Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance by Nick Estes

In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century. Water Protectors knew this battle for native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even after the encampment was gone, their anticolonial struggle would continue. In Our History Is the Future, Nick Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance that led to the #NoDAPL movement. Our History Is the Future is at once a work of history, a manifesto, and an intergenerational story of resistance.

Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.

Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance is available from Verso

Co-sponsored by the Racial Capitalism Working Group, the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University, Barnard’s New Directions in American Studies, Verso Books, and The People’s Forum.

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CSSD working group Racial Capitalism co-sponsors the launch of Manu Karuka’s new book. Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (University of California Press, 2019).

Karuka’s book boldly reframes the history of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Pawnee Native American tribes, and the Chinese migrants who toiled on its path. In this meticulously researched book, Manu Karuka situates the railroad within the violent global histories of colonialism and capitalism. Through an examination of legislative, military, and business records, Karuka deftly explains the imperial foundations of U.S. political economy. Tracing the shared paths of Indigenous and Asian American histories, this multisited interdisciplinary study connects military occupation to exclusionary border policies, a linked chain spanning the heart of U.S. imperialism. This highly original and beautifully wrought book unveils how the transcontinental railroad laid the tracks of the U.S. Empire.

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CSSD working group Racial Capitalism co-sponsors Colonial Pasts and Violent Present of Confinement in Counterinsurgencies with Laleh Khalili, Professor of Middle East Politics SOAS University of London, on the evolution of modern regimes.

Detention and confinement— both of combatants and large groups of civilians—have become fixtures of asymmetric wars over the course of the last century, with a huge increase in the employment of detention camps, internment centres, and the enclosure or isolation of groups of people. Khalili examines the practices and historical roots of two major liberal counterinsurgencies of our day – the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the U.S. War on Terror. She argues that although practices of incarceration have been defended by the assertion that they constitute measures to “protect” populations against violence and terrorism, liberal states have in fact consistently acted illiberally in their confinements, and that this has increasingly encouraged policymakers willingly to choose to wage wars.

There will be a reception after the talk.

Additional co-sponsorship by the Center for Social Difference, Columbia University, Barnard’s New Directions in American Studies, Verso Books, and the People’s Forum.

CSSD working group Racial Capitalism presents Tankers, Tycoons, and the Making of Modern Regimes of Law, Labour, and Finance, an evening talk with Laleh Khalili, Professor of Middle East Politics SOAS University of London, on the evolution of modern regimes.

Event is FREE. Click here for more information.

Additional support for this event is provided by the Department of Anthropology, Institute of Religion, Culture, and Public Life, The Racial Capitalism Working Group, Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies, and the Middle East Institute.