Prologue

Prophets

Thanksgiving is the quintessential origin story a settler nation

tells itself: “peace” was achieved between Natives and settlers
at Plymouth, Massachusetts, where Mayflower pilgrims estab-
lished a colony in 1620, over roast turkey and yams. To
consummate the wanton slaughter of some 700 Pequots, in
1637 the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, William
Bradford, proclaimed that Thanksgiving Day be celebrated
“in honor of the bloody victory, thanking God that the battle
had been won.” Peace on stolen land is borne of genocide.
It was Thanksgiving 2016. We had spent a bitterly cold
night at a Wyoming gas station off I-80, among a half-dozen
other cars loaded with camp supplies and Water Protectors.
Everyone was up before sunrise, hoping the interstate would
reopen after the overnight freeze. Among them were Natives
and non-Natives from the Pacific Northwest and West Coast,
sporting fatigues and signature black and tan Carhartt jack-
ets with patches declaring: “WATER IS LIFE.” “This is
Trump country—we gotta hit the road!” one of the Water
Protectors exclaimed, half-jokingly, to the packed truck stop
bathroom. Outside, white men glared at us from their dually
pickups. Wyoming is an oil, gas, and coal state, and it was
sending its police to fight the modern-day Indian war that we
were on our way to help resist. We filed into our cars and took
the on-ramp toward Standing Rock.
This was my fourth and final trip to Oceti Sakowin Camp,
the largest of several camps that existed at the confluence of the
Cannonball and Missouri Rivers, north of the Standing Rock
Indian Reservation, from April 2016 to February 2017. Initially,

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the camps had been established to block construction of Energy

Transfer Partners’ $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL),
a 1,712-mile oil pipeline that cut through unceded territory of
the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and crossed under Mni Sose (the
Missouri River) immediately upstream from Standing Rock,
threatening the reservation’s water supply.
This was not just about Standing Rock water: The pipeline
crossed upriver from the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation on
the Missouri River, transporting oil extracted from that reser-
vation’s booming fracking industry. It cut under the Mississippi
River at the Iowa–Illinois border, where a coalition of
Indigenous peoples and white farmers, ranchers, and environ-
mentalists in Iowa opposed it. And it crossed four states—
North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois. But it was
Standing Rock and allied Indigenous nations, including Fort
Berthold, who had put up the most intense resistance.
After North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple declared a
state of emergency on August 19, 2016—to safeguard the pipe-
line’s final construction—the movement surged. Dalrymple
deployed the National Guard and invoked powers under the
Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC) that
are normally used only during natural disasters, such as floods,
fires, and hurricanes. EMAC also allows for state, municipal,
and federal law enforcement agencies to share equipment and
personnel during what are declared “community disorders,
insurgency, or enemy attack.” In April 2015, Maryland
Governor Larry Hogan had also used EMAC powers to crush
a Black-led uprising for justice for Freddie Gray, a Black man
killed by Baltimore police. This time it was an Indigenous
nation that was declared the threat.
The encampments were about more than stopping a pipe-
line. Scattered and separated during invasion, the long-awaited
reunification of all seven nations of Dakota-, Nakota-, and
Lakota-speaking peoples hadn’t occurred in more than a
hundred years, or at least seven generations. Oceti Sakowin,

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dubbed the “Great Sioux Nation” by settlers, once encom-

passed territory that spanned from the western shores of Lake
Superior to the Bighorn Mountains. Only in stories had I heard
about the Oceti Sakowin uniting, its fire lit, and the seven tipis
or lodges—each representing a nation—arranged in the shape
a buffalo horn. Historically, this reunification had happened in
times of celebration, for annual sun dances, large multi-tribal
trading fairs, and buffalo hunts. But the last time was also in a
time of war—to resist invasion. Now, the gathering had become
what the passengers of our car—Carolina, an Indigenous
immigration lawyer, Dina, an Indigenous writer, and I—liked
to call “Indian City”; at its peak, the camp was North Dakota’s
tenth-largest city. Its population surpassed 10,000 people,
possibly reaching as many as 15,000.
The camp was at a standstill when we arrived, and
completely encircled by law enforcement employing hundreds
of miles of concertina wire, road blocks, and twenty-four-
hour aerial surveillance, in what resembled a military occupa-
tion. In an effort to sow division, TigerSwan, a private secu-
rity contractor hired by DAPL to assist North Dakota law
enforcement, infiltrated the camps and planted false reports
on social media and local news comparing Water Protectors
to jihadist insurgents. The #NoDAPL movement was “an
ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious compo-
nent,” they claimed, in documents released by the Intercept.1
The effects were devastating, and many of the planted stories
continue to circulate as truth, the divisions cleaved still fester-
ing. And because of the violent police crackdown on protests,
including the infamous October 27 raid on the 1851 Treaty
Camp, a hiatus had been placed on high-risk direct actions
like placing bodies before earthmovers.
So the next day—Black Friday—we went to the mall. In
Bismarck, North Dakota, shoppers, mostly white, flooded the
Kirkwood Mall, eager to cash in on holiday discounts. Our
plan was to disrupt Black Friday shopping, in unison with

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other Black Friday actions, to keep the message of #NoDAPL

in the news and the fire burning in people’s hearts and minds.
Back at camp, I had run into a childhood friend, Michael, and
his partner Emma, and we had packed into his car. Through
traffic was entirely blocked on Highway 1806, the fastest route
to reservation border towns Mandan and Bismarck, and mili-
tary checkpoints choked off business to Prairie Knights
Casino—a major employer in the reservation and source of
revenue for Standing Rock—and hampered residents’ access
to off-reservation jobs and groceries. What resembled an
economic embargo and, in different circumstances, could be
considered an act of war against a sovereign nation, added an
extra half hour to forty-five minutes to our drive.
The mall was packed. Bismarck police, all of them white,
guarded the entrances with AR-15 rifles. Once inside, our
goal was to create a prayer circle in the mall’s large food
court, without getting caught; this meant we would have to
“blend in.” That’s hard enough for Natives in a sea of whites.
Our cover was blown. A white woman cried out: “They
smell like campfire!” Shoppers stopped and looked. She pointed
to a group of women—faces wind and sun-burnt, jackets and
skirts unwashed—heading toward the mall’s restrooms. Two
cops, their AR-15s slung over their shoulders, approached, and
grabbed and twisted one of the women’s arm. She was dark-
skinned, and her black hair was neatly braided to her waist. I
waited to hear her arm pop from dislocation or fracture, as the
cop slammed her face-first on the thin carpet.
“I’m trying to go to the bathroom!”
“Shut the fuck up!”
Soon all four of them were sitting on the ground with their
hands zip-tied behind them, and then the cops dragged them
away. The smell of fire, a central aspect of camp life—ceremony,
planning, cooking, eating, sleeping, singing, storytelling, and
keeping warm—had given them away. “Oceti” in “Oceti
Sakowin,” after all, means “council fire.” In another time, they

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might have been accused of “smelling like an Indian” because

fire is central to Lakota ceremonial life; but now, smoke also
indicated that one had come from the #NoDAPL camps.
“What’s your problem?” asked a white man, approaching
the cops. With a leg sweep, he was also facedown, with a knee
on his neck and knee on his spine.
“Quit resisting!” the officer shouted. They didn’t bother to
pick him up, instead dragging him belly-first across the ground.
“He smelled like campfire,” shrugged the cop who had
thrown him down.
Eventually, we formed a prayer circle—before cops began
tackling, punching, and kicking us too. A man’s crutches were
taken from him, and he hobbled on one foot as another cop
tackled him. White men from the crowd began holding Water
Protectors for the police or throwing them into the police line.
“Go back to the reservation! Prairie niggers!” one of them
screamed in our faces.
White children looking on also screamed, though they
seemed more scared of the police than of the Water Protectors.
A woman got caught between the police and our retreating line,
and cops grabbed her by the hair and dragged her to the ground
crying. Her partner stepped in and was kneed several times in
the face. A woman began running as we made our way through
the exit doors and was tackled on the pavement by a cop.
We had flinched each time they nabbed one of us from the
crowd, expecting the now-familiar chemical shower of CS gas
or pepper spray—another odor that was mixed in with the
smoke, and that, in a single attack, could dull a person’s sense
of smell for days, sometimes weeks. But the presence of white
shoppers and their families—unwanted collateral damage—
protected us from being shot or sprayed. Instead, the cops
used their hands and feet. Thirty-three were arrested. After
Michael, Emma, and I escaped, we rendezvoused at the car.
Michael turned to me, his hands shaking. “Now I know
what it’s like to be hunted.”

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At camp, the smell of campfire brought us back to another

world—an older world, an Indigenous world always thought
to be on the brink of extinction, a place at once familiar to
Native peoples and radically unfamiliar to settlers. In the
twilight hours, Water Protectors told stories and shared the
prophetic visions of a better world, not just in the past, but
one currently in the making, as purple-grey smoke filled the
spaces between tipis, tents, and lines of cars and trucks.
The camps had attracted Indigenous and non-Indigenous
people from across North America. On my first day in camp,
in August, I dug compost holes with my Ojibwe relative
Josh—a cook from Bismarck—and built a cook shack at the
camp’s main kitchen with my Diné relative Brandon and a
Palestinian network administrator, Emad, from Yankton,
South Dakota—himself a refugee from the US-backed Israeli
colonization of his homelands. My Palestinian comrade Samia
once called our sacrosanct duty at camp an “intifada on the
plains,” because she saw it as an uprising against the same
occupier. The cook shack, pieced together with genuine soli-
darity and gnarly fallen trees, survived a brutal Northern
Plains winter and helped feed thousands.
I also knew Michael, a white kid from my small hometown
of Chamberlain, South Dakota, along the Missouri River. I
grew up in a single-parent, single-income household, in a
mobile home literally on the wrong side of the tracks. Michael’s
parents made ends meet by working at the Catholic-run Indian
boarding school where my father and his siblings had their
Lakota culture and language beaten from them. Along with
other kids like us, both Native and white, the two of us bonded
over skateboarding, punk rock, and left politics—everything
we felt rebelled against the pervasive, and often violent,
conservatism of our hometown.
Politicians and media attempted to play up divisions in the
camps, depicting white Water Protectors as “hippies” who
treated the movement like “Burning Man.” Those elements

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existed, and some Native people played along. But such

portrayals gloss over meaningful solidarities. For example, our
national camp, Kul Wicasa, welcomed everyone. Our camp’s
leader, my friend and Tahansi (cousin) Lewis Grassrope, helped
create the Oceti Sakowin Horn, inviting not only Indigenous,
but also non-Indigenous peoples to participate. (Our families
had shared political commitments that went back generations.
In the 1930s his great-grandfather Daniel Grassrope, a tradi-
tional headman, and my great-grandfather Ruben Estes, a
translator, traveled together to Washington, DC, to encourage
Congress to pass the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act.)2 Lewis
knew the importance of allies.
Two years earlier he and I had spent cold nights in poorly
insulated tipis protesting our own nation. Of all the tribal coun-
cils, that of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe was the only to cast
support for TransCanada, the company building the Keystone
XL Pipeline. Our protest camp had little to no help from our
own people, nor from the outside world. There were no televi-
sion cameras or social media live streams, and there was no
Mark Ruffalo. But now the world had come to #NoDAPL. A
white woman named Maria, a local reporter and a friend from
Chamberlain, embedded herself in the camp as a cook, feeding
thousands. Abe, a white military veteran from Colorado, ran
our camp security. In Chicago, my comrades Kofi from
#BlackLivesMatter and Renae, a Nuu-chah-nulth revolutionary
socialist, led solidarity delegations. And there were many more.
Political elites and corporate media have frequently depicted
poor whites and poor Natives as irreconcilable enemies, without
common ground competing for scarce resources in economically
depressed rural areas. Yet, the defense of Native land, water, and
treaties brought us together. Although not perfect, Oceti Sakowin
camp was a home to many for months. And the bonds were long
lasting, despite the horrific histories working against them.
Chamberlain is a white-dominated border town next to
the Lower Brule and Crow Creek Indian reservations. The

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set­tle­ment began as Fort Kiowa, across the river, a notorious

trade hub whose early history is depicted in the 2015 block-
buster film The Revenant with great historical accuracy,
despite its tired trope of a white savior “playing Indian.” The
film shows the nineteenth-century fur trade’s organized plun-
der of not only the river ecosystem, but entire nations of
people, and its apocalyptic death-world of rape, genocide,
poaching, trespass, theft, and smallpox. In the final scene,
the main protagonist, Hugh Glass, a real historical figure,
approaches Fort Kiowa, where he sees Native women and
children begging outside the gates and being bought and sold
inside by drunk white traders. These river trade forts were
the first “man camps”: large, usually temporary, encamp-
ments of men working in extractive industries, from the fur
trade to oil and gas development, where rates of sexual and
domestic violence, and murders and disappearances of Native
women and girls are intensified. As Ihanktonwan elder and
member of the Brave Heart Society Faith Spotted Eagle has
pointed out, “history teaches us that during times of crisis
violence escalates;”3 indeed, the proliferation of violence
against the land has been directly related to attacks on
Indigenous women’s bodies.
This region—our homeland—is also part of He Sapa, the
Black Hills, or the heart of everything that is. He Sapa is the
beating heart of the Lakota cosmos, where we emerged from
red earth, took our first breath, and gained our humanity as
Oyate Luta: the “Red People,” or the “Red Nation.” During
the last ice age, massive glaciers carved up the land. After the
ice retreated, it left rolling hills and tunneling valleys that
became buffalo roads, where herds that once blackened the
plains traveled during seasonal migrations to and from water.
The buffalo followed the stars, and the people followed the
buffalo. To honor our relations, we called ourselves “Pte
Oyate” (the Buffalo Nation), and “Wicahpi Oyate” (the Star
Nation). In these ebbs and flows of migration, all roads led to

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 PROPHETS

Mni Sose, which translates to “roiling water,” for the once-

astir and often-muddy river. Many Lakotayapi nouns, like
“Mni Sose,” indicate not merely static, inanimate form, but
also action. In this landscape, water is animated and has
agency; it streams as liquid, forms clouds as gas, and even
moves earth as solid ice—because it is alive and gives life. If
He Sapa is the heart of the world, then Mni Sose is its aorta.
This is a Lakota and Indigenous relationship to the physical
world. What has been derided for centuries as “primitive
superstition” has only recently been “discovered” by Western
scientists and academics as “valid” knowledge. Nevertheless,
knowledge alone has never ended imperialism.
The US military understood this vital connection to place
and other-than-humans in the 1860s when it annihilated the
remaining 10 to 15 million buffalos in less than two decades.
A century later another branch of the military, the US Army
Corps of Engineers, constructed five earthen rolled dams on
the main stem of the Missouri River, turning life-giving
waters into life-taking waters. A river that was once astir was
now choked and plugged. After World War II, the United
States also aimed to “get out of the Indian business”: to termi-
nate federal responsibilities to Indigenous peoples that had
been guaranteed through treaties, to relocate Indigenous
peoples off their reservations, and to sell off remaining lands
and resources to private industry and white settlers. The Pick-
Sloan Plan, a basin-wide multipurpose dam project—which
aimed to provide postwar employment, hydroelectricity, flood
control, and irrigation to white farming communities and far-
off cities—worked in tandem with Indian termination and
relocation. With the flooding of the fertile river bottomlands,
people were forced off the reservation. Remaining lands were
largely uninhabitable, making relocation the only option for
many. Thirty percent of Missouri River reservation popula-
tions were removed; 90 percent of commercial timber was
destroyed; thousands of acres of subsistence farms and

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gardens were flooded; and 75 percent of wildlife and plants

indigenous to the river bottomlands disappeared.
Oglala visionary and prophet Nicholas Black Elk, himself a
Catholic, compared the invasion of white Christians as akin to
the biblical flood. But unlike the Genesis flood that receded
after 150 days, Black Elk’s apocalyptic deluge had no end. It has
worked continuously to eliminate Indigenous peoples and their
other-than-human relatives from the land, thereby severing
their relationship with the land. According to the vision Black
Elk described to poet John Neihardt in 1931, white men came
like an endless wall of floodwater, creating “a little island,” or a
reservation, “where we were free to try to save our nation, but
we couldn’t do it.” Constantly hounded as fugitives, escaping
from one patch of dry land to the next, the people “were always
leaving our lands and the flood devours the four-leggeds as they
flee.” The four-leggeds were bears, elk, deer, buffalos, wolves,
and so forth—some of whom are presently extinct in the lands
of the Oceti Sakowin. The Department of the Interior is tasked
with managing the diminished lands and territories of both
wildlife and Indians, survivors of an ongoing holocaust. “All of
our religion of the old times that the early Indians had was left
behind them as they fled and the water covered the region,”
Black Elk lamented. “Now, as I look ahead, we are nothing but
prisoners of war.”4 His “we” included the four-leggeds.
Over the last 200 years, the US military has waged relent-
less war on the Oceti Sakowin as much as it has on their
kinship relations, such as Pte Oyate (the buffalo nation) and
Mni Sose (the Missouri River). What happened at Standing
Rock was the most recent iteration of an Indian War that
never ends. DAPL was originally meant to cross the Missouri
River upstream from Bismarck, a city that is 90 percent white.
But the Army Corps rerouted it to cross downstream, citing a
shorter route, fewer water crossings, and reduced proximity
to residential areas. Now, it crossed the river just upstream
from an 84 percent Native residential area—a suggestion

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made not by Dakota Access, but by the Army Corps, which

went so far as to guide companies funding the pipeline to
create environmental justice studies that would find no
“disproportionate risk to a racial minority.”5
In fact, the Army Corps had been one of the main driving
forces behind choking the Missouri River after World War II.
In 1946, without authorization from Congress, the Army
Corps modified the Garrison Dam project to protect the small
majority-white town of Williston, North Dakota, from flood-
ing. Nothing was done, however, to protect against the flood-
ing of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. The 212-foot dam
flooded 152,360 acres of reservation lands, dislocating 325
families (80 percent of the tribal membership) and destroying
94 percent of their agricultural lands.6 In 1955, the Army Corps
selected the Big Bend dam site on Lower Brule and Crow Creek
reservation lands, without notifying either tribal council. Six
different sites were considered, four of which would not have
flooded the agency town of Lower Brule. The reservation site
was chosen for hydraulic reasons but also because its location
wouldn’t flood the upriver town of Pierre, the white-dominated
state capital of South Dakota, or its neighboring town of Fort
Pierre.7 Big Bend Dam flooded and dislocated both reservation
communities for the second time, forcing some families who
had moved to higher ground to relocate yet again. The first
flood took out the Crow Creek Agency (the combined head-
quarters of the Crow Creek and Lower Brule tribes). A quarter
of Lower Brule’s population was removed during the first
deluge, and half during the second.
My grandparents, Joyce and Andrew Estes—both Kul Wicasa
from Lower Brule—fought the construction of the Pick-Sloan
dams in the 1950s and 1960s. The dams flooded nearly all of my
great-grandmother Cornelia Swalla’s allotment. My grandfa-
ther, a World War II veteran and, according to my father, Ben, a
Lakota code talker, returned from the war to find his homelands
and nation under threat from the very government he fought to

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defend. Our lands, and lives, were targeted not because they
held precious resources or labor to be extracted. In fact, the
opposite was true: our lands and lives were targeted and held
value because they could be wasted—submerged, destroyed.
Grandpa Andrew, nicknamed “Brown” for his dark complex-
ion, later gifted his mother Cornelia’s remaining allotted lands
to the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe so that our nation could rebuild
the inundated Lower Brule town site. In 1937, my great-grandfa-
ther Ruben Estes, Cornelia’s husband and the first tribal chair-
man, opposed the state of South Dakota’s attempt to build dams
on the Missouri River without Lower Brule’s consent. The old
ones called Ruben “Tongue” because, after butchering his cattle,
he gave away all the meat to elders and the hungry, keeping only
the tongues for himself. My ancestors were tribal historians,
writers, intellectuals, and fierce Indigenous nationalists at a time
when Indians weren’t supposed to be anything but drunk,
stupid, or dead. They were also Water Protectors, treaty defend-
ers, and humble people of the earth, and they fought for and
took care of Mni Sose as best as they could.
In 1963, my grandfather Frank Estes, who was named after
Franklin Delano Roosevelt in honor of the “Indian New
Deal,” wrote and published the first book on Lower Brule,
Make Way for the Brules.8 His book was a study of Indigenous
movement before and during the reservation period. It was a
response to the forced removals caused by the Fort Randall
and Big Bend Dams and a challenge to the confinement narra-
tive that Native people should just stay “home” in prisoner of
war camps, now called “reservations,” out of sight and out of
mind. In 1971, my grandfather George Estes, with Richard
Loder, cowrote Kul-Wicasa-Oyate—a more extensive history
of Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, including the reconstitution of
communities and families after surviving forced removal by
the US military to our river reservation homeland in the nine-
teenth century, as well as the two forced relocations caused by
the Pick-Sloan dams in the twentieth century.

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My grandfather Andrew, who had an eighth-grade education,

wrote in the preface of Kul-Wicasa-Oyate what would have
been a fitting epigraph for this book about our nation’s history
of the defense of our land, our water, and our people:

My people’s history has been lost or destroyed since the

coming of the white man. My people, in many ways, have
been lost and destroyed by the coming of the white man . . .
This book is not the whole story of my people nor is it all that
is best in our heritage. Some of our traditions, our hopes and
our roots, we will never write down for the world to see.
What we will allow the world to see is, in good part, in these
pages. Read them my brothers and you white man, you read
them too. It is a history of a proud people: a people who
believe in the land and themselves. My people were civilized
before the white came and we will be civilized and be here
after the white man goes away, poisoned by his misuse of the
land and eaten up by his own greed and diseases.9

In September 2016, at a #NoDAPL protest in Chicago

organized by the Native community and groups such as
#BlackLivesMatter, I told this family history in front of a
crowd of thousands outside the Army Corps headquarters.
That city’s vibrant Native community was itself a result of
federal relocation programs onto traditional Potawatomi
territory, an Indigenous nation subjected to genocide and
removed from its homelands in the place currently called
“Chicago.” My ancestors could never have imagined that
thousands, perhaps millions, would one day rally to defend
the river, our relative Mni Sose. Half a century ago, there
were no mass protests against the dams that still wreak havoc
on our river, a history I have spent the more than a decade
speaking and writing about, with little interest from the
outside world.
As we marched, a light rain fell.

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“Tell me what the prophecy looks like!” we chanted.

“This is what the prophecy looks like!”
And it was prophecy. 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 fore-
shadows 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. But prophets and prophecies do not
predict the future, nor are they mystical, ahistorical occur-
rences. They are simply diagnoses of the times in which we live,
and visions of what must be done to get free. In the past, youth
followed the guidance of Indigenous elders, the old ones. But in
these prophetic times, it is the old ones who are following the
leadership of the young, the youth leaders of the #NoDAPL
movement—among them, Zaysha Grinnell, Bobbi Jean Three
Legs, Jasilyn Charger, and Joseph White Eyes, among others,
who brought the message of the Black Snake to the world
through thousand-mile relay runs from April to July of 2016.
For the Oceti Sakowin, prophecies like the Black Snake are
revolutionary theory, a way to help us think about our relation-
ship to the land, to other humans and other-than-humans, and
to history and time. How does one relate to the past? Settler
narratives use a linear conception of time to distance them-
selves 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.

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Concepts such as Mni Wiconi (water is life) may be new to

some, but like the nation of people the concept belongs to, Mni
Wiconi predates and continues to exist in spite of white suprem-
acist empires like the United States.
The protestors called themselves Water Protectors because
they weren’t simply against a pipeline; they also stood for some-
thing greater: the continuation of life on a planet ravaged by
capitalism. This reflected the Lakota and Dakota philosophy of
Mitakuye Oyasin, meaning “all my relations” or “we are all
related.” Water Protectors led the movement in a disciplined
way, by what Lakotas call Wocekiye, meaning “honoring rela-
tions.” To the outside world this looks like “praying,” the smok-
ing of the Canupa, the sacred pipe, offering tobacco, ceremony,
and song to human and other-than-human life. The late Lakota
linguist and scholar Albert White Hat Sr. notes that Wocekiye
was purposely mistranslated to “praying” by Christian mission-
aries to describe “bowing and kneeling to a supreme power,
which is much different from the original meaning of acknowl-
edging or meeting a relative.” There was no equivalent to “pray-
ing” in the Lakota language, although the word has taken on
that meaning because of Christian influence.10
For the Oceti Sakowin, Mni Sose, the Missouri River, is
one such nonhuman relative who is alive, and who is also of
the Mni Oyate, the Water Nation. Nothing owns her, and
therefore she cannot be sold or alienated like a piece of prop-
erty. (How do you sell a relative?) And protecting one’s rela-
tives is part of enacting kinship and being a good relative, or
Wotakuye, including from the threat of contamination by
pipeline leak—in other words, death. This would also spell
death for the Oceti Sakowin and its nonhuman relations. In
this way, the rallying cry of Mni Wiconi—“water is life”—is
also an affirmation that water is alive. Hunkpapa historian
Josephine Waggoner has suggested that the word mni (water)
is a combination of the words mi (meaning “I”) and ni (mean-
ing “being”), indicating that it also contains life.11

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Mni Wiconi and these Indigenous ways of relating to human

and other-than-human life exist in opposition to capitalism,
which transforms both humans and nonhumans into labor
and commodities to be bought and sold. These ways of relat-
ing also exist in opposition to capitalism’s twin, settler coloni-
alism, which calls for the annihilation of Indigenous peoples
and their other-than-human kin. This is distinct from the
romantic notion of Indigenous people and culture that is
popular among non-Natives and has been aided by disciplines
such as anthropology—a discipline that has robbed us of a
viable future by trapping us in a past that never existed. In the
last two centuries, armies of anthropologists, historians,
archaeologists, hobbyists, and grave robbers have pillaged and
looted Indigenous bodies, knowledges, and histories, in the
same way that Indigenous lands and resources were pillaged
and looted. Their distorted, misinterpreted Indigenous histo-
ries are both irrelevant and unfamiliar to actually existing
Indigenous peoples, and they are deeply disempowering.
There exists no better example of Indigenous revolutionary
theory, and its purposeful distortion, than the Ghost Dance. In
popular history books, the Ghost Dance appears briefly, only
to die at the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. The Ghost
Dance, in the revolutionary sense, was about life, not death; it
was about imagining and enacting an anticolonial Indigenous
future free from the death world brought on by settler inva-
sion. It originated with Paiute prophet and healer Wovoka. In
his vision, the Great Spirit’s Red Son transforms the earth.
This Red coming of the Messiah wipes away the colonial
world, bringing back the animals, plants, and human and
other-than-human ancestors destroyed by white men and, in
turn, destroying the destroyers. Wovoka did not predict the
future. Rather, he profoundly understood the times in which
he lived, and his prophecy occurred in response to the hard-
ships brought on by reservation life. Its message of a coming
Indigenous future spread like wildfire up the Western Canadian

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 PROPHETS

coast, down to the Southwestern United States and Northern

Mexico, and onto the Plains. The Ghost Dance unified
Indigenous peoples behind a revolutionary movement—one
that sought nothing less than the complete departure of the
colonial reality. Its visions were powerful and remain so today.
Indigenous dancing had itself been outlawed and was therefore
a criminal act. Lakota and Dakota Ghost Dancers attempted
to shut down the reservation system by refusing to send chil-
dren to boarding schools or to heed the orders of Indian agents.
But the absence of the colonial system was not enough to bring
about true freedom; rather, freedom could only find its genuine
expression in actions that would create a new Indigenous world
to replace the nightmarish present.
The beauty and power of the Ghost Dance moved Oglala
prophet Nicholas Black Elk, who saw it as parallel to his own
vision: that the people must unite to nourish back to health
the tree of life, so that it can bloom once again. The dance
brought Black Elk new visions of Wanikiya, the Lakota word
for the Red Messiah that literally means “to make live.” In
1932, poet John Neihardt published a literary interpretation
of Black Elk’s vision in Black Elk Speaks, an influential book
that Standing Rock scholar Vine Deloria Jr. described as “a
North American bible of all tribes.”12 After the Seventh
Cavalry Regiment massacred more than 300 Lakota Ghost
Dancers at Wounded Knee in 1890, the Ghost Dance and
Black Elk’s vision were thought to be dead or dying, like
Native people. Neihardt contributed to this notion by fabri-
cating the most-quoted lines in Black Elk Speaks. “A people’s
dream died there,” mourned Black Elk in this made-up
version, seeing the carnage at Wounded Knee and his rela-
tives’ bodies strewn across the bloody snow. “The nation’s
hoop is broken and scattered.”13 But Black Elk never believed
that, and he knew that collective visions for liberation didn’t
die at Wound Knee. “The tree that was to bloom just faded
away,” he said reflecting on the massacre forty years later,

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 OUR HISTORY IS THE FUTURE

“but the roots will stay alive, and we are here to make that
tree bloom.”14
Roots are an apt metaphor to explain how the aspirations
for freedom—the tree of life—had stayed alive. Ceremonies,
dance, language, warrior and political societies, and spiritual
knowledge were forced underground, each of them made ille-
gal by the punitive Civilization Regulations and only fully
“legalized” in 1978 with the American Indian Religious
Freedom Act. Like many, to protect himself and his family,
Black Elk had converted to Catholicism, but he never lost
faith in his vision. For him, liberation wasn’t a one-off event,
a single action, or a moment. If history books do not alto-
gether deny the Wounded Knee Massacre, sympathetic treat-
ments tend to label the Ghost Dance as a “harmless” trend
that would have faded into the past, like the Indians practic-
ing it. But if it were just dancing that was the threat, then why
did the United States deploy nearly half its army against starv-
ing, horseless, and unarmed people in order to crush it?
Indigenous resistance draws from a long history, projecting
itself backward and forward in time. While traditional histo-
rians merely interpret the past, radical Indigenous historians
and Indigenous knowledge-keepers aim to change the colo-
nial present, and to imagine a decolonial future by reconnect-
ing to Indigenous places and histories. For this to occur, those
suppressed practices must make a crack in history.
Karl Marx explained the nature of revolutions through the
figure of the mole, which burrows through history, making
elaborate tunnels and preparing to surface again. The most
dramatic moments come when the mole breaks the surface:
revolution. But revolution is a mere moment within the longer
movement of history. The mole is easily defeated on the surface
by counterrevolutionary forces if she hasn’t adequately prepared
her subterranean spaces, which provide shelter and safety; even
when pushed back underground, the mole doesn’t stop her
work. In song and ceremony, Lakotas revere the mole for her

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 PROPHETS

hard work collecting medicines from the roots underfoot.

During his campaign against US military invasion, to protect
himself Crazy Horse collected fresh dirt from mole mounds.
Because he knew it to contain medicines, he washed his body
with the dirt. Hidden from view to outsiders, this constant
tunneling, plotting, planning, harvesting, remembering, and
conspiring for freedom—the collective faith that another world
is possible—is the most important aspect of revolutionary
work. It is from everyday life that the collective confidence to
change reality grows, giving rise to extraordinary events.
At Oceti Sakowin Camp, courage manifested through the
combination of direct actions and the legal strategy to defeat
DAPL in court, which the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe spear-
headed. Direct actions drew media attention and thus ampli-
fied the messages of #NoDAPL and Mni Wiconi, putting
pressure on the federal courts and institutions to weigh in on
the issue of Standing Rock’s sovereignty. Direct actions also
had the immeasurable psychological effect of empowering the
powerless to action, by encouraging everyday people to take
control of their lives and to shrug off the self-doubt and genu-
ine fear that accompanies centuries of violent occupation. It
also formed in everyday camp life.
The camps also performed another critical function: caretak-
ing, or providing nourishment, replenishment, comradery,
encouragement, warmth, songs, stories, and love. The ultimate
goal for Dakotas, and therefore the Oceti Sakowin, “was quite
simple: One must obey kinship rules; one must be a good rela-
tive,” wrote the Dakota scholar Ella Deloria.15 This was the
underground work of the mole and the foundation of any long-
term struggle, though it often receives less attention than head-
line-grabbing spectacles of mass protest and frontline action.
Yet, both are equally important and necessary. As Dakota
scholar Kim TallBear argues, caretaking labor is often gendered,
and is seen as the work of women. But the fact that many
contemporary social movements—in particular #NoDAPL,

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 OUR HISTORY IS THE FUTURE

Idle No More, and #BlackLivesMatter—were led by women,

and Two-Spirit and LGBTQ people, is important.16
My friend and relative, Lakota Water Protector Marcella
Gilbert, pointed out how these roles have been taken up by
generations of Indigenous women. Marcella’s mother, Madonna
Thunder Hawk, and her aunties, Phyllis Young and Mabel
Anne Eagle Hunter, were all leaders and participants of the Red
Power Movement during the 1960s and 1970s. They were all
pivotal members of the American Indian Movement, helped
found the International Indian Treaty Council at Standing
Rock in 1974, and formed Women of All Red Nations that
same year—movements I will describe later in this book. Their
leadership continued at Oceti Sakowin Camp by seeing to it
that the next generation carried on the tradition. Phyllis Young
was a respected Standing Rock elder and former councilwoman.
Madonna and Mabel Anne fell back into leadership roles in
their own camps, teaching and mentoring young people. For
Marcella, freedom was education. She was a product of the
“We Will Remember” Survival School, founded in Rapid City,
South Dakota, in 1974. Her mother, Madonna, helped to create
the school, where students were taught treaty rights and Native
culture and history. We Will Remember was one of many
survival schools created to address rampant discrimination
against Native students in public schools, and to undo the
indoctrination of Christianity and US patriotism at govern-
ment- and church-run boarding schools. For Marcella, the
#NoDAPL camps continued the tradition, providing a radical
grassroots education on Indigenous self-determination and
political autonomy—what it’s like to live and be free—to thou-
sands of young Native people.17 In other words, moments like
#NoDAPL are ones where the Indigenous movement reproduces
itself and grows.
Our History Is the Future explores the movement to protect
the Missouri River marching under the banner of Mni Wiconi.
How did it emerge, and how does settler colonialism, a key

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 PROPHETS

element of US history, continue to inform our present?

#NoDAPL and Mni Wiconi are part of a longer history of
Indigenous resistance against the trespass of settlers, dams,
and pipelines across the Mni Sose, the Missouri River. The
Oceti Sakowin—our relationship to Mni Sose, and our
historic struggle for liberation—are fundamentally tied to our
prior history of Indigenous nationhood and political author-
ity. This book is less a story about objects, individuals, and
ideas than it is a history of relationships—those between the
Oceti Sakowin, Mni Sose, and the United States as an occu-
pying power. By focusing on these relationships, we can see
that Indigenous history is not a narrow subfield of US
history—or of the history of capitalism or imperialism, for
that matter. Rather, Indigenous peoples are central subjects of
modern world history.
This is not simply an examination of the past. Like #NoDAPL
and Mni Wiconi, what I call traditions of Indigenous resist-
ance have far-reaching implications, extending beyond the
world that is normally understood as “Indigenous.” A tradi-
tion is usually defined as a static or unchanging practice. This
view often suggests that Indigenous culture or tradition doesn’t
change over time—that Indigenous people are trapped in the
past and thus have no future. But as colonialism changes
throughout time, so too does resistance to it. By drawing upon
earlier struggles and incorporating elements of them into their
own experience, each generation continues to build dynamic
and vital traditions of resistance. Such collective experiences
build up over time and are grounded in specific Indigenous
territories and nations.
For the Oceti Sakowin, the affirmation Mni Wiconi, “water
is life,” relates to Wotakuye, or “being a good relative.”
Indigenous resistance to the trespass of settlers, pipelines, and
dams is part of being a good relative to the water, land, and
animals, not to mention the human world. Contrast this with
the actions of Energy Transfer Partners (the financial backers

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 OUR HISTORY IS THE FUTURE

of DAPL)—and of capitalism, more broadly, which seeks

above all else to extract profits from the land and all forms of
life. This is not to suggest that Indigenous societies possess
the solution to climate change (and in fact, many Indigenous
nations actively participate in resource extraction and capital-
ist economies in order to strengthen their self-determination).
But in its best moments, #NoDAPL showed us a future that
becomes possible when everyday Native people take control
of their own destinies and lands, while drawing upon their
own traditions of resistance. I am interested in the kind of
tradition of Indigenous resistance that is a radical conscious-
ness, both anti-capitalist and anti-colonial, and is deeply
embedded in history and place—one that expresses the ulti-
mate desire for freedom.
In this book, I move through seven episodes of Oceti
Sakowin history and resistance. This history is by no means
exhaustive, but I have chosen to focus on these particular
cases to show how they inform our present moment, and to
chart a historical road map for collective liberation.
Chapter 1 tells the story of the #NoDAPL movement at
Standing Rock and its origins in the battle against tar sands
extraction and the Keystone XL Pipeline, whose defense of
Lakota and Dakota lands are part of a tradition of resistance
against US imperialism that began centuries ago. I turn to the
beginning of that history in chapter 2, which describes the
Oceti Sakowin’s emergence as a nation and its first encoun-
ters, in the nineteenth century, with the United States as a
predator nation.
Before long, those encounters evolved into the Indian Wars
of the nineteenth century—the subject of chapter 3—that
raged across the Northern Plains, in which the Oceti Sakowin
defended against US military invasion and counterinsurgency
tactics. By the turn of the twentieth century, Indigenous people
had been largely confined to ever-dwindling reservations. The
Oceti Sakowin, however, confronted the US military—the

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 PROPHETS

Army Corps of Engineers—again in the mid twentieth century,

as US policy turned to the use of large-scale river development
to continue the project of Indigenous dispossession—with
policymakers attempting, all the while, to relieve themselves
of the responsibilities outlined in the treaties.
In chapter 4, I outline these schemes through the story of the
mid-century Pick-Sloan Plan, which authorized the Army Corps
of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation to dam the main
stem of the Missouri River. These dams specifically targeted
and destroyed Native lives and lands, with 611,642 acres of
land condemned through eminent domain, 309,584 acres of
which were vital reservation bottomlands. Flooding also forced
more than a thousand Native families to relocate, in patent
violation of treaties and without prior consent. The memory of
this experience was still fresh at the #NoDAPL camps.
Chapter 5 outlines the story of the urban-centered American
Indian Movement (AIM) and their 1973 occupation of
Wounded Knee in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation—the
culmination of more than a decade of Red Power organizing.
This became the catalyst for a mass gathering of thousands at
Standing Rock in 1974, which resulted in the founding of the
International Indian Treaty Council—a body that would
eventually lead international efforts for Indigenous recogni-
tion that have had a deep, global significance.
Chapter 6 traces the history of twentieth-century Indigenous
internationalism—particularly, the Oceti Sakowin’s central
role in spearheading the four-decade-long campaign for
Indigenous recognition at the United Nations, which was the
basis for the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples. The global Red Power movement eventually became a
catalyst for the contemporary #NoDAPL movement at Standing
Rock. Chapter 7 draws out these links, reflecting upon the
ways our past and present struggles are connected, as they are
to both past and present international anti-colonial and anti-
capitalist movements around the world.

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