Dan’s lengthy interview with Nick Estes on his remarkable book Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. The problem that settler colonialism was repeatedly trying to solve by unleashing such terrific violence—through massacres, by nearly eliminating the buffalo, in reservation confinement, in dominating the Missouri River—was not just indigenous people being in the way but also the existence of a larger relationship between indigenous people and the land, water and animals. The history of resisting this capitalist and colonialist dispossession has endured through the Water Protectors’ struggle at Standing Rock—which will, in retrospect, be remembered as a pivotal moment in the global struggle against climate catastrophe.
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