Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance," by Nick Estes.
Prophecy told of Zuzeca Sapa, the Black Snake, extending itself across the land and imperiling all life, beginning with the water. From its heads, or many heads, it would spew death and destruction. Zuzeca Sapa is DAPL—and all oil pipelines trespassing through Indigenous territory. But while the Black Snake prophecy foreshadows doom, it also foreshadows historic resistance and resurgent Indigenous histories not seen for generations, if ever. To protect Unci Maka, Grandmother Earth, Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples will have to unite to turn back the forces destroying the earth—capitalism and colonialism.
Settler narratives use a linear conception of time to distance themselves from the horrific crimes committed against Indigenous peoples and the land. This includes celebrating bogus origin stories like Thanksgiving. But Indigenous notions of time consider the present to be structured entirely by our past and by our ancestors. There is no separation between past and present, meaning that an alternative future is also determined by our understanding of our past. Our history is the future.
“Public land” for “public good” was a highly subsidized federal endeavor for private enterprise, racial exclusion, and Indigenous elimination. One and a half million white families gained title to 246 million acres of Indigenous lands—an area nearly the size of California and Texas combined—under the Homestead Act, with the added value of federally subsidized irrigation. A quarter of adults alive today in the United States are direct descendants of those who profited from the Homestead Act’s legacy of exclusive, racialized property ownership and economic mobility, a legacy that categorically excluded Black, Indigenous, and other nonwhite peoples. Access to Indigenous water was crucial for securing the ownership of Indigenous lands and generating wealth from these lands over generations. Thus, a single land policy has had a profound lasting political and economic legacy. It informs present disparities, which boil down to a single axiom: land is wealth and water is wealth. The Pick-Sloan Plan is part and parcel of this massive settler-colonial agricultural machine that greases its gears with water. Today, agriculture in the western United States accounts for three-quarters of all water usage. Water is settler colonialism’s lifeblood—blood that has to be continually excised from Indigenous peoples.
Indigenous resistance is not a one-time event. It continually asks: What proliferates in the absence of empire? Thus, it defines freedom not as the absence of settler colonialism, but as the amplified presence of Indigenous life and just relations with human and nonhuman relatives, and with the earth.
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