studies has proposed and
resolved certain questions in the four decades of its
existence, including the idea that Indigenous
perspectives are valid and in some ways superior to
colonizers’ perspectives on our history—and that
Indigenous peoples have the right to tell their own
stories according to their own traditions. I think
that’s really important. What I’ve learned from my own
study, especially books like Engels’s <i>The Origin of
Family, Private Property, and the State</i>—there are
problems with the book, but it also shows how Indigenous
history can teach us that capitalism is neither
inevitable nor natural. It shows that there were
non-capitalist societies, non-capitalist nations,
non-capitalist civilizations, that had advanced, and
that were knocked off of their developmental trajectory
by colonialism.</p>
<p>The attempt of Indigenous studies is, very much in the
line with the thinking of African Marxist revolutionary
Amílcar Cabral, to “return to the source.” He’s not
saying return to a mystical Indigenous past. What he’s
saying is to return to that path of social development
that we were once on, to take our experience as
colonized people as well as this non-capitalist,
anti-colonial, anti-capitalist core of Indigenous
history, combine them and use those tools to view our
history. We live in a capitalist society and we can’t
extricate ourselves from that, but at the same time we
have remnants of a non-capitalist way of viewing the
world. And it is grounded in our relationships.</p>
<p>This is a huge word in Indigenous studies right
now—relationality—that I think has become mystified.
We’re not the Na’vi of <i>Avatar</i> running around
plugging our brains into trees trying to download data.
I go back to the buffalo, because buffalo relations
really represent the form of relationality that we had
with animals. It wasn’t just this mystical kind of thing
where we were communing with them outside of history.
They represented a source of life for us in the sense
that without the buffalo, we wouldn’t be the Lakota
people, by mere fact that we wouldn’t have a food
source.</p>
<p>Our relationship with the buffalo wasn’t just one-way;
they weren’t just providing for us. We managed those
herds; we cleared out the land for pasture. We would
burn it, to clear the landscape to ensure the survival
of the buffalo nations. That is a very material
relationship. There is reverence in our stories and our
songs [for the buffalo], but I think those cultural
protocols were created to prevent us from
over-exploitation and from throwing out of balance that
relationship.</p>
<p>The same could be said with water. We didn’t use water
for hydroelectricity. We had our own technologies, but
it wasn’t the same in the sense of thinking of nature as
a dead object that could be commodified. I don’t want to
romanticize us as Indigenous people, but we did have a
certain kind of relationship that wasn’t perfect but was
an attempt to seek correct relations with the non-human
world. I don’t think it’s the solution, but it’s a
kernel of a larger solution to the current catastrophe
that we’re facing with climate change. Indigenous people
have a lot to say and an important role to play in how
we address these issues.</p>
<p><b>Serpe</b>: I was really struck by one particular
essay in <i>Standing with Standing Rock</i> by
Elizabeth Ellis, where she sounds an optimistic note
about the fire lit by the fight against Dakota Access
Pipeline. She writes: “This fight forced non-Indigenous
Americans to acknowledge not just the existence of real,
modern, Native Americans but also that unresolved treaty
claims and U.S. colonization of Indigenous peoples and
lands are very current problems. Furthermore, the
conversations about water rights, self-determination,
police violence, and racism that the #NoDAPL movement
fostered have also forged a new intersectional platform
that applies Indigenous perspectives of settler-colonial
nationalism to critique oppression across the United
States.” I wanted to ask you, as an organizer, about
developments in Indigenous movement politics in the
years since Standing Rock. But I also want to hear what
you think about how seriously this budding North
American left takes the issue of decolonization. Are
there encouraging signs of coalition building,
solidarity? What work remains to be done?</p>
<p><b>Estes</b>: Everyone can point to Standing Rock, but
they can’t really point to what’s happened after
Standing Rock. When Indigenous politics enter the
mainstream discussion, it’s often facilitated by white
racism—whether it’s Elizabeth Warren’s DNA claims or the
MAGA-hat-wearing Catholic school boys taunting an
Indigenous elder on the National Mall. People have those
images in their minds, but they can’t tell you the
backstory behind it. They can’t tell you that the
incident on the National Mall was part of a very large
Indigenous-led march to remember missing and murdered
Indigenous women (MMIW). Or the fact that, as explained
on Rebecca Nagle’s <i>This Land </i>podcast, there’s a
longstanding tradition of white Oklahomans who are white
supremacists claiming to be Indigenous or part of the
Cherokee nation to take Native land. The media want
these juicy topics, but they remove the historical
context.</p>
<p>That Elizabeth Ellis quote is spot on. I think it
reflects across all the contributors to <i>Standing
with Standing Rock</i>. Many of them are still on the
front lines or have been on the front lines, battling
extractive industries, battling for LGBTQ and Two Spirit
rights in Indigenous communities and the mainstream,
fighting for MMIW, fighting police violence to this day.
Some of them are back home creating community gardens
for people to use. It didn’t stop at Standing Rock, it
continues. Just because you don’t see what’s going on
doesn’t mean it isn’t going on.</p>
<p>There is a critical approach that we can to take to
this movement. I’ve been asking myself this question for
the last three years: why didn’t Standing Rock arise
into a broader national or international movement with
clear political demands? Instead, we’ve seen the outcome
of Standing Rock as getting several Native congresswomen
elected. Which is good: it shows that people aren’t all
buying the Trump moment, that in this moment of white
backlash you can get two Indigenous women elected to
Congress who are liberals—I wouldn’t say they’re
leftists!—with a host of other congresswomen who are
somewhat leftist. That’s a huge deal, but that was not
the desired outcome of Standing Rock.</p>
<p>There’s oil flowing through that pipeline, and there’s
talk of actually expanding its capacity. But it’s not
just about pipelines. People think that’s all that
Indigenous people do is just try to stop pipelines.
That’s a tactic among a host of strategies, long-term
strategies, for restoring the Missouri River basin
watershed, asserting our sovereignty in connection to
those lands as well, to the point where corporations and
the United States government won’t be able to just
willy-nilly trespass through our land anymore. While
there hasn’t been a coalescence of a long-term, larger
movement, there has been a lot of long-term thinking and
planning. It’s still very diverse and scattered right
now.</p>
<p>The second question that you have was about the left.
To be honest, the left has failed to take seriously
settler colonialism, and not just Indigenous
decolonization but decolonization in general as a
platform. I’ve had a lot of discussions with leftists,
socialists, progressive trade unions. People are
genuinely interested; they’re not hostile to it
automatically. I think it’s just that how we define
class in this country, by traditional or historical
elements of the left, essentially erases Indigenous
people because it prioritizes the needs of settler
society over Indigenous nationhood. They’re often framed
as competing systems. We’ve seen a lot of socialists and
leftists asking about Indigenous reparations, which is
funny because there’s never been an overarching demand
by Indigenous people <i>for </i>reparations. [The
demand is for] land return. Anishinaabe scholar and
intellectual Leanne Simpson said it best (I’m going to
paraphrase her): settler society always asks us for
solutions to these problems, but they don’t like our
answers, because they’re really hard. It gets to the
root of this society. It would be like going back to the
nineteenth century and advocating for class struggle
without talking about the abolition of slavery. It would
be absurd!</p>
<p>The last two centuries have been defined by
unrestrained, settler-colonial land grabs. Just in the
last couple years, the Trump administration has opened
up millions and millions of acres of “public” lands—even
that name itself erases indigeneity—for exploitation,
the extraction of oil and gas, mining, and so on.
Everyone thinks that the major land grabs happened in
the nineteenth century—but, in fact, the land grabs are
still going on today. These extractive industries are
linked from the Bakken region to the tar sands in
Alberta, Canada, and Indigenous peoples have been making
that connection for years. Because of Indigenous
movements, now people are finally paying attention.</p>
<p>Naomi Klein says the Green New Deal is a kind of a
laundry list of progressive movements, linking housing
rights, rights to green jobs, and so on, to climate
justice—well, if every progressive movement can be
linked to climate justice, why can’t every progressive
movement be linked to decolonization as well? That’s my
role as an organizer. I’m trying to bring into
conversation these various social forces that are
advancing things like the Green New Deal to make
decolonization a primary form of class struggle in the
United States.</p>
<p>Most people think that decolonization would mean
getting kicked off the land, or that Indigenous people
would do to them what they did to Indigenous people in
the past. It’s a failure to imagine what a just future
could look like. But it’s also a failure to critically
understand who owns the land in the United States and
what the land is used for. Upward of 96 percent of
agricultural lands are owned by white people, not
Indigenous people. But these aren’t just mom-and-pop
farms out in rural South Dakota or Wyoming. These are
large-scale industrial agricultural operations with
thousands and thousands of acres of land. Ted Turner,
the media mogul, owns 200,000 acres of our treaty
territory alone. He has the largest privately owned
buffalo herd in the world. Worldwide, he owns 2 million
acres of land. Why is it that a single white man can own
that much land?</p>
<p>When we’re talking about land restoration, we’re
talking about the so-called federal public lands of the
United States, but also about these large landholding
capitalists. This is a conversation that we have to have
in North America: who owns the land? What is our
relationship to it? And what should that relationship
look like in a future decolonized society? We understand
as Indigenous people that we have to work with
non-Indigenous people out of mere survival.
Decolonization isn’t an Indian problem. It’s everybody’s
problem.</p>
<p><b>Serpe</b>: In <i>Our History Is the Future</i>, you
write: “Each struggle had adopted essential features of
previous traditions of Indigenous resistance, while
creating new tactics and visions to address the present
reality, and, consequently, projected Indigenous
liberation into the future. Trauma played a major role.
But if we oversimplify Indigenous peoples as perpetually
wounded, we cannot possibly understand how they formed
kinship bonds and constantly recreated and kept intact
families, communities, and governance structures while
surviving as fugitives and prisoners of a settler state
and as conspirators against empire; how they loved,
cried, laughed, imagined, dreamed, and defended
themselves; or how they remain, to this day, the first
sovereigns of this land and the oldest political
authority.” These days there’s a lot of discussion about
“climate despair,” or “eco-anxiety,”—a sort of traumatic
encounter with the serious challenges right now to life
on this planet, so I wanted to ask you about the
long-term resilience of front-line communities facing
violence and overwhelming political odds. How do you
maintain a capacity to fight for a better life even in
times of relative apparent quiescence, or when the
balance of forces seems to be way out of favor? With so
many people feeling overwhelmed by the scale of climate
change, what can we learn from movements that coalesce
around place, community, threats to everyday life?</p>
<p><b>Estes</b>: Indigenous people are post-apocalyptic.
In some cases, we have undergone several apocalypses.
For my community alone, it was the destruction of the
buffalo herds, the destruction of our animal relatives
on the land, the destruction of our animal nations in
the nineteenth century, of our river homelands in the
twentieth century. I don’t want to universalize that
experience; it was very unique to us as nations. But if
there is something you can learn from Indigenous people,
it’s what it’s like to live in a post-apocalyptic
society.</p>
<p>One of the positive meanings of the title of the book,
<i>Our History Is the Future</i>, is that in times of
great turmoil and destruction, people didn’t just stop
being humans. They didn’t just give up. And while we
think of resistance in many ways as a kind of act of
defiance that’s spectacular and militant, it also
happens in everyday realities, in how we keep alive
these stories. People still had children in times of
destruction. People still raised families. They did
their best to keep alive the nation through genocide.</p>
<p>The passage you read is a critique of a trend in
Indigenous studies and Indigenous organizing circles to
focus on trauma and healing at the individual level.
It’s not that people shouldn’t focus on trauma and
healing, but that it’s been mobilized in this neoliberal
moment to say that, once the individual heals, they’ll
be able to go out and be a productive person in society.
That becomes the horizon of struggle: healing at the
site of the individual. The horizon of struggle is no
longer liberation. I think it’s telling in this
particular moment that healing and trauma discourse
becomes almost an obstacle we have to overcome. It’s a
tool of governance in many ways.</p>
<p>Just look at what’s happening in Canada with the
reconciliation process. How messed up is it that the
very perpetrators of that violence are now the ones who
are going to remediate that violence, provide the care
for those victims of violence? Hey, I’m sorry we
kidnapped all of your children, sent them to residential
schools, killed a lot of them, raped a lot of them,
abused a lot of them. Now we’re going to say sorry, but
instead of actually giving back land or giving back the
resources for you to build yourselves as nations, we’re
just going to provide the social services for you to get
the help that you need from us. It’s this mentality of
crying on the shoulder of the man who stole your land.</p>
<p>That’s reflected in the climate justice movement. We
see the future in very bleak and pessimistic terms—that
there is no future. That’s the perfect articulation of
capitalism. Frederick Jameson, wrote that “It’s easier
to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine
the end of capitalism.” That’s very much our moment
right now.</p>
<p>I don’t want to minimize those feelings, but at the
same time I believe fundamentally in revolutionary
optimism, which carried these traditions from absolute
genocide and horror and the Wounded Knee Massacre to
Standing Rock, which was also absolute horror in many
ways. There were people who kept that fire alive. That’s
the job of revolutionaries in history; we’re
cheerleaders of the movement, and we have a backward-
and forward-facing perspective. We’re trying to study
our movements to see how these ideas stayed alive, for
example, when COINTELPRO infiltrated the Red Power
movement and destroyed it. They went international—took
these ideas into the international realm. It was a
survival mechanism that sustained us to the next
movement.</p>
<p>The climate justice movement is very diverse, and it’s
all over the place. If there’s one thing I can offer,
it’s to say: we know what it’s like to undergo
apocalypse. Our worlds have been destroyed in many ways,
and we’re trying to rebuild them, reclaim them, and
reestablish correct relations. The severity of the
situation shouldn’t undermine the willingness to act.
Not to act, to succumb to a kind of paralysis, of
inaction, is itself an action. Not doing anything is
doing something. Howard Zinn said it best: you can’t be
neutral on a moving train.</p>
<hr>
<p><b>Nick Estes </b>is an assistant professor of
American Studies at the University of New Mexico.</p>
<p><b>Nick Serpe </b>is a senior editor at <i>Dissent</i>.</p>
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