"This book is a jewel--history and analysis that reads like the best poetry."--Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
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"When state violence against peaceful protest at Standing Rock became part of the national consciousness, many noticed Native people for the first time--again. Our History Is the Future is necessary reading, documenting how Native resistance is met with settler erasure: an outcome shaped by land, resources, and the juggernaut of capitalism. Estes has written a powerful history of Seven Fires resolve that demonstrates how Standing Rock is the outcome of history and the beginning of the future."
--Louise Erdrich, author of the National Book Award winner The Round House
"In Our History Is the Future historian Nick Estes tells a spellbinding story of the 10 month Indigenous resistance at Standing Rock in 2016, animating the lives and characters of the leaders and organizers, emphasizing the powerful leadership of the women. Alone this would be a brilliant analysis of one of the most significant social movements of this century. But embedded in the story and inseparable from it is the centuries long history of the Oceti Sakowin' resistance to United States' genocidal wars and colonial institutions. And woven into these entwined stories of Indigenous resistance is the true history of the United States as a colonialist state and a global history of European colonialism. This book is a jewel--history and analysis that reads like the best poetry--certain to be a classic work as well as a study guide for continued and accelerated resistance."
--Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
"The story of Indigenous resistance--its history, goals, forms, successes, and failures--is the book's backbone, which allows Estes to range broadly, illuminating how racism, colonialism, capitalism, genocidal policies, religious and cultural persecution, and vile stereotyping have marginalized, dispossessed, and impoverished Indigenous societies over the centuries."
--Pekka Hämäläinen, New Mexico Historical Review, author of Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America
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.
Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.
