Our History Is the Future Quotes

“Under capitalism, neither Democrat nor Republican can save Indigenous lands or Black and Indigenous lives. The continuation of state-sanctioned racial terror against Black and Native people, from police violence to energy development, from one administration to the next demonstrates only radical change in the form of decolonization, the repatriation of stolen lands and stolen lives, can undo centuries of settler colonialism.”
― Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

“Indigenous resistance is not a one-time event. It continually asks: What proliferates in the absence of empire? Thus, it defines freedom not as the absence of settler colonialism, but as the amplified presence of Indigenous life and just relations with human and nonhuman relatives, and with the earth.”
― Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

“In this particular era of neoliberal capitalism, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
― Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

“The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism—the specific form of colonialism whereby an imperial power seizes Native territory, eliminates the original people by force, and resettles the land with a foreign, invading population.”
― Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

“By following its own legal traditions, the arc of the Western moral universe never bends towards Indigenous justice. At best, it ignores it. At worst, it annihilates it.”
― Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

“Obama spoke of being inspired by the courage of Black civil rights activists and freedom riders, who faced dog attacks, fire hoses, and police brutality, and “who risked everything to advance democracy.” Yet under his watch, private security working on behalf of DAPL unleashed attack dogs on unarmed Water Protectors who were attempting to stop bulldozers form destroying a burial ground; Morton County sheriff’s deputies sprayed Water Protectors with water cannons in freezing temperatures, injuring hundreds; and police officers and private security guards brutalized hundreds of unarmed protestors. All of this violence was part of an effort to put a pipeline through Indigenous lands.”
― Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance