Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Our History Is the Future: The Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED May 20, 2021 In this episode, we speak with Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future, about the powerful throughline connecting the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, the 1973 AIM occupation, and the 2016 resistance at Standing Rock. Far from isolated events, these are chapters in a living history of Indigenous struggle against settler colonialism, ecological devastation, and capitalist expansion. Estes brings a revolutionary lens to history; one that is rooted in land, memory, and the radical refusal to disappear. This isn’t just a conversation about the past though, it’s a call to understand that the continued fight for Indigenous sovereignty is the fight for a livable future. Listen to the full episode of Guerrilla History here: https://guerrillahistory.libsyn.com/nick-estes ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE

We're back on Guerrilla History, and we're now joined by our guest, Nick Estes, who's Professor of American Studies at University of New Mexico, is the author of Our History is the Future and is 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 Adnan, 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 discuss 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, you know, 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. 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, you know, 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 Hesapa or Minisose, the Missouri River and the Black Hills. and our relationship to that land and territory and how we were caretakers and how we attempted to be or aspired to be in good relation with the land and all the life that existed on the land. So that's kind of like a spatial relationship. 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 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. And one medium,

or one genre of popular culture that we are frequently appear in is the Western, right? The past on the frontier. And all Westerns are war movies, right? Where the settler is the sort of the settler is looked at as

the victim. And invasion thus becomes kind of self-defense and no better representation of that as 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 about indigenous futurism and the kind of scientific genre, but thinking about actual historical conditions that 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 one of the ways that you're talking about how how colonizers see time it comes up in the phrase like you know racism is in the past the genocide of the 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 which you do talk about this 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 you know 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 um that the indigenous ways of relating and being and experiencing their own lives in the world is it has something profound to teach us on our path as a as a species going forward so um on multiple on 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. It's 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. And I think a long-dure 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 in 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 Ocheti Shalconi 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 a its own traditions and its own kind of understanding of itself. And specifically, the United States, the United States thinks of itself as kind of this self-contained historical, you know, process when in fact, the United States' existence on this land is very, it's actually very short.

It's what I called, not in the book, but in elsewhere where I've written and talked about, 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 and 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 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, to oral historians tell our history. They don't talk about, uh, wounded knee, you know, as Black Elk wrote and really as John Knightheart wrote, um, the poet, the white guy, uh, you know, our hoop was broken. And, you know, we, you know, we ceased to exist as a nation. It was like, that's total bullshit. That's just some kind of tragic, you know, uh, end of the trail. I can't remember the, the artist who made that the end of the trail, the, 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 knowledges 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 Emelcar Cabral'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, you know, how do we make a revolution in Guinea-Busau? 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-Bissot. 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, Cabral 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 AIME, 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 that were like, oh, we were defeated people after wounded knee and the vision died or whatever poetic language they use or fatalistic language they use. No, that continues. and it was, you know, it didn't, 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 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 are 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 focused 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 it was not. Black Elk said as much, but why is it not the end of the era? Well, you know, Black Elk 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 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. 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 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, 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, you know, just about every oppressed people has that kind of tendency within, you know, within their historical experience. but I think what what 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 the 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 superstructure of our culture, which is, you know, in tatters, 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 you said, when we think about indigenous people as people in a settler colonialist nation, And 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 dance as a form of resistance, though, you know, not in the same form that we would have seen at, Little Big Horn. 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 John Grenier's

the first way of war. 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 Gronier 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 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.

military history because it thinks of, you know, when they study military history, they think of like the Indian Wars as kind of this discrete, 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, 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, kitschy 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 against 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, you know, 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 modeled up to, 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 of these, like, debates about states' rights and decentralization, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. a strong federal, a 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 on the field of battle nine times out of ten we 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 wage total warfare campaigns against us, or they engaged in what we now know as 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, Mohawk or Modoc people for resisting? And the determination of the court was like, yeah, actually we do because they're an enemy non-combatant. 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, you know, 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 at the small, or 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, 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 it's they're like oh virgin soil epidemic they're biologically inferior to europeans they didn't have the the immunity well it's like if that was the case then europe wouldn't exist and the black plague would have destroyed every like 90% of europe right and what 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. 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 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 um

from the very start, because even when you mention Lewis and Clark characterizing 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 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 Brave Bowl 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, 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, of the church. But you have a proliferation of, especially in red power, you have a proliferation of an

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, and 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 sun dances 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 raise consciousness around the red power movement, you see a proliferation of Sundances to the point where there's over 100 sun dances 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 to knee and those, 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 Fondallis was targeted specifically by Obama's FBI during the Standing Rock protest. in fact, you know, 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 and 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 acquit, she didn't go out and search for a gun.

it was actually the FBI informant who gave her that gun, you know, 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 break 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 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. 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 need in the head he was like hey man he'll calm down and you know he gets hit and then 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, 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 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 um i'll be honest i don't really write about uh spirituality that much even though it's it's a very prominent thing within indigenous uh movements and it plays a central role um 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 and inanimate up. 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, it's something that is, 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 irreparable harm to it but it because it'll kill you a little bit just Like, it doesn't make sense to, you know, 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. But then also, I think establishing a more complicated and esoteric relationship to a certain region, you know, is, or territory or landscape is incredibly important. And it doesn't translate into, you know, it doesn't translate into what we understand. understand is 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, the, the, where the Oceti Shalconi 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 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 as 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 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 anthroposan 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 of 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, Outtajora or New Zealand where they've given, you know, rights or personhood to a river or to mountains or things like, 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, 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 our friend and by friend, I mean not friend, Elon Musk, a lot of the way that the Great 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

in 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 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 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, you know, last year destroyed a 46,000 or 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 sacred site, since time immemorial Apache people have done their coming-of-age ceremonies at this particular location. 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, 7,000 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 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 Qistone 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 you know a country like Bolivia that possesses that possesses large lithium reserves the entire Andean region possesses large lithium reserves it's not just 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 green, of quote-unquote green technology, right, and sell them back to you. Well, of course, imperialism, you know, that's not profitable for 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 U.S. 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 track the approval of a lithium mine in northern Nevada which is on Shoshone or excuse me which is on northern piute 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. 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 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 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 know, 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 exploiting indigenous lands, running pipelines through them. And so 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, you know, 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 adjudicating 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 like wounded knee trials. And when, you know, they were debating on whether or not the United States even had jurisdiction to arrest people in treaty land. And if the, you know, the Lakota Nation had actually ceded sovereignty and jurisdiction to the U.S. So, you know, 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 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 sue nation sitting in judgment on america um which is compiled and edited by uh roxan dunbarthes who's an historian um but also was you know part of this kind of legal defense at the time and it documents the testimony because at the time there 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 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 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 to indict its system 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 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 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 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 were international observers who showed up. And they made the move to bring the treaty to the United Nations. And they also made 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 Entreaty 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 you know quite some time and so but it didn't you know at this at this moment in time there's the american indian movement faced like a unique uh 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 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 synoboy and sue, activists. 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 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 Noura Erichat on the specific like legal campaign that international human rights illegal campaign. The the Palestinian movement had waged. And so we were really taken, 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, or 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 craft 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. goes back to even our understanding of, you know, the, as I talk about in chapter two and origins, the original covenant with De Saint-We, 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 and 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 Chakhan, 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. She 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 K. 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 Raoul Peck 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 Pecks, exterminate the brutes. That, I think, is, 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, you know, the president of the United States, which is completely false.

Like, 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. A 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 um so it is really difficult um in

that sense but you know i i really do think that we need uh 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 um so it you know it is complicated and I don't I don't have like advice you know I'm not like a I'm not like a a guru or anything um 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, 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 you know despite the the availability of these resources or the you know the the creation of these shoddy uh infrastructures that you know a little storm that you know that dumps a little bit of snow completely wipes out you know uh an entire infrastructure and you know it affects black people and you know uh 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 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. 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 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 comrade 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? 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.org 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 who, you know, are 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.