Guerrilla History - The History of Indigenous Resistance w/ Nick Estes

Episode Date: May 21, 2021

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we bring on professor, activist, and author Nick Estes to talk to us about the long history of American indigenous resistance.  The conversation is structured around Nick's brilliant book Our History Is the Future:  Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He's also an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico, an organizer with The Red Nation, and author of the aforementioned Our History Is the Future, which is available from Verso Books:  https://www.versobooks.com/books/2953-our-history-is-the-future.  You can find The Red Nation via their website http://therednation.org/ and on twitter @The_Red_Nation. Nick can be found on twitter @nickwestes. Breht has previously recorded a couple of episodes of Revolutionary Left Radio with Nick as well.  You can find those on your podcast app of choice, or via the following links: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/lakota-and-dakota-history https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/aim Guerrilla History is the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history, and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.  If you have any questions or guest/topic suggestions, email them to us at [e-mail]. Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea.   Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod, and can be supported on patreon at https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory.  Your contributions will make the show possible to continue and succeed! To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/the-majlis, and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio and cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter @Red_Menace_Pod.  Follow and support these shows on patreon, and find them at https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/.     Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.

You don't remember Dinn-Vin-Vin? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, and welcome to guerrilla history. the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history

and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm your host, Henry Huckimacki, joined, as always, by my co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing well. Great to be with you, Henry. Yeah, it's always nice to be joined with you, and I'll just mention briefly that we recently just interviewed Margaret Kimberly together and that was a lot of fun so it's always fun to get together with you adan it was and uh i'm also joined as always by brett o'Shea the revolutionary left radio and co-host of

the red menace podcast hello brett how are you doing today hello i'm doing great i'm actually incredibly excited uh for this interview in general because there's so much to cover and um i really enjoyed the book that it's based on as well so yeah i'm very excited i agree wholeheartedly with that assessment. And the one thing that I'm going to regret about this interview is that it's not like a two-week-long interview where we just are talking to our guests for two weeks straight about this topic because there's so much that we could cover. But alas, we're only going to have a little bit of time for today. But our guest today is Nick Estes, who's a professor of American Studies at University of New Mexico, and is author of the book, Our History Is the Future,

which is available from Verso and will be coming out in paperback very soon. you set this up because you're already friends with Nick prior to setting this up. And so I know Adnan and I were both really looking forward to doing this. And yeah, thanks for setting that up. For sure. Yeah. It's a connection that we've had since early on in Rev Left, me and Nick have done a few episodes together. He, of course, helps run the organization and the podcast, Red Nation, him and several

other of his comrades, which will probably be plugged throughout the seven. episode, but highly recommended as well. And I think this episode itself will also be cross-published on the Red Nation podcast and guerrilla history, gesturing to that continued sort of solidarity and cooperation between the two platforms writ large. Absolutely. I always listen to the Red Nation podcast when it comes out and check their newsletters when they come out. Really, really fantastic analysis done there. So anybody that's listening to Guerrilla history and has not subscribed to the Red nation. Well, go ahead and do that right now. But I want to talk here in this intro segment about why this interview is going to be so important for us as individuals that live in North

America. So Brett, you and I are located in the United States, Adnan. You're in Canada currently, but you're originally from the United States. And it's an unavoidable fact that we live in settler colonies. The United States and Canada are both settler colonies. They've were founded by settler colonialists and I have long thought and this is something that was instilled by one of my university professors of Native American studies who I'll shout out later

but the fact that we live in settler colonies should inform how we view the decisions and the actions taken by these countries both in terms of domestic policy and international policy and a lot of the actions that we take are really well explained by the fact that we are a settler colony. So I'm going to pitch it over to the two of you now to maybe reflect on that point,

whether you agree or disagree on how important the fact that we're in a settler colony, all of us are in settler colonies, how important that is for analyzing policies and actions taken by these states. Adnan, why don't we start with you? Well, I think it's absolutely fundamental for us to recognize if we're thinking about history that so many of the contemporary states like Canada, the United States, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, you know, Israel, Palestine, and also all of Latin America, that when you think of this in terms of global history, that settler colonialism is a process that has wide impact on the shape of the world today.

And especially also for us, we're in a republic, but it seems like the Republican form and the Republican ideals. We already had a wonderful discussion with Professor Gerald Horn about the counter-revolution of 1776, is that putting these Enlightenment ideals in their history ends up giving them a very different, we have a very different perspective on them. So it's absolutely foundational. That's why I've been so excited to have this. I wanted to make sure that early on in guerrilla history that we deal with questions of indigenous resistance to settler colonialism and understand that

because it's vital, I think not only for understanding the past but also for really restoring relations in the future to have a just society. So what I think some of the consequences of settler colonialism are, is that it's tantamount to genocide. I mean, it is basically a process by which an existing people are dispossessed of their land, are suppressed, their culture is destroyed, and many of them are killed, whether it is through disease or whether through actual warfare and through violence, that the goal of

settler colonialism is to replace a certain people on the land so that the land, the land, can be possessed and new society can be created. And that process may take different forms. It may have different phases from early settlement to dispossession to war to incorporation, the reserve system creating minorities. But fundamentally, it's absolutely foundational for the shape of the state that we have. So I think it's very hard to really analyze U.S. history without acknowledging and recognizing how important that is. We often talk about the original sin of the United States as being slavery, but really we have to include

and say as foundational and important was the dispossession and genocide of indigenous peoples on this land. If I may jump in for one quick second to add one final point on what Adnan just said, you mentioned that this is foundational to understanding American history, but I would say that this is foundational

in terms of understanding world history, really, because as the imperial hegemon of the world of modern times at least, but as a significant player in world history for several hundred years at this point, even before we were the hegemon, we being the United States. The fact that this was a settler colony and still is a settler colony doesn't only affect the history within the United States, but the United States' actions worldwide also informs global history, the fact that we are a settler colony also is going to inform global history. So just to make sure

that we lay that fact down. But I agree entirely with your analysis, Adnan. Yeah, I just would say that there are a lot of patterns in settler colonial societies. You know, you think of colonial, settler colonial Algeria. You think of, you know, apartheid South Africa. You know, you think of all of these places of Israel currently, that there are certain. structures that frame the nature of politics, the fact that they have a suppression and occupation of, you know, other people and have to have a militarized society. And there's just so many consequences of it. And there's something of a shared pattern that this is really something to appreciate and understand for global history, both because the U.S.'s role, but also because

the U.S. was created out of a period in history where there were two kinds of colonialism that were developed. One was more of a franchise colonialism where they rule from afar in order to exploit resources, but others where they transfer a population to settle and replace the indigenous people. And that's what we're talking about now. Right, exactly. Brett? Yeah, I mean, I think it's absolutely crucial to understand that the entire global order is shaped by settler colonialism. I mean, you could just take the entire Western Hemisphere, the America's north, central, and south is just a history of colonization. But then all around the world, the very existence and the dichotomy between the global south and the global north is premised on colonialism. The purposeful underdevelopment

of the entire continent of Africa is based on colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, understanding places like the Philippines or fascism in the European imperial core. These are all things that can't be understood without an understanding of colonialism. And more than that are modern forms of racism and racial understandings and racial divisions all over the planet are created and forged in the process of colonialism. The like anti-blackness did not exist in the way that it exists to this day prior to the epoch of colonialism. The very, the very identity of whiteness was forged in this process.

So you literally cannot understand the present reality. political, social, economic, environmental, without racial, without understanding of colonialism. And there is a segment of the, there always have been, the segment of the left in settler colonial society specifically, who don't take this problem seriously, don't put in the work to understand it, and their settler biases, assumptions, and chauvinisms bloom in the vacuum created by that ignorance. Class analysis itself, I think, becomes impossible, particularly in a settler colonial context, when that history is not understood. And then, of course, the way it's taught in settler colonial societies is from the perspective of the colonialists. So growing up, you hear about these conflicts, cowboys and Indians, right?

How it's framed in popular culture. You hear about Thanksgiving, but all of these things are skewed toward the perspective of whiteness and of colonialism. So the average American integrates that misunderstanding into their entire world conception. And again, you know, something like modern-day fascism can't be separated from whiteness in that colonial history. And so if you want to fight it, how do you fight it? You've got to understand a problem before you can cure it, et cetera. And so we're going to talk about a lot of this stuff throughout this. But I would just say one last point before we get towards the interview.

And that's that there's this wonderful documentary out right now that I think gets at this history really well. It's called Exterminate All the Brutes. And it is directed and produced by Raul Peck, the director of young Karl Marx and I Am Not Your Negro. And I think this sort of framing of history and understanding of it, he links the process of colonialism to modern day fascist movements all over the world and does a lot more. this is the way to understand history and more and more projects and multiple forms of media are now addressing this and coming to this realization and so if you're all interested in deepening your understanding of this of course listen to shows like guerrilla history and the Red Nation but also check out exterminate all the brutes and the books that it's based on the multiple

books because that history is just absolutely crucial and again if you don't understand that history you literally cannot understand the present and a lot of people in a American society, talk about politics and social movements and economics with a third grade understanding of colonialism and its legacies. And that can only create more delusion, more mysticism, and more white chauvinism in its wake. Yeah, I think that that's very important to understand. And I just think that listeners, as they listen to this interview, should keep in mind that while we're going to be talking about Native American issues throughout this episode,

that the structure that the United States is built on is going to inform all of the future conversations where the United States plays a role. But, Adnan, you were going to say something? Oh, no, just I was going to say that I'm definitely looking forward to watching that movie. Raul Peck is a wonderful filmmaker. I think he also did a biopic on Lumumba.

Patrice Lumumba, very important figure when we were talking about listeners, you can go back and listen to the episode that we had about decolonization with Leo Zellig in Africa. But, you know, I've been a bit on a little bit of a kick on political movies recently, and I recently watched Burn, which is a Ponticorvo movie, which is really about a kind of slave rebellion. It's a little bit like the Haitian revolt. And those kinds of movies are a great way to get interested in some of these issues and see and be able to imagine something like what this dynamic between colonizer and colonized are. And it's basically about a settler colonial republic being founded.

And in some ways, you could think about that as a lot like the United States in some ways, is that you have a colonial rebellion against the imperial power, but it's a settler. it's led by settlers in order to maintain, you know, the racial hierarchies and the forms of capitalist depression. And I think it just is so foundational and fundamental for understanding, you know, our history, especially U.S. history, Canadian history, is to really understand and grasp what is a settler colony all about. Yeah, I think that that's another really excellent point. I love having conversations with you guys. All the points that are made are excellent, but But the last thing I want to talk about for just a brief minute or two, perhaps each before we get into the interview, is, of course, a lot of this interview is going to be based on Nick's book, Our History is the Future, though not exclusively because, of course, Nick is a wealth of knowledge on all issues, but especially on Native American issues. So we might drift a bit here or there to other things that we want to talk about.

But when talking about our history is the future, the subtitle, I think, is something that is going to be worth keeping in mind both for this interview as well as, again, listeners, as you look into this topic further on your own, Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline in the long tradition of indigenous resistance. I think that the resistance part is, of course, it's the key point of the book, but I think that that's also something. that we tend to forget about. And when we do think about indigenous resistance, we're just thinking about sporadic events like Custer's Last Stand or, you know, Red Cloud's War, something like that, maybe the Seminoles down in Florida.

We tend to think of these, I don't want to say small events, but these instances of resistance. But that is not the full picture of indigenous resistance in North America. This is a long-standing process that has been going essentially since the landing of Europeans on this land up through today. And this resistance has taken a variety of different forms. And by looking at these different forms of resistance, all as forms of resistance, but varied in terms of their tactics, I think that it's going to be very important to kind of put those things together and to think about how this resistance has shaped American.

in history. Either of you guys want to add anything to that before we cut to Nick? I think you said it well, and I think there's just so much on the table that we put out that we can follow up with Nick. So, yeah, I think we're good. None, nothing else. Well, I just hope we'll have many conversations with Nick and with his colleagues and others on indigenous questions because there's a sea to explore here.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, in that case, we'll wrap up this introduction, and we'll be back. listeners in just a second with Nick Estes, Professor of American Studies and author of Our History is the Future. a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. Hello, Nick, and welcome to guerrilla history. It's a pleasure to have you on. Yeah, it's great to join you all. Nice to meet you, Henry, Anon, and Brett, to see you in person, I actually never knew

what you looked like, so. Well, I'm sorry to let you down, but here I am. He's a heck. No, I'm just kidding. I can say that, you know, we've definitely been wanting to record with you for a while, and we're definitely looking forward to this conversation. but Brett, you've already done a couple episodes with Neck and you know, you're familiar with him. So why don't I turn this over to you to get this conversation underway?

Sure. Yeah. Well, first of all, Nick, as everything you do, I'm a huge fan. I love this book. Loved re-diving into it in preparation for this interview and highly recommend it to anybody listening. That's for sure. And maybe a good place to start is to discuss the title. Our history is the future. I think this is like multi-layered in many ways. it makes me think about the relationship to the natural world, climate change, and you even discussed the radically different conception of time and analysis of history that comes out of indigenous culture. So what does the title, Our History Is the Future, mean to you?

And why did you pick that as a way to frame this entire book? To be honest, the meaning has changed over time. The original intent has sort of been lost, I guess, and listening to other people's interpretations of the title has actually made it much more of a kind of collective understanding. And I've noticed that people have actually been using that phrase. I don't know if I coined it or not. It was just sitting on my aunt's couch.

And I was trying to figure out, I was actually reading BJ Prashad's socialist writing and thinking about detonator sentences, right? And thinking about how to relay really complicated sort of analyses in simple kind of language. And that's kind of where this title came from, our history is the future, thinking about that indigenous people are frequently trapped in the past, right?

We're often thought of as only existing in like one kind of period of, you know, this land and then, you know, we don't have a future, right? We only, we're kind of just trapped in the past. We only are focused on what we were, but never what we are or what we could. be, right? And so thinking about that, but also in terms, you know, the subtitle is the long tradition of indigenous resistance. And really thinking back or looking at our oral tradition and our prophecies and how we understood time, it was always a future-oriented project. And thinking about things such as like the ghost dance or even the uprising at Standing Rock,

it wasn't about a return so much as it was about a way forward. So I guess that was the original intent, but over time when people kind of talk to me or I listen to people, reflect on it, I think of it more as a form of like of a relationship or a relation. So in some senses of the words, you know, there's, in some senses there's a spatial relationship that indigenous people have to place.

you know in the book i talk a lot about chisapa or minisose the missouri river and um the black hills and our our relationship to that land and territory and how we were caretakers and how we attempted to be uh or aspired to be good good in good relation with the land and all the life that existed on the land so that's kind of like a spatial relationship um but the more I've heard people kind of reflect on this book and the title and what it means to them, there's also a temporal relationship. What does it mean to be a good ancestor to the future, right? And thinking about it in terms of that, like, relationality isn't just spatial.

It's not just familial. It's also temporal. And I think when we think about time and, you know, I've had a little bit of experience in speaking with indigenous nations from the south of the hemorrhury. hemisphere. And there's very much kind of a similar understanding of time, like thinking about long durations of time versus kind of what the capitalist kind of mindset of like the here and now or like survival mode, right? Colonialism teaches us to live in the present and to think about ourselves only of what we were in the past, but never imagine ourselves in the future.

And I think the best thing for best representation of that is thinking about how people in this country in this settler state learn about indigenous history they don't learn about indigenous history often through reading books by indigenous people for indigenous people it's often through popular culture uh and one medium or one genre of popular culture that that we are you know frequently appear in is the western right the past on the frontier and all westerns are war movies right where the the settler is the sort of um the settlers is looked at as the victim uh and And invasion thus becomes kind of self-defense. And no better representation of that is John Wayne and the searchers, right?

Going through Comanche territory and just annihilating indigenous people all to defend the integrity of whiteness. So one genre that we'd never appear in is science fiction because there is no future for indigenous people. And so this isn't so much like about indigenous futurism and the kind of scientific genre, but thinking about actual historical conditions that, you know, gave rise to indigenous movements and helped us imagine ourselves in the future. Yeah, I think that's beautiful. And as you said, it leaves so much room for interpretation. One of the ways that you're talking about how colonizers see time, it comes up in the phrase,

like, you know, racism is in the past. The genocide of the indigenous people, that's in the past. and now we're here. And so like there's almost a cutting it off from its legacy. And that obviously leads to right wing reactionary views on a plethora of subjects. And it also feeds into this concept of linear progress, which you do talk about, this idea that within capitalism, there is a slow march and in the right direction as opposed to something more akin to a death spiral.

And also I think it's deeply dialectical in that there is this understanding that the present and the future can only be fully understood if there is this robust conception of the past as inherently connected to our present and to our future. And then, of course, one of the big ways that I interpreted it was this idea of with climate change, with the six mass extinction, with the sort of pathology of settler colonialism and this parallel process of the genocide of indigenous peoples all over the world with the destruction of the natural world. There's this coming back around to realizing that the indigenous ways of relating and being and experiencing their own lives in the world, it has something profound to teach us on our path as a species going forward.

So on multiple grounds, it's a perfect title. Yeah, I just wanted to echo that. I was thinking about it in terms of a different way of approaching and narrating and making history meaningful that I saw is very consonant with what we're trying to do in guerrilla history, which is to understand aspects of past experience as vital and necessary for our future struggle. And you said something very interesting in the introduction where you talked about this long history of resistance. I think a long duray approach is so important so that it doesn't seem as episodic and something that can be overcome. But you said indigenous resistance

draws from a long history projecting itself backward and forward in time, which I would note you do so well in the book. You go backwards and forwards in narrating this. While traditional historians merely interpret the past, radical indigenous historians and indigenous knowledgekeepers aim to change the colonial present and to imagine a decolonial future by reconnecting to indigenous places and histories, for this to occur, those suppressed practices must make a crack in history. And so I just wanted you to maybe elaborate a little bit further and where you see the differences, what's possible with this kind of an indigenous vision of history that we can't understand just with these traditional or academic approaches. Well, I think the big, you know,

the big thing for the Ocetti-Sha Khoi or the Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota people is that the sort of end of our way of life happens in 1890, right? And, the nation state gets consolidated or consummated in 1890 with the closing of the frontier you have frederick jackson turner's frontier thesis right he's at the columbian exposition really elaborating on how the frontier itself as an idea was an engine you know very idealistic you know it's not it's not materialist at all but it was this idea that um you know this the spirit of u.s history was one of constant expansion and constant growth right and so what that what has happened when you know when you look at sort of the the normative field of history and history is conservative history is probably one of the most conservative fields not just politically but the way that it it draws upon its own traditions and its own kind of understanding of itself and specifically um the united states the united states thinks of itself as kind of this self-contained historical uh you know process um when in fact the united states

existence on this land is very, it's actually very short. It's a, it's what I called not in the book, but in elsewhere where I've written and talked about, it's a, it's a covetous branch that thinks it's the tree, right? And that's how U.S. history, you know, imagines itself. And what I try to do with this kind of approach to history, there's two things. One is to provincialize the United States. They say, you are not at the center of this narrative. And if you look at, you know, I don't elaborate very much on this in the book. But if you look at our oral traditions, then you look at our actual recorded history, which includes documents such as the winter counts, which I get into in the first chapter, or is it the second chapter? Second chapter on origins. Was it the first one?

No, it's the second chapter on origins. And using that as a primary document or a primary source material, if you look at the winter counts, the Lakota winter counts, very few reference the United States, very few reference, you know, colonizers or invasion itself. They reference the effects of it, which is like famine and disease, the introduction of intercommunicable diseases, such as smallpox, which was devastating. But never like, you know, oh, the United States came and they were the greatest nation in the world. And, you know, we just kind of, we submit it was never central to how we understood ourselves.

It only came after the reservation period and through indoctrination, through boarding schools and through, you know, flag-waving patriotism, that that became, that our history became grafted onto what we now know as kind of like the U.S. national narrative. And the other aspect of that is to think about instead of truncating our history within these kind of periods, right? So you have the pre-reservation or pre-colonial or you have the post-reservation and the era of self-determination, which we're allegedly in. Think like when you listen to oral historians tell our history, they don't talk about, uh, wounded knee, you know, as Black Elk wrote and really as, you know, John Knightheart. wrote, the poet, the white guy, you know, our hoop was broken. And, you know, we, you know, we ceased to exist as a nation. It was like, that's a total bullshit. That's just some kind of

tragic, you know, end of the trail. I can't remember the artist who made that. The end of the trail, you know, the man slumped over on his horse kind of defeated and thus the end of our history to make way for the real nation and the real national history to take place. So looking at these traditions or looking at these oral histories, nobody ever truncated like life didn't stop after Wounded Knee, right? Actually, life continued and resistance continued. And in fact, you have the formation of treaty councils around the same time as Wounded Knee, where these were kind of underground secret societies that kept indigenous knowages

not only of our culture, our language, and spiritual practices alive, but also of our political understanding of ourselves as sovereign indigenous people, as a sovereign nation. And that was incredibly foundational. You see the full expression of that in the 20th century with the rise of the red power movement, right? And so that's, you know,

I go back to Emulkar-Kabrall's, you know, our people are the mountains kind of speech. And he was thinking when he went to Cuba, you know, he talked to the guerrillas there and he's like, how do we make a revolution and Guinea-Busso and they're like, oh, you know, we went to the mountains and that was, you know, we went to the Sierra Maestres and we held a guerrilla warfare there and we, you know, invaded the capital.

And then he went back to Guinea-Bissau and he's like, we don't have mountains. We have planes, you know, we have a coast. And then he realized that the most resistant people in Guinea-Bosso were the traditional tribal people of the forests. They were the most anti-colonial. So he began, Cabrero began to organize amongst them. And he realized that it was, as he says it, our people are our mountains, right? And in the 1970s, when AIM, when the American Indian movement and the Red Power movement was getting to go, you know, getting more militant and more aggressive with their stance for indigenous sovereignty, they understood that these treaty councils and that elders in our communities were our mountains.

And they became the kind of the source for our struggle. So these treaty councils weren't just something, you know, that were like, oh, we were defeated people after wounded knee and the vision died or whatever, you know, poetic language they use or fatalistic language they use. No, that, that continued. And it was, you know, it didn't die at all. And in fact, it was strengthened. You know, like that's the law of contradictions.

As repression intensifies, so too does. resistance, right? And so that's what we saw in the 1970s and the rise of, you know, the International Indian Treaty Council and bringing our struggle beyond the nation state into, to the world court. So that's what I mean by, you know, radical indigenous historians, you know, try to attempt to overturn that kind of that narrative and that we shouldn't restrict ourselves to these kind of idealistic notions of the U.S. nation state as the only history, because there many histories. I think we all have follow-ups that we want to ask, so I'll keep mine pretty short. But you mentioned Wounded Knee is not the end of history, right? And Black Elk said

essentially the same thing. Black Elk witnessed Wounded Knee. And when asked, was this the end of an era? He said, no, no, Wounded Knee was not the end of an era. And so I just want to circle back around to a point that you were already making, you know, off and on. but I want to make sure that we focus down on it, which is this concept of eras within an indigenous framework and how this, how time is really centered within an indigenous framework. Could you just maybe dive a little bit deeper into that? You know, why was Wounded Knee, not the end of an era? We know that, we know that it was not. Black Elk said as much, but why is it not the end of the era. Well, you know, Black Oak was talking about, you know, the tree of life may have been, you know, cut down, but its roots still grow. And, you know, the tree of life is very central to who we are and how we understand ourselves. I mean, if we think, you know, I think there's, there's several tendencies that can happen when you look at indigenous history. We can just look at the genocidal, violent, traumatic experience of that history, which it is. It's almost, it's unimaginable. It's unimaginative.

You know, even being a descendant of people who survive from that, it's unimaginable to me. To this day, it never ceases to amaze me the depths to which violence structures, not just our lives as indigenous people, but, you know, the African experience in this continent, as well as the immigrant and migrant experience in this continent, the immense amount of violence that's imbued into that process. But a tendency to focus only on the trauma or only on the injury misses the larger vision. right misses the aspirations to get free so even during wounded knee you know people just didn't stop living there weren't you know the the the the ghost dance didn't stop getting practiced right you know everything moved underground for sure but the point of history is not to you know think of things as terminal narratives um but to think about how people persisted how they continue to love dream and think about the future. I don't really think that's necessarily unique to indigenous people. I think just about every oppressed people has that kind of tendency within their historical

experience. But I think what makes indigenous people or what makes the kind of indigenous historiography or study of history really foundational to how we should understand anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism in this country is that it shows that the United States wasn't inevitable that there are seeds for an alternative, right?

And that many indigenous people, like even up into the mid-50s or mid-1950s, 1960s, there were still indigenous people who were alive, who remembered, who had a living memory of what it was like to be free. And so that's only several generations removed.

You know, like even my, even within my own family, you know, my dad, my grandfather grew up in a subsistence lifestyle. You know, well, he didn't really have a wage labor job. You know, he lived on the land, you know, not like 100% subsistence, but it was mixed. You know, it was a mixed economy. And he could drink out of the river. He could, you know, if he was hungry, he could go get fish. He could go and, you know, plant a garden and grow traditional foods. he could go hunt if he wanted to.

That's a radically different experience. And, you know, me, I go to the grocery store. I try to plant. I try to do all those things. But those, you remove that kind of mode of production that's non-capitalist. That's, you know, reciprocal with nature. It's not to go back to the hunting gathering society, but it's to understand that our culture, you know,

is built off the base and that mode of production. And so the super, the superstructure of our culture, which is, you know, in tatter. there's only remnants of it. There isn't, you know, it's not a full-throated kind of articulation of that kind of non-capitalist way of living, but the values are still there. And I think that is incredibly important when we think about alternatives and possible histories. I'm going to hop in again and ask perhaps a tangentially related question.

So we're talking about conceptions, we talked about conception of time, of eras, we also have the conception of war and resistance. So as he said, when we think about indigenous people as people in a settler colonialist nation, we tend to think of things like a little bighorn or, you know, Red Clouds Wars or the Seminole Wars, these individual instances that happened or these small localized things rather than a continuum of resistance from the time that the Europeans landed up to today and in many different forms. So, of course, we had armed conflict, but we also had things like the ghost stance as a form of resistance, though, you know, not in the same form that we would have seen at, Little Bighorn.

And I think that what I kind of want to get out of this question here is, can you talk about these different types of resistance and the way that that changed over time? And then how those forms of resistance have influenced the United States. So, for example, the United States treats indigenous people in these conflicts as non-state combatants. And that same framework of indigenous people as a non-state combatant has really shaped how the United States has acted when looking internationally in terms of how the U.S. military acts against non-state combatants in other locations around the world. A lot of that was rooted in indigenous resistance. So I know kind of a couple of disparate thoughts there, but all in the same. general theme of resistance yeah i would encourage you to read uh john grenier's the first way of

war um he's actually one of the few are any of you historians i apologize okay so you have so military history like speaking of conservative fields military history is very conservative like that's a very conservative field but john guineer is actually like a i think he's like a u.s like naval is i don't remember but he teaches that like i think he teaches that like i think he teaches at West Point. I want to say he teaches at West Point. But he, you know, he kind of moves against the kind of the grain, so to speak, in what is understood as military history. Because it thinks of, you know, when they study military history, they think of like the Indian Wars as kind of this discreet, like, you know, it had a beginning and an end. And if you just look at the

U.S. Army banners, I think there's 14 streamers for the Indian Wars. and they're all red. And it begins, it begins somewhere in 1780, I believe. And the last streamer, the last banner is 1890s, the wounded knee, the wounded knee campaign, right?

So to this day, they celebrate it as an actual battle and as an actual military campaign. I recommend everybody go and look these up. I didn't actually believe it. It's this weird, like, kitsy culture thing within the sort of U.S. military. but one of the things, you know, he talks about this,

he calls it the first way of war. And the first way of war, the way that the Continental Army sort of cut its teeth was on irregular warfare against indigenous people specifically. And I know you all had Gerald Horn on the podcast and discussed a lot about that. And he covers one aspect of, you know, the kind of revolution of 1776.

And he kind of vaguely references it here and there throughout the book. But, you know, it's not a criticism of the book because that wasn't his focus, because he's focusing more on abolition. But almost unanimously, the indigenous nations that were in and around the American colonies decided to unite with Britain or with Britain against the United States or what became the United States because they understood them as a great threat. And so in the Declaration of Independence, that's why you have one of the grievances listed, you know, the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.

That's just pure projection. That's exactly what the colonial or the continental army was doing to indigenous people. And you had, you know, there's a really good book called the Autumn of the Black Snake, where another military historian talks about a defeat. greater than Custer's, you know, in the Ohio River Valley, there was an alliance against the Continental Army, and the Continental Army was almost completely wiped out. And this was kind of around the time that the Second Amendment came about, right? And the creation of well-regulated settler militias, right? Because the Continental Army itself was almost annihilated by indigenous people. And if there was a militarized culture that existed akin to that of the United States

at the time within indigenous societies, we could have marched on Washington and burned it to the ground if we wanted to. Because there was literally nothing standing in our way. But we're not a militaristic culture. We're not a militaristic, you know, finance, you know, state. And the United States was, and there's a tendency to frame the United States as like, oh, it evolved. into this warmaking machine. It's like, no, from day one, this was a warmaking machine. The debates, you know, there's always this back and forth about, oh, how did the U.S. Constitution, was a U.S. Constitution modeled after the Iroquois Confederacy?

It was like, hell, no, it wasn't. That's just some, like, fairy tale, you know, that people tell themselves. The, the influence of indigenous people on the U.S. Constitution was that they understood, They looked at the, you know, the 1776 Declaration of Independence as an example. It's like, if we don't build a military, the Indians are going to kill us. And so the, you know, while there's all these like debates about states' rights and decentralization, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, a strong federal system was actually a response. Like, it was considered a self-defense mechanisms against the merciless Indian savages.

So the raising of a strong army and the financing of a strong army that led to the war state that we live in now was conceived at the very beginning of the United States. And so, you know, John Grunier, the historian, that's what he's talking about. He's like, this was a military that was raised to basically fight not just indigenous people, but to fight irregular wars. And in irregular war, you're not just killing enemy. combatants. We're not just fielding. Every time the Lakota nation fielded, you know, what could be considered soldiers or enemy combatants on the field of battle, nine times out of ten, we whipped ass, right? But it was when they targeted non-combatants or civilians for destruction, or they went after our food supply, or they waged total warfare campaigns against us, or they engaged in what we now know

us counterinsurgency against us, that was when they defeated us. And so when we think about terms like enemy non-combatant, that's actually, you know, John C.U., the architect of the torture memos, you know, or the drafter of the torture memos and the architect of the legalization of U.S. torture during the U.S. war on terror actually cited the Modoc cases in the late 19th century because there was this debate and it was like, well, you know, should, do we have the authority? Does the United States have the authority to just assassinate and kill, you know, Moha or Modoc people for resisting? And the determination of the court was like, yeah, actually we do because they're enemy non-combatants. So that means that any time that the United States wants to, you know, label its enemies as enemy non-combatants, therefore they're rightless and they don't have, they're always exists in the state of exception, they can be killed. That was a legal precedent that was made by, you know, the Indian wars that have literally never ended. The U.S. War and Terror is simply a continuation of the Indian Wars. And in fact, I did a talk on this book in New York City

in Brooklyn at the small little bookshop. And there was a Pakistani lawyer there. And he said, you know, he's like, I came to the United States to learn international law, to understand why the United States can assassinate my people with drones. And he's like, nobody has ever talked about the fact that this goes back to the Indian wars. So like, there's a global connection here. It's not just something that's isolated to one kind of, you know, point in time. But that ball, you know, was set in motion a long time ago. And I think that's the key, in my mind, the key to understanding U.S. imperialism is to think about the origins of this country as a settler colonial state, as a state that was founded not only on the enslavement of African people for the plantation and expansion of the plantation economy, but also the genocide of indigenous people and how that genocide actually took place.

It often wasn't just, you know, armies going out and killing us. you know, the vast majority of indigenous people died because of starvation, famine, and disease. And disease wasn't because, I'm going a little bit beyond the scope of the book. So I apologize. But disease wasn't, you know, as we've all, maybe we've gotten interested in, you know, indigenous history. And we were like, what, you know, why did so many indigenous people die of disease? And they're like, oh, virgin soil epidemic. They're biologically inferior to your.

Europeans, they didn't have the immunity. Well, it's like, if that was the case, then Europe wouldn't exist and the black plague would have destroyed like 90% of Europe, right? And what is actually happening is the U.S. is creating constant conditions of war, right? As we see what is happening in Yemen. Are most Yemenis dying of Saudi bombs that are bought by the United States? No, they're dying because the conditions of war make it such that they starve to death. or they get dysentery, or they get some kind of legionnaires disease, or whatever it is,

and it's the conditions of war that exacerbate the spread of disease and exacerbate these kinds of famines. And so that in itself, you know, has to be looked at. It's not just, you know, people killing each other on, you know, the field of combat, but there's also, you know, this kind of, this kind of back-end justification to say, oh, you're biologically inferior, you know, you just didn't have the right immunities to these diseases so therefore you died right we see the same thing happening with oh you have comorbidities for covid 19 therefore you're going to you're just you know black people just have bad hearts and they're going to die more because of COVID 19 it's like well why do how do black why does black America have a broken heart and it's because of white supremacy right and the same thing

goes with indigenous people so that that war has literally never ended and it's it's continuing it's now a global war on terror well i so much appreciate those interconnections that you're making throughout the book about connecting the past and the present but also the global war on terrorism discourse and the structures behind it as well it seems that they're very intertwined from the very start because even when you mention um lewis and clark characterizing uh these as pirates of the planes that that very sense of their lawless savage, illegal combatants don't follow the rules of civilized warfare, i.e. this justifies counterinsurgency total war. So total war is not an invention of like, you know, World War I and

World War II. It's a colonial war, you know, colonial wars that happen all around the world against indigenous people. That was invented a long time ago by the Europeans. But this idea of the pirates of the planes, I mean, this is drawing on that same language. in European discourse and in early American discourse of the barbary pirates as a major problem for this emerging commercial nation that the laws of the sea are not being followed by these rebellious, you know, savage, barbaric people. So it's like very intertwined that when you come to the president and talk about the global war on terrorism and Muslim extremism and jihadist insurgency at Standing Rock, I mean, there's like a discourse and a pattern. that's available to be used and deployed because it's been developed for such a long period of time. So I wanted to ask you a little bit about that idea of standing rock and religious extremism and going back to the ghost dance and the fact that so many of these

forms of prayer and performance and traditions were suppressed because they were considered dangerous. How do you see that relationship between kind of this spiritual and this religious forms of resistance and how that becomes characterized as a particular threat. Yeah, it's a really good question. And it's kind of like one of those things where if you kind of grow up in that understanding, you don't really understand why people are so hostile to it. But then, you know, when you see it actually play out at a place like Standing Rock, you know, like LaDonna Brable Allard, who just passed away recently,

she was one of the founders of Secret Stone Camp and that was originally just a prayer camp that began in April of 2016. It was after some youth runners had run down to, they had like a convergence on the Army Corps of Engineers headquarters. There was constant like campaigns, you know, awareness around the Dakota Access Pipeline. There was a lot of awareness around it.

And, you know, as indigenous people today, you know, our ceremonies have, you know, were banned. Like, it was illegal to practice and they only got legalized in 1972 with American Indian Religious Freedom Act. And that was, that was, you know, that was a huge, that was a huge deal for us. You know, I mean, imagine not being able to, I don't know if any of you are religious. I don't know if this makes sense, but it's not even really religion. It's not like in, you know, the kind of like organized sense of the church. But you have a proliferation of, especially in Red Power, you have a proliferation of a return of culture and ceremony that's very politicized.

You know, the American Indian movement says it's a spiritual movement. And it was about bringing back those ways, right? And to bring them, you know, to all kinds of different indigenous people. And to give you an example of this. in a place like Pine Ridge, Indian Reservation, you know, it was where it was illegal to Sundance for quite a long time. Most of the Sundances would happen at Powwows around 4th of July,

and there were really just a mockery of what, you know, a Sundance should be. And after, you know, they kind of raised consciousness around the Red Power movement, you see a proliferation of Sundances, to the point where there's over 100 Sundances now on Pine Ridge. It's a very widespread practice. And that's just one ceremony.

And, you know, that, the culture of resistance, right? It's literally built into the culture of resistance of indigenous resistance. And so when you go to a place like Standing Rock, or even, you know, even going back to like wound and knee and those what we understand as armed, quote unquote, violent confrontations, they often began in prayer and meditation about like, you know, nobody wanted to be violent. It was always self-defense, you know. It was always, in self-defense, you know, is criminalized. And it's, you know, no matter what we do.

And we saw that at Standing Rock. Even, you know, we're in a different era where a lot of, you know, armed resistance is issued in favor of, you know, a spiritual resistance or being in ceremony, right? And understanding that the conditions in a state like North Dakota, that is very anti-Indigenous, you even are seen with a gun, you know, as an indigenous person, you're putting a target on your back.

And there's a reason why somebody like Red Fon FALIS was targeted specifically by Obama's FBI during the Standing Rock protest. And in fact, her family was the target of FBI investigations. And, you know, she comes from an American Indian movement family in Denver, Colorado. They were the target of FBI investigations in infiltration back in the 70s.

And she's the daughter of a fairly prominent, member of the American Indian movement, and she herself was actually targeted by an FBI informant. She didn't go out and search for a gun. It was actually the FBI informant who gave her that gun. And she was a convicted felon. So it was a setup from the beginning. It was a way to discredit the movement itself.

And on top of that, you have this kind of element of religious fanaticism that's being portrayed in the media. like all these unreasonable Indians all they're doing is you know when you go to the when you went to the prayer camps it really wasn't like I mean the only people who were being violent were the cops everyone else is like sitting there trying to be in prayer and I remember in the book you know that opening scene in the mall at the Bismarck Mall they were literally just trying to form a prayer circle and it wasn't like you know it it it wasn't like a spectacular thing because it happened so many times it was just like oh they're trying to okay they're going to do a prayer circle. circle and they're going to probably talk about the history of Thanksgiving and the consumer holiday black Friday and you know we're going to be on our way but instead the reaction to it as soon as they saw indigenous people praying they just started beating like literally just beating people up like people were getting punched some guy got neat in the head this white guy got neat in the head he was like hey man he'll calm down and you know he gets hit and then the the kid

from the international indigenous youth council begins to lead a prayer and he's got a broken ankle and then the cop comes and tackles him, you know. And so that played a, you know, a role in creating a certain kind of narrative. And the other aspect of this is thinking about Tiger Swan, you know, the private security firm that was operating in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and participating in the U.S. Global War on Terror and taking those kind of counterinsurgency tactics and applying them to the Standing Rock movement itself. And it's really funny when you look at their briefing notes

who they identified as leaders. And it was almost like it was a setup. It was trying to find, you know, media personalities. It was trying to pin, you know, these are the real leaders. But if you're an indigenous person and you know what's happening on the ground, it was actually the spiritual leaders who were leading a lot of this. So it's not to say that religion or spirituality didn't play a point. part in it, but the way that it became characterized as like, you know, oh, these unreasonable,

you know, jihadist, fundamentalist people, they're engaging in acts of terrorism. They're also specifically tracking the movements of Palestinians in the camp as well, which is really fascinating. Yeah, that opens up a whole field of questions that I'm particularly interested in revolving around spirituality. I think, you know, from an outside perspective, there's this sort of homogenizing of spiritual traditions among indigenous peoples across the continent. But certainly there are their similarities and sort of ontological approaches to the land and the water that are common among indigenous nations and communities, but there's also differences.

This is outside the scope of your book, I think, a little bit, but I was just hoping if you could talk a little bit about some of the similarities, some of the differences, and just the fundamental relationship to land and water that, makes that way of being so fundamentally different from the settler colonial way of experiencing themselves in the world. Yeah, I don't, I don't, I'll be honest, I don't really write about spirituality that much, even though it's, it's a very prominent thing within indigenous movements, and it plays a central role. And thinking about, you know, spirituality and its connection to land and water, it's not just some kind of mythical thing. It's not just,

like, you know, oh, we just like worship totems or whatever it is. I don't even know the anthropological terms for these kinds of things. And that we're somehow, you know, we have this special relationship to water. Yeah, if you live in a place long enough, your culture and your worldview is going to develop, is going to be determined by those material conditions and whatever beings that live in that area, right? And so the definition that we have between what is considered alive and dead, there is not really, it's not as clear cut as it is in like, you know, kind of Western

epistemology about these are inanimate inanimate objects. The way we define the world is through a term called takushkanshka which actually means that which moves. That which moves is sacred. And it's not, you know, sacred is like, associated with the church and it, you know, has all

these weird attributions of purity and sanctity. But it's not so much that it's sacred, but it's something that is to be revered, right? And understanding that the, like a mountain or a river has, has life, you know, and it gives life. And therefore, it has rights in some senses, has negative rights, not in the liberal, like, kind of Western Democratic sense, but has rights in the sense that as a relative, you don't treat water this way or you don't treat a river this way. And not just because, you know, you'll hurt its feelings or you'll do some sort of.

of irreparable harm to it but it because it'll kill you a little just like it doesn't make sense to you know um uh i i i just i don't want to say bad words but it doesn't make sense to shit where you eat right like that's just a common fact um but then also i think establishing a more complicated and esoteric relationship to a certain uh region you know uh is or territory or landscape is incredibly important, and it doesn't translate into what we understand as kind of like a universal, a universalized humanism in the Western kind of colonial sense. Because, you know, the idea of like human rights arises from this idea that all humans are equal in the first place when we know that's false. But we would also say that the same applies to species. Why are some

species allowed to live and others have to be annihilated? And we would say that that would occur to a place like, you know, where the Ocheti Shalcomi lives and the annihilation of the buffalo, the annihilation of the bear, you know, the annihilation of the elk, the containment of those species and the treatment of those species. And so when we talk about

water, we're not just talking about the consumption of water in an anthropocentric sense. We understand that water, as we, you know, in our creation stories, water was the second element. The first was ea or matter. And if you, if you, I can speak on this. I participate in a little bit of ethnographic refusal because it's like,

you should know what you should know and the rest of it, you don't need to know. But you can find this on the internet. So I'm not, I'm not revealing any kind of truths or any kind of secrets. But our understanding of the beginning of the universe is very akin to the Big Bang, right? Everything was matter or rock in the beginning and then slowly, you know, evolved and transitioned into, you know, things that we know as movement, as, you know, the sky, as the stars, as water itself. And water was the second element. And it's our first medicine.

And by medicine, that's not even, you know, that even has kind of weird baggage in English itself. But it's, it's foundational not only to who we are, but it's foundational to, you know, the reproduction of life and the continuation of life, not just for us as human beings, but for animals and plants. And I'll give you sort of an example of how we're trying to deal with this in this moment in time. There's a movement called, you know, the rights of nature. And it arises from a country like Bolivia, which is very much imbued with indigenous knowages, right?

The cosmovision, the Indian cosmovision of Pachamama, right? The idea of Mother Earth that it's not just a human anthropocentric notion of rights that we should be aspiring to or sustainability or just. justice, but that the earth itself has rights and deserves to live, right? And that translates to things, you know, such as water. And when we think about the way that, you know, water has been quantified and commodified, you know, now you can buy it on the stock exchange. I think that's the final step, you know, that we're at in terms of the threats to water. But, you know, when we talk about our water rights, we're also talking about the animals and the plants that need water to live and they deserve to have, you know, their portion of water and their clean

drinking water as well. And so I'm trying to explain this in ways that don't, you know, kind of center just the like a kind of anthropos or an anthropological version or an ethnographic version of indigenous people that, oh, we had, you know, these views in the past, but, you know, we've moved on. It's like, no, they've evolved and they've changed to the material conditions. And I would say the most robust version of an environmental justice politics comes from a place like Bolivia, you know, that it was allowed to, you know, determine its own laws and determine its own values, much according to indigenous worldviews, things that have been picked up by like, you know, Alteora or New Zealand where they've given, you know, rights or personhood to a river or to mountains

or things of that nature it doesn't quite fit in a liberal democratic value but the aspiration and the intent I think is incredibly valuable because it shows that there is another way of being and living in relationship to what we know as quote unquote in nature. I'm going to hop in here, Nick.

You're talking about the environment and you're talking about how this conception of thinking about the environment is very integral to indigenous culture. And I want to bring up something that there's been some debate about in left circles, which is the Green New Deal. So, of course, there's not really a debate in left circles that we need some dramatic plan to curb the escalating environmental catastrophe that's coming down the pipeline straight into us.

That's not the debate. The debate is how the Green New Deal is currently being thought about, which you can think of as eco-capitalism or you could even say eco-imperialism when we look at, again, a country like Bolivia and, you know, our friend and by friend, I mean not friend, Elon Musk, a lot of the way that the Green New Deal is being planned out right now is very reliant on raw materials that are based on extractive processes that are particularly violent in. underdeveloped countries and underdeveloped communities globally. So talking about lithium, coming from Bolivia, an underdeveloped country, and from a heavily indigenous area. And we're talking about a process that is absolutely devastating to the wildlife, the flora and the fauna of the area,

as well as the landscape itself in terms of the strip mining that's done for lithium extraction. And the way that the Green New Deal is being thought about by many people right now is heavily reliant on this. Would you think of that as eco-imperialism and how would a more, you know, indigenous-oriented approach to the environment look compared to the way that a lot of individuals are thinking of the Green New Deal right now being based on lithium batteries and whatnot? Yeah, I don't think people in who are theorizing the Green New Deal. I don't think many people, some people are, thinking about where these resources actually come from.

I mean, we live in a post-industrial society that's consumption-based, right? It's a consumer-based economy in the United States. And so instead of the question is like maintaining those levels of consumption, right? And thinking about like not just lithium, but copper. Copper is huge. the copper that's needed to go into electric vehicles, the copper that's needed to go into green, quote unquote, green renewable technologies

like wind turbines or, you know, solar panels. It's not like you can rip out the copper wiring in your house and then recycle it and then put it back into these vehicles or these cars. The technology doesn't exist for recycled copper. So the kinds of copper that's needed in these green renewable technologies actually has to be a very, very pure form of copper that can only be extracted through certain kind of mining processes. And to give you an example, Rio Tinto is an Australian-based mining company that last year destroyed a 46,000-year-old sacred site, an Australian indigenous

sacred site, to build a copper mine. And, you know, under the Obama signed into law and the National Defense Reauthorization Act, I can't remember which year. They're all kind of like bleed together. But there was a writer, and I think it was in 2011 or in 2012, I could be wrong about the dates. There was a writer. It was called Resolution Copper to designate Oak Flat, an Apache secret site, since time immemorial, Apache people have done their coming-of-age ceremonies at this particular location in a,

in the state of Arizona, which is controlled by the National Forest Service, they have designated this area. They basically, you know, John McCain, good old John McCain, haunting us from the grave, like all good Indian killers, he set aside this area basically to give over to Rio Tinto, to build almost to blow up this sacred site, almost like two miles down, seven thousand feet,

down into the earth to extract copper to understanding and anticipating that there's going to be this growing demand for green renewables. And, you know, at this, you know, we can talk about fossil fuels, you know, we can talk about the need for transition, right? But the U.S. economy and the domination, the U.S. domination of the fossil fuel economy came at the expense of indigenous people, right? Obama's American energy independence, which he kicked off, I think, in 2010,

was at the height of the fracking revolution in the United States, which was an attempt to wean the United States off of oil being imported from places like Venezuela and Iran, and then to develop its own domestic oil production in the form of fracking. And where did they go? They went to indigenous lands to do this, or they were building pipelines that were transporting

fracked oil such as the Dakota access pipeline, right? And so under Obama's administration, you had an 88% increase in domestic oil production and the creation and expansion of pipelines. You know, Obama didn't end or cancel the Keystone XL pipeline. He only canceled a quarter of it that crossed an international boundary. So when Trump gets into office, he merely expands the Obama era oil and gas, you know, boom and transitions away from American energy independence to American energy dominance or unleashing American energy dominance on the world to use Trump's very bombastic language. But at the same time, Trump was also concerned about, and he met with a lot of mining corporations because he understood he's not a stupid man. And, you know, like he's very much

tied into the ruling class, and they understood that there's a transition coming, right? And so they began investing in what they called strategic minerals, things such as mining and copper, to wean the U.S. economy off of the major producer of lithium in the world, which is China, right? And also copper and things of that nature. And so when you have a country like Bolivia that possesses large lithium reserves. The entire Andean region possesses large lithium reserves. It's not just Bolivia. But Bolivia, you know, began to develop its lithium reserves to add value to it,

to say that you're not just going to extract this raw material. We're going to create our own batteries, you know, we're going to create our own, you know, forms of quote unquote green technology, right, and sell them back to you. well of course imperialism you know that's not profitable for the the kind of imperial core and so you know whether or not it's true you know we don't really know at this moment in time but we can say that yes the US backed the coup against several Morales and then you know Elon Musk gets on Twitter and says basically we'll coup whoever we want but then also Elon Musk you know where does he create his battery factory where does he put his battery factory puts it in

Nevada, because there's now, under Trump, Trump fast-tracked the approval of a lithium mine in Northern Nevada, which is on Shoshone, or excuse me, which is on Northern Paiute land, to begin to develop domestic lithium production in this country. And so what is happening is that, yeah, we're transitioning into, we're perhaps transitioning into a different kind of energy economy, but what's the fundamental relation that remains the same? And that's the colonial relation, right? And I would say, like, going back to Cochabamba in 2010 in Bolivia, they drafted, you know, the People's Accords, which directly challenged this kind of consumer-based idea of development, right? And you talked about underdevelopment, I would call it perhaps

maldevelopment, and understanding that the pathways available to countries of the global South, you know, they can't follow the same capitalist model that the United States has. Why? Because to consume that much energy and resources would require three planets, right? So it's simply out of the question. And so the Green New Deal, it's kind of more, I guess, like, you know, people, Democratic supporters of it are leading us down another era or another kind of avenue of destruction and annihilation that doesn't fundamentally undo not only the colonial relation that the United States has with indigenous people, but it doesn't undo the imperial relation that the United States has with the rest of the world. And that's the biggest question

is that this isn't even sustainable. It's like, so now migrant people have to run from electrified border patrol vehicles. Like, how is this progress? You know, it goes beyond just where they're getting these things, but the kind of institutions that they're trying to sustain because Biden is, you know, committing to electrifying the federal fleet. And it's like we all see those like little robot dogs, you know, that they're all that they're developing at MIT. Pretty soon they're going to be all electric and solar powered, you know, and then we're all going to be running like hell from them, you know, so it doesn't fundamentally change those kind of those kind of systems of oppression and dominance. And so what we're really thinking about in terms

of decolonization is development, not according to capitalist development, but according to social need, housing, you know, food, just basic levels of comfort and, and sustainability. I know Adnan has a question, but before I turn it over to him, Nick, would you mind if I read the last two sentences from your book? Because I think that they fit into this conversation very well. You write, whereas past revolutionary struggles have strived for the emancipation of labor from capital, we are challenged not just to imagine, but to demand the emancipation of Earth from capital. For the Earth to live, capitalism must die. I think that that ties up that conversation pretty well. Adnan, I'm going to pitch it over to you now. I know that you wanted to shift us to a little

different topic for a little bit. Yeah, well, I just, you know, great quote. And yeah, that was, it just reminded me also your joke there about the electrified border patrols, solar powered, is, you Elizabeth Warren's plan to green the U.S. military. Wonderful, so now the occupation of Iraq could have been green. And that reminds me also just a little bit about that global connections. You mentioned in your book and just now about the importance of exploiting oil resources to be energy independent from Iran and so on. But I think that the interrelationship is actually even worse or creepier, which is that the U.S., in order for the tar sands to even be profitable to exploit because it's dirty, expensive, requires a lot of refining, and the whole process

of it is expensive to extract that oil from the tar sands with devastating environmental consequences as well, oil has to be above a certain level for it to be profitable. And it was the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that forced, you know, global oil prices up so high that it made it possible to start exploiting that in Alberta and then seeking ways to send that oil south through the Dakota access pipeline so that this imperial history is connected globally. The things that the U.S. is doing in the Middle East, destabilizing, trying to control the oil, increasing the global oil prices then has this consequence domestically for, you know, exploiting indigenous lands, running pipelines through them. And so I, one thing I love about

this book is how much you situate this story in global terms. And you did mention a little bit about the indigenous treaty at the UN getting the 2007 declaration. And so I just wanted to ask you a little bit more about that kind of internationalism, about putting indigenous struggle and resistance. When we think of it, you know, as anti-colonial resistance against settler colonialism, we suddenly see it connecting with other global struggles that there can be solidarity with. And just this whole, taking the, you know, the question of a Jewish. Indigenous sovereignty outside of the U.S. kind of hands to the World Court. It reminded me so much of the internationalism of black radicals in earlier times, W.E.B. Du Bois, and particularly Malcolm X, who wanted to indict the U.S. for crimes against black people and violating their human rights, not their civil rights, because that's under U.S. constitutional law.

but he wanted to take the U.S. to the U.N. to indict, and that seems to be parallel here. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about what you see is crucial in that internationalist perspective, both in the history but also maybe going forward those kinds of solidities with global indigenous and anti-colonial resistance. How should we think about that? Yeah, I think the, you know, this arose out of a debate that happened in one of the federal courts during the so-called wounded knee trials

and when they were debating on whether or not the United States even had jurisdiction to arrest people in treaty land and if the the Lakota Nation

had actually ceded sovereignty and jurisdiction to the US so they were very strategic and they knew they probably couldn't win the question about whether or not the U.S. had jurisdiction but they could win the question of whether or not these were these treaties were made as international agreements.

And so they had this treaty hearing, and it's really, it's really beautiful. And I recommend everyone go and check it out. There's a book called The Great Su Nations Sitting in Judgment on America, which is compiled and edited by Roxanne Dunbarthes, who's an historian, but also was, you know, part of this kind of legal defense at the time. And it documents the testimony, because at the time, they're, they, they, you know, oftentimes you're, you put on trial, right? And I don't know if anyone's ever been to a courtroom, but it's going to be very intimidating

because people are like sitting in judgment, whether it's a jury or a judge, you know, a prosecutor. And in this hearing that they had, they called it the treaty hearing, you know, there was just the judge and the Lakota people. And so all the elders filled the jury box. And it was as if they were sitting in judgment on, you know, the United States to indict its system, right? And so then it began this kind of like long, kind of drawn out hearing about what is the status of treaties, what is the status of the Lakota nation. And whether the United States actually had the authority to end our sovereignty and end our nationhood. And a judge, the federal judge who was overseeing the hearing, you know, didn't agree with the jurisdictional question, but nonetheless ruled that these are international. agreements and the court has no place to decide you know as a domestic court has no place to decide on on the validity of a treaty and so he you know he basically recommends that they take it to an international forum and this has kind of been the goal all along so you know subsequently after

this ruling you know they held the international Indian treaty council which was in standing rock on the on the west bank of the missouri river there's about 5,000 people that showed up from different from I think around 98 to 99 indigenous nations from around the world there are international observers who showed up and they made the move to bring the treaty to the united nations and they also made the the commitment to take the United States to the world court and charge them with genocide and if you know anything, you know, about, like, there's the we-charge genocide campaign that happened prior to this, but indigenous people hadn't really taken up the language of genocide in the international forum before, and so this was quite unique, right? And so that really kind of became, you know, the staging ground for a kind of internationalism. There were other indigenous groups like the National Indian Brotherhood and George Manuel from up north in Canada who were doing this work at the United Nations,

but it didn't really get its boost until 1974. So it's not to say that the American Indian Movement or the International Treaty Council was the only one. There are many groups. And in fact, as I talk about in the book, there were attempts by the Six Nations, Iroquois Confederacy, to get recognition at the League of Nations.

And even some Lakota and Dakota people to try to push for representation at the League of Nations among the colonized people in the world. So this wasn't a unique thing. It's been going on for quite some time. And so, but it didn't, you know, at this moment in time, there's the American Indian movement faced like a unique challenge. Whereas like the Black Panther Party had kind of, you know,

you can kind of trace a beginning and an end to the Black Panther party in the early 70s. It kind of, you know, faded out and wasn't really a, you know, a party or a force anymore that it used to be. well the American Indian movement you know definitely had a beginning but it didn't really end you know it didn't like it didn't just disappear like the Black Panther Party did or it didn't lose that kind of that momentum

in fact it just kind of it developed into something different and it had to it had to strategically make a decision to become something different and to move into the international arena because U.S. opinion

and support of the American Indian movement began to wane, right? And Cook, because of the FBI campaigns against the American Indian movement were being effective, tying them to foreign governments, or, you know, infiltrating the movement, doing all these things. So it didn't, it didn't have the same kind of sympathetic liberal kind of media portrayal as it did in the past. And so to survive, utter collapse in state repression, it decided to go international. And in the international arena, it reached out to, of course, it reached out to indigenous people of this hemisphere because they weren't represented at the United Nations.

There really wasn't, you know, a pathway for representation. So they began to organize in South America, but then they also began to take that treaty, that 1868, Fort Laramie Treaty, as a model for other indigenous nations, but also a human rights framework for indigenous people at the United Nations. And the origins of, you know, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People actually arose from the trail of broken treaties demands. There was a 20-point program that was drafted mostly by Hank Adams, who was in a sineboy and sue activist. But that became the kind of basis for an international indigenous rights framework.

That later became the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous people. but to get to navigate those avenues and those legal channels in the United Nations, like we didn't know anything. We didn't have like international lawyers. We had people like representing us in the federal courts. And so it was actually the Palestinians who lent an expertise because they had been navigating the human rights framework, the UN human rights framework quite skillfully and tactfully, right, even to the point of legalizing, you know, guerrilla warfare, right,

as a legal tactic. Like, that's huge. And there's a book by Nura Erichat on the specific, like, legal campaign that international human rights illegal campaign that the Palestinian movement had waged. And so we were really taking, you know, taken by their struggle,

but then also the anti-apartheid movement, which was, you know, happening simultaneously, like the Palestinian movement, there was definitely armed conflict, there was definitely street protests, but there was also an international human rights campaign that was sort of attached to it. And so the UN decade to combat racism and apartheid

actually acknowledged indigenous people for the first time and also labeled Zionism as a form of racism, right? So the anti-apartheid movement brought and created space for Palestinian and indigenous people of the Americas to have a platform. And this was something that just didn't happen because people felt bad for us. we sent ambassadors to all different kinds of countries and different kinds of movements in the third world, people of the non-aligned bloc, even some in the Soviet blocks, to gain and garner sympathy for this particular cause.

And so I think in the way that the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People is remembered, it often doesn't remember that sort of radical, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist history, which I think is incredibly important and often forgotten. And in my next book project, I'm writing quite extensively about this and the kind of characters that arose and, you know, the contradictions, you know, because they're allying with governments, you know, or with movements such as the Sandinistas, which later got, you know, criticized for their treatment of indigenous people. But these were all things that, you know, they're, they're skillfully kind of navigating. And we don't really hear about it that much because oftentimes people, the way the history is written and remembered, as after Wounded Knee, nothing really happened. But in fact, there's this really extensive and quite beautiful history of international engagement that I think is incredibly important. It goes back to even our understanding of, you know, as I talk about in Chapter 2 and origins,

the original covenant with De Saint-Wee, how we understood treaty making as not just between, you know, human nations, but as well as animal nations. And that was definitely things that people were talking about, that these agreements and that these covenants need international recognition and application. So that's the kind of the origins of international struggle, but also kind of an anti-imperialist. I wouldn't quite call it left. They weren't explicitly like Marxist or communists or socialist or even progressive,

but definitely anti-imperialist in understanding themselves in relation to other anti-imperialist struggles. Brett, I know that you're going to be asking the question that's going to wrap up this interview. But before we do that, I just want to make sure that I have the opportunity to shout out one of my former professors that I had during my undergrad, Betty K. McGowan, who is a Mississippi Chaktaan, Cherokee, anthropologists at Eastern Michigan University. And absolutely one of my favorite professors. And the reason I'm bringing her up now is talking about indigenous internationalism. had been to the UN for well over 20 years on these delegations talking about water as a human right, bringing up the issue of the boarding schools, which she actually, her and her twin

sister made a documentary on, and trying to make sure that the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People was implemented worldwide. So I just would be remiss to not mention my former professor, Betty Kay McGowan, who's just one of my favorite people I've ever met. She's absolutely fantastic. Now, Brett? Yeah, and you mentioned Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz. She features prominently, and her book is featured in the recent film by Raul Pett called Exterminate All the Brutes, which goes to this history. Again, I recommended it in the intro. I just wanted to re-plug that. She's a really critical thinker on this front. But as a way to sort of zoom in towards the end here, and there's a million things that we could talk about. The book is wonderful, and I know

you do a lot of work even outside the confines of what you discuss in the book, but maybe a way to get towards the end here is for those settlers, particularly white settlers, you know, on this continent who sincerely and genuinely want to be an asset as opposed to a liability in the decolonial struggle, the fight against white supremacy, etc. What meaningful things can they do to partake in that struggle in a respectful way? And then maybe you could also say what main lesson you would like anybody to take away from your book, Our History is the Future. Learning the history of this land is incredibly important. And you know, you talked about Raul Pecs, Exterminate the Brutes.

That, I think, would be upsetting to a lot of people, a lot of white folks. You know, he talks quite explicitly, and so too does Roxanne Dunbartese about the Scots-Irish and how colonized people get conscripted into colonial armies to do awful and horrible things to genocide other people, right? And how whiteness becomes kind of this racial project, not just of the United States, but of Europe in general, to sort of erase what we would know as class differences in such a way that it distorts, you know,

white people's, you know, settlers' sense of themselves, thinking that they have something in common if they work at Walmart with the president of the United States which is completely false. There's nothing that they share in common at all. And white supremacy is first and foremost about controlling the behaviors of white people themselves

and through a structural process. Settler isn't just an individual identity. It's a structure, right? It's something that exists. It's codified in laws. It's codified in culture and society. you know, how do you describe water to a fish, right? It's really difficult to explain the sort of the necessity of decolonization to people

who may not, who may see it as an abstract reality or something that's not, you know, conducive or reflective of who they think or what they want to think that this country is about and for. So it is really difficult in that sense, but, you know, I really, do think that we need, you know, education is always important. I'll say that as like somebody, you know, I wrote this book. You know, I did write, you know, I don't, I didn't write exclusively to indigenous people, but I did write to my own people, first and foremost,

understanding that non-Indigenous people were going to read this book as well. So I'm not like, I'm not just somebody who's interested solely in indigenous issues for the sake of indigenous issues. So, you know, it is complicated. And I don't have like advice. You know, I'm not like a, I'm not like a guru or anything. But more and more as I see the contradictions unfold and the levels of devastation and destruction and, you know, indignities upon indignities cast upon just people in this country who live on this land, both indigenous and non-indigenous, you know, the only thing that's holding back white working people from allying and forming. you know, unifying as a class with, you know, non-white people is white supremacy.

And so it's literally, it's killing white people. We see this in Texas and the refusal to, like, get vaccinated. And, you know, despite the availability of these resources or the, you know, the creation of these shoddy infrastructures that, you know, a little storm that, you know, that dumps a little bit of snow completely wipes out, you know, an entire infrastructure. and, you know, it affects black people and, you know, brown people more, but it also affects, you know, poor white people as well. And so, you know, as more and more as I get older and older, I think, you know,

I wrote this book and, you know, with an idea of about, or for indigenous kind of liberation and thinking about decolonization, but the more, the older I get and the more I listen to stories, I think more and more that, you know, the ruling class is unified in the, state. You know, the ruling class is unified and together and acting in unity to basically hold our futures hostage. And if we do not unite as a class in this country, not at the expense of other people, not at the expense of indigenous people or the global south, but really in a true kind of affirmative struggle of humanity, you know, we're all going to die. Like, you know,

we all drink the same water. We all, you know, breathe the same air. like that is not just an indigenous issue that is not just an indigenous problem that's everybody's problem and so what i'm really trying to say in this book and i don't know if it if it comes across all the time because sometimes when because of the way we're racialized and thought of in this country every time you start talking about indigenous issues or indigenous spirituality or ways of knowing it's like cheesy flute music begins playing in white people's ear and they can't hear what you're saying um so i think about this as a real sincere problem but what I'm trying to say is that like indigenous issues are not a

particular issue they're not like oh now we're going to do the indigenous section or now we're going to do the indigenous whatever it's like clean drinking water is is a fundamental human right everybody deserves clean drinking water right indigenous like these this indigenous way of knowing and relating and understanding the world is has universal application doesn't mean that you're all going to become indians sorry that's why you came on the show. We're not going to make y'all Indians, but it's about trying to think about how we live in good relations with each other and the planet. And I think that's something that everyone can subscribe to. And I think that's really the beating heart of the project that I'm engaged in,

you know, as somebody who's not just writing histories, but somebody who's trying to build a different alternative in a different world and to understand that these are shared struggles. And there's a shared humanity here that we need to, um, that we all need to embark on. And there's going to be a lot of, you know, some people have to take more risks than others, you know, uh, this can't be just developed on the back of the young or, uh, at the expense of indigenous people. Um, we need all kinds of, you know, comrades in this fight. You know, allies are conditional, you know, accomplices are in the ruling class and amongst the predators of the world, but nobody, you know, they can't, they can't co-op the language of, of comrades.

because that's a political relationship. And I think that's something we can share with non-Indigenous people as well. A wonderful note and a really fantastic interview. Thank you for coming on the show. Again, our guest was Nick Estes, Professor of American Studies at University of New Mexico, author of Our History is the Future, which is now coming out in paperback. And I've got the paperback on pre-order myself. I've been using the e-book, but looking forward to that.

So when can our listeners look forward to the paperback? coming out. And can you talk briefly about the Red Nation and the stuff that you've been doing there lately? I actually have no idea when the paperback is coming out. I feel like it got pushed back. I think it said it was going to be shifting. I think it's because of me because I was supposed to do something. And my editor keeps emailing me. So it kind of gets into the other question about what the Red Nation is doing. We published two books actually this week and then next week. So we're trying to promote that. And we also created a publishing arm, a media arm called Red Media Press,

focusing on indigenous intelligence and all its forms, not just political work, but thinking about literature more broadly in trying to get indigenous literatures taught in schools, especially like reservation schools. And so that's really what we're working on, you know, as a media project. We still have ongoing campaigns of mutual aid, feeding people on the streets, keeping people warm, making, you know, just doing the, survival work pending revolution of course um so we're still doing that kind of work um and if you want

to support us the best way to do it is either on patreon or directly through uh the red nation dot or g uh you can find out you know all of our stuff and what we're up to um you know i'm not the only person involved in red nation i probably do the least on the ground organizing work right now so i'm a bad representative in that sense um but we have comrades who of various skills and disciplines um who you know or throughout the country. So check us out, support us if you can. And just, yeah, just read our work. And again, listeners, that was the red nation.org.

Be sure to check it out. Listen to the podcast. I do all the time. It's really good. And yeah, by our history is the future whenever it happens to be coming out in paperback. Thanks again, Nick, for coming on the show. And listeners will be right back with a brief wrap-up.

And we're back on guerrilla history and another just, we're getting really lucky with our guests. We've had fantastic conversation after fantastic conversation. And this certainly was one. Nick Estes is really an excellent scholar of American studies and particularly on indigenous issues. And someone who, I know he said at the end, he hasn't been doing a lot of on the ground organizing, but over the course of his life he has, he's a quintessential activist, or you could even say a freedom fighter in his own right. And so it was really a pleasure to be able to talk with Nick. But Adnan, I know that you had a historical parallel that you were planning on bringing up,

but we didn't really find the right spot for it during the interview. So why don't we talk about that now? Oh, sure. Well, I firstly just want to echo that this was such a pleasure to talk with him. Very interesting. The book is fantastic. It's a beautiful book, beautifully written. Its structure is so interesting, how it goes back and forth,

make so many wonderful and amazing connections that he elucidated so articulately today in our discussion. There's just so many connections that my mind goes off on. because of how many facets this question of indigenous resistance brings up. And it just reminded me that the suppression of all of these religious and cultural practices of the indigenous nations that he's speaking about is so similar in some ways with the practices, the colonial practices after the Reconquista. After 1492, the forced conversions of Muslims and Jews, the suppression of their religious and cultural practices, use of Arabic, their particular distinctive form of music, the Zarfa, which was derived from Berber musical traditions in North Africa. That was banned, going to the Hamam, that is the sort of public bath.

All of these lifeways and cultural practices that were tied with this. their religious culture, but we're just cultural practices. We're suppressed. And I think part of the reason why there's so much hostility to doing a prayer circle or, you know, kind of a peace march and so on that he was talking about is this anxiety in settler culture in the colonial condition over the failures of assimilation. That when you see the return, because the process is the attempt. to assimilate, to convert to Christianity, to erase the, you know, distinctive culture of a people

and to absorb them into the settler population. If you can't, you know, outright just eliminate them, at least absorb them and destroy that distinctive culture and identity. And when it resurfaces in these various ways, those roots that still continue and rise up in resistance of various forms, which can be reviving or promoting these particular cultural practices, that's very threatening because it exposes the failure of the entire project to erase the genocide, the assimilation, you know, isn't working. And that requires the re, you know, the redeployment of colonial violence, right, you know, in those moments. So it just reminded me so much of this long history of European relations to conquered colonial peoples and the parallels between those

different episodes that they're part of a kind of continuous history. And I just something that that reminds me of, again, is the boarding schools, which is something that we didn't get to talk about during this conversation. But I think is something that we definitely should talk about in a future episode at some point because these boarding schools were absolutely brutal, and again, for the express intention of destroying the culture and destroying the history of indigenous people within the United States and Canada, again,

let's not forget that Canada is just as culpable in us. Well, yeah, call them residential schools here. Right, exactly. But, you know, that was another of the practices, okay? So, bizarrely, you know, so when the Spanish conquered Granada and forcibly converted the Moriscoes. They were obviously still concerned

that the forcible conversion didn't necessarily eliminate cultural and religious difference, right? The assimilation wasn't working. That was their anxiety. So one of their tactics was to establish special schools for Morisco children

that there was a lot of pressure to place them in where they could be educated by religious practitioners like nuns or monks and so on. And it's very parallel to the creation of the residential or boarding schools as a technique of assimilation is you can do too much with the adults. They're still resistant, but you can, you know, change the culture of the tradition.

And that's why when the modiscoes were expelled in 1609 to 1614, they were forced to leave, even though they had been forcibly converted and they were Christians. They were nonetheless expelled from Spain, except for children under 10 who were taken and separated from their parents and their families and kept because they were still a human resource that could be turned into good, you know, Spanish Christians. And it's so parallel with this history and these stories of what happened to indigenous peoples here in the Americas. I think that we should have episodes on both of those instances. I mean, the destruction of culture is something. that we, you know, we always cry about it when we see these cultural artifacts being destroyed or cultural practices being forgotten.

We always cry about it for a moment and then we forget about it, but we forget the violence and the inherent violence of this process. And so, yeah, I think that we'll definitely look at doing episodes on both of those instances, the residential schools, Canada, boarding schools of the United States, as well as, is this other process that you were just talking about, odd none. Brett, what did you think about the conversation,

anything that you want to add? Yeah, I mean, the conversation was great. It speaks for itself, just to bounce off what you're saying, you know, capitalism,

far from the, uh, don't tread on me or liberty and freedom rhetoric. It tells about itself must destroy ways of life that are not conducive to its entire sort of way of viewing reality, the marketization, financialization, extractive nature of capitalism, et cetera.

And you have to understand that many on the left realize that to be anti-capitalist means you have to be anti-fascist, means you have to be anti-imperialist, and Marxists understand all those things as deeply connected, right? Imperialism is what capitalism, monopoly capitalism looks like globally. Fascism is capitalism in crisis, etc. We should also add and remember distinctly to be decolonial, that colonization is part and parcel with capitalism, with fascism, and with imperialism. And it's those four things that are really a singular package, historical processes,

that different faces of a singular historical process that needs to be combated in its entirety or you won't combat it. And so anybody that's ostensibly on the left speaking about socialism that doesn't care about the global South and extractive imperialism, that is more concerned with reaching across the fascist, line to bring them over than they are worrying about black and indigenous and immigrant issues or who don't want to take the time to understand colonialism as an ongoing and constitutive project part and parcel with capitalism that's always going to be a false socialism it will either default to liberalism or default to white chauvinism so be on the lookout because as socialism grows its popularity so too do these deformed and false versions of it and we see

that cropping up all over constantly. The second point I wanted to make is on the spirituality front, you know, what Nick is getting at, and I think has some interesting similarities to mystical traditions and to East Asian wisdom traditions, is this understanding of oneself within the totality of nature and to not do an internal division, right? In Marxist terms, we talk about being alienated from the product of our labor, how it alienates us from one another, from ourselves, and from the natural world. So there's a Marxist understanding of this. You know, there's a Buddhist and spiritual understanding of our, the delusion of separation.

And there's also this interesting element of Cartesian dualism that came along with the Enlightenment that, you know, we understand the Enlightenment as a process that arose with and alongside and justified colonialism, this Cartesian dualism where the body is separated from the mind is like the Western person and now globally people experience themselves. as if they are up here behind their eyes between their ears like a little humunculus inside the body that is not really even us you know and and Descartes also talked about animals being automaton's and this whole intellectual structure and this whole way of experiencing our reality as if we are fundamentally separate from the natural world and

from one another is a core delusion that is part of the colonial process and is bringing us and our species and the biodiversity of the world to the brink as we speak. So that's a pathology. And then the third point that I really wanted to harp on is this green tech, this green new deal, this ideas of a green capitalism, that even with this shift that is already occurring, two renewables, that same relation, that same set of social relations, that same colonial process, the same brutal extractive nature of the same. system is still taking place, still as prominent as ever, it's just going to green itself.

And so when you don't have a deep structural analysis and critique of the entire mode of production and social relations, you can get swept up into thinking that it's progressive if we move to renewable energies, not asking any questions below the surface of how those raw materials are brought to the earth, how they're put together, who's exploited in that process. and Nick pointing out that many of the companies that are into mining and fracking and fossil fuels are investing in this new generation of renewable technologies, meaning that to some extent the same people who, the same corporations and sets of people who are profiting luxuriously off of the status quo today are still going to be totally fine, you know, doing the same thing in a new generation of renewable technologies and how that relates to things like the coup in Bolivia, in Venezuela, imperial or broadly, et cetera. Those are all crucial, crucial points. And as much as we had many more things to talk about, there's still some really important stuff that got laid out on the table that I really hope people take home with them. Well, we'll go around the horn one last time just for

the last last word from each of us. I'll start. And I just want to remind the listeners, and I've said this several times in the episode and the introduction, et cetera, but to understand why the United States acts the way it does, why Canada acts the way it does, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, et cetera. We named all of these settler colonies. To understand why these states act the way they do, you have to understand the history of them as settler colonies and the legacy of them being settler colonies. And only by understanding that history and that legacy, can you make sense of a lot of the things that they do. Now, of course, you can come up with superficial explanations as to why things happen without analyzing this historical narrative.

But until you do look at this historical narrative and the violence committed against indigenous peoples in these nations, whether you're from these nations or not. Again, these countries have a big amount of power on the international stage as well. But until you explore and fully appreciate that history of violence against the people within the country, within that settler colony, the indigenous people,

you can't fully understand why many of the actions that take place by these settler colonies do take place. Adnan, we'll turn it over to you and then Brett gets the final word and then we'll wrap up. Well, just on that last point, you can't understand. You know, maybe you can't understand why it was so easy to develop the national security state and the global war on terrorism until you appreciate this long-dure history and realize that it's been incubating in the structure of American history since its foundation, that, you know, those connections make so much sense that Nick made in his book and in discussing it. And I also really appreciated very much that woven throughout the book are connections

about other settler colonial societies like Israel and Palestine and really thinking about that resistance and the right of resistance, you know, in terms of indigenous resistance to settler colonialism that is justified and necessary and has existed historically both in North America but also elsewhere in the world where settler colonial projects have taken place and dispossessed people who have to resist occupation and the ongoing colonial state So the only thing that I think, you know, I really would have liked to talk more about capitalism and how he sees capitalism operating in this context. That's a really interesting area. We touched upon it and Brett raised some points, but that's a really fruitful area to be thinking about.

I'm just thankful we had a chance really to learn about honoring relations and this idea of kinship with, in a broad sense, with nature. There's so much to take away, and it's a wonderful book. I really recommend it to everyone. Yeah, and just for my closing words, some recommendations, because one of the things Nick said about what, you know, white settlers specifically can do to be an asset rather than a liability is to politically educate themselves on this history, on colonialism, etc. So this book, Our History is the Future by Nick Estes, is essential. We mentioned in the episode, Roxanne Dunbar, Ortiz. She has many, many books. One of them is an indigenous people's history of the United States, riffing off of Howard Zins, a people's history of the United States with that focus

on indigenous history, essential if you want to learn. Another multimedia approaches what I've mentioned multiple times, exterminate all the brutes by Raul Peck, really, really beautifully done, wide-ranging, and again, connecting up fascism in the imperial core in Europe and its colonies to this process of colonialism and the forging of whiteness as a thing. And then finally, I did an episode on Rev Left with Nick Estes on the American Indian Movement, Aim. And I think he cross-promoted that on Red Nation as well. So listen to Red Nation and check out that episode specifically because he did mention

AIM in this conversation, mentions it in our history as the future. And so if you're interested in that whole sort of historical episode, definitely check out that episode I did with him on RevLeft Radio. Excellent. And again, I really enjoyed this interview. I really enjoyed the conversation with both of you, as I always do. So thanks, as always. Adnan, Brett, I'm going to have you now tell the listeners how they can find you on social media. We'll start with Adnan. How can they find you on Twitter and your other podcast? You can find me on Twitter at Adnan-A-Husain, H-U-S-A-I-N.

And check out the M-A-J-L-I-S if you're interested in Middle East, Islamic World, Muslim diasporas. We have all kinds of episodes on topics related to that that you might be interested in. And Brett, how can the listeners find you in all of the excellent work that you've been doing? You can go to Revolutionary LeftRadio.com, find all the shows, social media, patrons, et cetera. And on Rev Left, I just did an interview with Kevin. Rashid Johnson, a political prisoner incarcerated with a life sentence plus 40 years. And he is one of the co-founders of the New African Black Panther Party. And then it recently split to the revolutionary intercommunal Black Panther Party. But that was one of the most intense interviews I've ever done.

He talks extensively about the brutality and the terrorism inside the prison system. And if you think all the videos you see on the outside of cops killing unarmed people, usually black and brown people are hideous. And they are. Imagine what goes on. in the prison system without any recourse to video cameras and anybody getting footage out. He talks about some things that you would not even believe, even if you have a very pessimistic and rightfully so view of the American prison system, he talks about some things that go on inside that have not left me since that interview and likely won't leave you after listening to it. So definitely check that out.

Yeah, I've listened to the first half of it, and that's fantastic so far. I'm really looking forward to getting through the rest of it as soon as I can. Listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995-H-U-C-K-1-995. You can follow me on Patreon where I write about public health and immunology with focus on COVID, of course, Patreon.com forward slash Huck-1995. And you can follow the show on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod. And please support the show on Patreon and patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history.

Again, Gorilla being spelled G-E-R-R-I-L-A, your contributions help keep the show running with all the books that we're buying. You know, the costs start to get up there. So your contributions do help us continue with that book purchasing endeavor. In any case, we'll be back again relatively soon with another episode, and I'm sure it's going to be another great interview just like we had today. So until next time, stay safe. Solidarity. Thank you.