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

Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (2019) is a work of nonfiction by Nick Estes that centers on the story of Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline. Estes outlines this story within the context of a historical account of the US government’s treatment of Indigenous peoples and their strong resistance against colonialism and capitalism.

Nick Estes is Kul Wicasa, a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe within the nation of Oceti Sakowin Oyate. Estes is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He cofounded The Red Nation, a social justice organization that consists of a coalition of activists focused on Indigenous liberation.

Estes’s book emphasizes how colonialism and capitalism created a foundation on which the US government repeatedly targeted and attacked Indigenous nations, separating Indigenous peoples from their connection with the land, depleting their resources, and repeatedly denying their humanity. Estes rejects the acceptance of capitalism as force of good, revealing how it has historically created an excuse to kill and repeatedly relocate Indigenous peoples. Focusing mainly on the nation of the Oceti Sakowin, Estes shows how resistance by Indigenous peoples is bound in their ancestry and how time is woven together like a tapestry, unlike the linear conception of time perpetuated by Western society.