Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

Winner of the Oakland "Blue Collar" PEN Award

A work of history, a manifesto, and an intergenerational story of resistance that shows how two centuries of Indigenous struggle 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, attracting tens of thousands of Indigenous and non-Native allies from around the world. Its slogan "Mni Wiconi"--Water is Life--was about more than just a pipeline. Water Protectors knew this battle for Native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even after the encampment was gone, their anti-colonial struggle would continue.

In Our History is the Future, Nick Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance leading to the #NoDAPL movement from the days of the Missouri River trading forts through the Indian Wars, the Pick-Sloan dams, the American Indian Movement, and the campaign for Indigenous rights at the United Nations. While a historian by trade, Estes also draws on observations from the encampments and from growing up as a citizen of the Oceti Sakowin (the Nation of the Seven Council Fires), making Our History is the Future at once a work of history, a personal story, and a manifesto.

ISBN-13: 9781804295502

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Verso Books

Publication Date: 09-26-2023

Pages: 320

Product Dimensions: 5.79(w) x 8.53(h) x 0.94(d)

Nick Estes is a member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and is an Assistant Professor in American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. Estes is an award-winning journalist whose writing has been featured in the New Yorker, the Guardian, Intercept, Jacobin, Indian Country Today, The Funambulist Magazine, and High Country News. He is the author of the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance and he co-edited Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement. Estes co-founded The Red Nation, an Indigenous resistance organization, in 2014. Estes co-hosts the Red Nation podcast and is the lead editor of Red Media, an Indigenous-run nonprofit media organization that publishes books, videos, and podcasts. Estes is a member of the Oceti Sakowin Writers Society, a network of Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota writers committed to defend and advance Oceti Sakowin sovereignty, cultures, and histories.

Table of Contents

Maps viii

Prologue: Prophets 1

1 Siege 25

2 Origins 67

3 War 89

4 Flood 133

5 Red Power 169

6 Internationalism 201

7 Liberation 247

Acknowledgments 259

Notes 263

Index 289

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