"The Red Deal presents an alternative: a shift away from the military-industrial complex and these extractive economies.…The reality is that Native nations have a longstanding intimacy with these kinds of economies, whether it’s nuclear economies or fossil fuel economies. Understanding the historical conditions that force Native nations to participate in these economies is important, but I don’t think it’s a conversation about tradeoffs. It’s about the fact that participating in these economies further entrenches us into the settler-colonial system." Interview with Nick Estes about his new book Our History is the Future, which situates the months-long encampment at Standing Rock within centuries-long traditions of Indigenous internationalist resistance to white supremacist imperialism, settler colonialism, and capitalism.

In my book, I mention this 1823 Supreme Court decision that said that Indigenous people only had occupancy rights to our land — not full title — so settlers who “discovered” our land could legally take it. That ruling was based on the “doctrine of discovery.” The Chief Justice in that case, John Marshall, cited a fifteenth-century papal bull called the “Doctrine of Christian Discovery” that was used to legally justify Portugal’s claims to land in West Africa. The reasoning was that, just like non-Christians in West Africa were considered “savages” who couldn’t own their own land, we couldn’t have full title to our land because we’re not full humans who exist at the level of civilization — a doctrine decided and standardized, of course, by the colonizing nation.

"Assembling communal life is in itself a technology."