In Our History is the Future, Nick Estes tells the ongoing history of Indigenous resistance to settler colonial encroachment, violence, oppression, and dispossession, contextualized around the emergence of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) that runs from North Dakota through South Dakota, Iowa, and into Illinois. The issue with the pipeline’s trajectory is how it runs underneath the Missouri River, just north of the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota. As a result, the pipeline contaminates the river, jeopardizing the livelihoods of countless Natives who reside on the surrounding lands and rely on the river for sustenance. The injustices of the pipeline spurred the #NoDAPL movement that began with the Standing Rock reservation and grew into an internationally known resistance effort made of Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists who dedicated themselves to protecting the land and inhabitants who would be desecrated by the pipeline.

Although media coverage of the protests against DAPL may be the first instance of many uninitiated viewers becoming aware of Indigenous resistance to colonial encroachment, Estes’s prologue offers a corrective to this narrative by pointing out that #NoDAPL is part of a much larger historically situated struggle for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. Telling this history is part of Estes’s aim with his book, which is to give a story of “a history of relationships” between the Oceti Sakowin (Sioux), Mni Sose (Missouri River), and the United States. Methodologically, Estes draws on historical documents, treaty agreements, and legislation alongside oral histories, firsthand accounts, and historical texts to offer a rich, illuminating narrative of how we arrived at this present moment and what our future holds if global imperialism is left unchecked.

Chapter One, “Siege,” helps set the stage for what is at stake in the DAPL struggle, discussing how it will harm human and more-than-human life along the Missouri River and how it serves to advance settler colonial domination of Indigenous lands by eliminating Indigenous life. Along the way, Estes accounts for the instances of violent confrontation between protestors and armed security and police who operated on behalf of the Army Corps of Engineers who headed the DAPL project. Estes reminds readers that such violent encounters are quite familiar for Indigenous peoples of the Northern Great Plains as he segues into the long history of Indigenous genocide in the next couple of chapters. 

Chapter Two, “Origins,” depicts the formative relationship that developed between the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota nations—whom the settlers called the “Sioux”—and the imperial expanders operating on behalf of the burgeoning US around the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Foundational among the relations between Indigenous and settler folk were how the Indigenous nations were always referred to as “nomadic,” “unsettled,” “malicious,” and without political organization, thus justifying imperial expansion and cessation of lands through issuances such as the Doctrine of Discovery. The logics of settler colonialism as a system of power predicated on the elimination of Indigenous life is further discussed in Chapter Three, “War.” Here, Estes navigates the changing US-Indigenous relations throughout the nineteenth century, which primarily took the form of warfare, treaties, trade, and acts of genocide. During this period, US government and military actions worked in tandem to functionally make it impossible for Indigenous peoples to live according to their cultural traditions by destroying the Pte Oyate (buffalo population) and banning many of their cultural customs such as “ceremonial dancing,” “men wearing long hair,” “polygamy,” and “large feasts not organized by the church.” Ultimately, armed conflict would largely subside by the end of the nineteenth century, and Native populations would be restricted to residing on reservation territories as the Northern Great Plains territories were divided into states such as Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

However, settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, that is predicated on the elimination of Native life, and as such, Chapter Four, “Flood,” elaborates on how Indigenous lives and ways of living were further targeted by imperial expansion through major dam projects on the Missouri River. The Pick-Sloan Plan was a major project aimed at harnessing the power of the Missouri River by building dams for the benefit of the settler population. Despite their persistent efforts to prevent the dams from being constructed, Indigenous populations negatively impacted by the flooding the dams caused were disregarded. The devastating floods made it impossible for Indigenous communities to live off the land as they had for centuries, forcing their relocation and assimilation into a settler colonial, capitalist lifestyle.

In Chapter Five, “Red Power,” Estes points out that the damming and flooding of the Missouri River, along with policies of relocation and termination, “helped birth a new movement” within the Indigenous population. Here, Estes recounts several major moments in organized Indigenous resistance efforts such as the National Indian Youth Council occupation of Alcatraz island in 1969, the occupation of Mount Rushmore by Oceti Sakowin in 1970, and the 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties led by eight Indigenous activist groups to raise awareness and demand restoration of broken treaties to restore Indigenous sovereignty. The persistent efforts of Indigenous activists throughout the 60s and 70s led to the creation of the International Indian Treaty Council, which “paved the way for Indigenous internationalism at the UN and laid the groundwork for the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” Chapter Six, “Internationalism,” focuses on the increasing prevalence of interactions among global Indigenous groups around the tail end of the twentieth century. Here, Estes traces how the collective effort from First Nation and Indigenous peoples of Canada, the US, Hopi, Panama, Guatemala, the Amazon, Mexico, and Chile contributed to developing the UN’s 2007 Declaration, which “became the touchstone document of international Indigenous rights.” In this chapter, Estes also discusses how solidarities have formed among Indigenous groups regarding the ongoing genocide of Palestinians on behalf of the Israeli government, which adopted similar strategies to US forms of settler colonialism. By way of Chapter Seven, “Liberation,” Estes concludes the book with a warning that the ongoing global imperialism and capitalist extractive economy continue to threaten the possibility of livable futures, particularly for Indigenous peoples, and that perhaps the only way to enact a just society requires Indigenous leadership and fostering “kinship relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous and the lands we both inhabit.”

Our History is the Future provides a detailed history of the ongoing struggle of Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism contextualized around the 2017 construction of the DAPL. One of the book’s many strengths lies in Estes’s ability to weave a deeply engaging story accounting for major historical events in the expansion of the US interspersed with insightful parallels between historical US-led acts of genocide and modern-day forms of militarized policing and their corresponding Indigenous-led acts of protest and resistance. This book is a must-read, particularly for scholars whose work overlaps with Indigenous studies, settler colonialism, and decoloniality and generally for scholars working in areas of social justice and activism.