Our History is the Future
Prior to reading this book, I hadn’t really approached Standing Rock from a historical perspective, and certainly not one that centered the sovereignty of the Oceti Sakowin before. It centered indigenous sovereignty from an indigenous perspective (being written, of course, by a native, sioux, person).
But I think that Nick Estes did a very good job recontextualizing historic events that I had heard about from settler perspectives and relating them to the continued fight for indigenous sovereignty that brought us to the events of the #NoDAPL movement.
It recontextualized things like the “American Indian Wars.” According to Wikipedia’s “list of wars involving the United States” there were 4 wars between the various Oceti Sakowin tribes and the United States; The Dakota War of 1862, the Colorado War (1863-65), the Powder River War (1965) and Red Cloud’s War (1866-68) which led to the creation of the Treaty of Fort Laramine, which much of the book is based around. There were also 2 other wars after the treaty was signed: the Great Sioux War of 1876 (which seized the black hills that were given in the treaty), the Pine Ridge Campaign (which led to the massacre at Wounded Knee). In reading Estes's account of these events, I realized that the way that these wars are taught in my childhood history classes, was as if there weren’t real wars. They were not portrayed as sovereign nations resisting encroachment onto their territories by the United States. I mean, they were barely taught at all, because history class preferred to focus on the Civil War that was happening at the same time.
When I was in Chicago at the cultural center, there was a sign that said: “The Civil War was also a settler colonial war.” This made sense to me in some way, because it was a war over land that belonged to neither group that was trying to claim it. The Indian Wars and the Civil War were both, as the sign said: “each part of the westward advance of the United States empire and the colonization of the west. The Civil War...was also a conflict over the way the United States empire would develop.” That sign, plus the realization that the dates of the American Indian Wars overlap almost completely with the Civil War made me realize just how wrong the United State’s history is taught.
The history of the Oceti Sakowin - their origins to now - isn’t included in the curriculum. The United States gets to act like their expansion was inevitable, and ignore the historic wars that were waged against sovereign nations in a conquest for more land and resources. And ignore the modern war with the continued occupation of lands, breaking of treaties, and denial of modern sovereignty. By simply thinking of the Oceti Sakowin Oyate/Great Sioux Nation as a nation it directly challenges the notion that it was inevitable. It recontextualizes the history and the supposed ‘greatness’ of the United States by proving that it is a nation built upon the destruction of other nations.
Another thing that stuck with me from the book was the Ghost Dance. Settler history doesn’t portray it in the same way as Estes does. Its generally refered to as some kind of ‘crazy indian thing’ on par with the Dancing Plague of 1518 because of its mischaracterization by anthropologists. What isn’t mentioned is how much it makes sense in the true context of its time period. Estes calls it “an accumulation of prior anti-colonial experiences, sentiments, and struggles” and recontextualizes it as a true anti-colonial resistance movement, one that went against the US ‘concentration camp’ reservations, boarding schools, and the movement towards assimilation. A movement that posed a threat to US imposition of their sovereignty over the Oceti Sakowin, and was met with military force and violence.
The title of the book, our history is the future was confusing to me at first, but the explanation of the ghost dance actually helped me to understand it. Estes description of the ghost dance as being “transported to a forthcoming world where the old ways and dead relatives lived” in contrast to the “horrors of their current reality” and that it offered “a reminder that life need not always be this way” to its participants, I was able to better understand (Estes 124). The idea of looking to our past in order to envision a future that is better than our current present makes sense. I think it’s a bit like envisioning the future that you want as the first step to making it a reality, like in Decolonization is not a metaphor, decolonization must first stop being a metaphor in order for “the very possibility of decolonization” to be real (Tuck & Yang 4).
And similarly, I think, Standing Rock offered a similar window into the past and the future. Estes recounts Ladonna BraveBull Allard’s story from the Sacred Stone camp, seeing everyone working, roasting deer meat, kids playing, and people telling stories. “They were all speaking Dakota. I looked at them and I thought, ‘this is how we are supposed to live. This makes sense to me.’ Every day...I saw our culture and our way of life come alive.” (BraveBull Allard, via Estes pg 51-52)
There are so many “Standing Rocks” that have happened over and over again throughout Octei Sakowin history as their land has been taken, and dams have flooded their towns, their land, as police killed their people, and there has been resistance to all of these. Yet from my perspective, settlers see Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline as different from all these other events that the tribes didn’t want.
But what really makes it different? Is it because there were other people involved? Because there were non-Sioux and non-native people who stood with them? What makes one act of resistance more important than another? Because all these acts of resistance are important to be recognized. “This Battle for native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even after the encampment was gone, their anti-colonial struggle would continue.” (From inside cover, Our History is the Future)
When I was considering those questions, a quote came to mind from Pualani Case, a Native Hawaiian who is a leader of the Protect Mauna Kea movement to stop TMT.
“When the Native people of a place say, ‘not this time’ ‘no more’ ‘you have taken almost everything we have, and if we allow you to build on the most sacred’ without attempting to stop that, we may as just lay down, as a native people and say ‘take everything’ if you take the most sacred what will we have left.”
When I first heard this quote, it made me uncomfortable, because I thought, ‘just because someone takes one thing doesn’t mean they should take all of it, but when I rewatched the video for the third-ish time, and after I read Estes’ book, I think I understand it better. That quote isn’t about the settlers taking the land, it's about the importance for the native people to defend the land, to try to stop settler imposition and construction on the land. Some of what makes them still have a right to the land are because they have never stopped fighting for it in one way or another.
Chicago Cultural Center is built on land that “consists of both territory ceded through treaties that the U.S. government coerced Indigenous people to sign and unceded territory created by landfill after those coerced treaties were signed.” (Decolonizing the Chicago Cultural Center, pg 20 ) Many other places in the united states are built like that, Boston is like that. But coerced treaties and made land doesn’t separate Native people from the land, it’s still theirs and they are still of the land.
And therefore, every act of resistance, every existence as resistance, is important, even if some are more important because they deal with the most sacred, and the most important things, like the water, and the right to live.
“Internationalism” was another concept from Our History is the Future that I thought was super interesting and recontextualizing. Because if you consider all the tribes to be their own nations that retain their sovereignty, then gatherings like the sacred stone camps at standing rock, organizations like the American Indian Movement, are international movements. And interactions between the United States and native nations are nation-to-nation, they are international relations, or at least, maybe they should be considered international relations.
A lot of my thoughts on this book are still scattered, even after the weeks that I’ve spent processing and connecting it to my interactions in my daily life. But there’s one paragraph that I really like that I think does a good job, a better job, of relating all these things I talked about down.
“The Ghost Dance was not a monolithic movement, but an accumulation of prior anti-colonial experiences, sentiments, and struggles that informed #NoDAPL. Each struggle had adopted essential features of previous traditions of Indigenous resistance, while creating new tactics and visions to address the present reality, and, consequentially, projected Indigenous liberation into the future. Trauma played a major role. But if we oversimplify Indigenous peoples as perpetually wounded, we cannot understand how they formed kinship bonds and constantly recreated and kept intact families, communities, and governance structures while surviving as fugitives and prisoners of a settler state and as conspirators against empire; how they loved, cried, laughed, imagined, dreamed, and defended themselves; or how they remain, to this day, the first sovereigns of this land and the oldest political authority.”
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