Nick Estes: Decolonial histories and the red deal (ep328)
In this episode, we welcome Nick Estes, a member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and co-founder of The Red Nation. Nick is a historian, journalist, and author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance.
We unravel the topics of why truth-seeking to better understand history has become so politicized and contentious, the boarding school system that the U.S. used to assimilate Native children, The Red Deal as going beyond what The Green New Deal addresses, and more.
Subscribe and listen to Green Dreamer in any podcast app, or read on for the transcript.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Indigenous Cloud
“To decolonize our understanding of sovereignty would be moving back to collective rights, moving back to ideas of nationhood that aren’t based on exclusivity, but are based on mutuality and reciprocity.”
If you feel inspired by this episode, please consider donating a gift of support of any amount today!
Transcript:
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Nick Estes: I was born and raised in a place called Chamberlain, South Dakota, which is on the Missouri River and about 20 miles south of the nearest reservation, Crow Creek Indian Reservation. That's right across the river from the place where I'm enrolled, the Lower Brule Sioux tribe.
My mom is white, and my dad is an enrolled member of the Lower Brule Sioux tribe. I had the fortunate opportunity to live near my dad's family and grow up knowing I was Native, knowing I was Lakota but also coming from a working-class background.
I lived in a trailer park for most of my life in Chamberlain, which is a border town—a term used to describe the white-dominated settlements that ring Indian reservations. There's a lot of racial discrimination that happens, but also criminalization. Nonetheless, the place I was born and raised is a very beautiful place. There's a very large river which I hold near and dear to my heart and informs a lot of the things I write about.
Kamea Chayne: What I've noticed surfacing more and more in recent years are alternate narratives of history that center on marginalized perspectives. For example, the general public is becoming more aware of what some people call Truthsgiving, or the real historical context behind Thanksgiving, which is much different than what a lot of us have learned growing up.
And it's not a surprise anymore to most people that a lot of what we learn in "U.S. history" classes centers on a white colonial lens and the experiences of those who got to shape the narratives of what happened.
But there always seems to be a lot of pushback when the more marginalized stories of our past are being told. So as a historian, why do you think truth-seeking, to simply better understand our past, has become so contentious and political?
Nick Estes: The Dakota scholar, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, once said that there are no two sides to this story—meaning that just because we were colonized by the United States, which is a white supremacist empire, doesn't mean that we've necessarily internalized that U.S. national narrative.
In fact, many Indigenous people and their histories form the trunk of the tree of history of this land. In many ways, the United States is a branch of that tree, but it's a covetous branch that thinks it's the actual tree.
We're not writing from a marginal perspective. We're not writing from the margins, because this is something that Lakota people, Dakota people have already known. It's the way we've told our own history.
You can look back at the historical evidence and things such as winter counts, which are pictographs that the Lakota people kept on the hides to tell stories. Each winter, they used a different symbol or a different picture as a mnemonic device to retell a significant event that happened that particular year. Many of the still-existing winter counts detail the history of the 19th century, and what you'll notice is there's not a lot of references to the United States, even though there were definitely intense wars of extermination and violence that the United States was inflicting on our people.
But we didn't see the United States as the center of our world. And so I think there is a form of American exceptionalism to say that the U.S. national narrative is the narrative—it's a very narcissistic perspective. In that sense, I'm not really doing anything radical—from the perspective of Lakota historiography.
It may be radical to a nation-state that has tried to wipe us out. And we see that playing out currently in a state like South Dakota, where you have Kristi Noem, a Trump troglodyte, attempting to not only enforce a specific kind of political order that is against Indigenous sovereignty but also trying to wipe out Indigenous people from the public school curriculum. According to their logic, if there aren't settlers, there is no history, right? That's the way that this country has functioned.
The former political CNN commentator Rick Santorum even said at a convention that essentially, the white European settlers who came here "brought history" and that there was nothing that existed here before, that Native people made no meaningful contribution to what we know as U.S. history or culture. I don't actually disagree with what he's saying in the sense that he's actually speaking a truth that a lot of rich and powerful people believe in this country.
It doesn't mean that people can't understand the contradictions of this nation-state and how it was built on genocide. I think if most people did understand that, they would question the current path that this country is on.
But the battle for the integrity of this land really boils down to how we understand history, where we're going, and the efforts that are underway.
Trump may be out of office. We may have a different flavor of a settler government. But nonetheless, it's still a settler government in the way it behaves towards Native people and our histories.
On one hand, we still have right-wing state governments waging this war against the boogeyman of Critical Race Theory and erasing any alternative telling of the founding of this country.
But then, on the other hand, we have people like Biden, who has sat on his hands for the majority of the construction of the Line Three pipeline, which is going through Dakota and Anishinaabe territory. His administration has been applauded for stopping or canceling, once and for all, the Keystone XL pipeline, which is a huge accomplishment. That's 270,000 barrels of oil a day that has been taken out of circulation, which is a huge blow against the fossil fuel industry coming from Native people—the vanguard of the most confrontational arm of the environmental movement.
But Joe Biden, much like Obama, has said nothing about Dakota Access Pipeline. Obama did not and Biden has not stopped the police terror against Indigenous water protectors at Line Three. In fact, his domestic policy adviser once had, at the beginning of her appointment, 2.7 million dollars invested in Enbridge, the Canadian oil company that's building the Line Three expansion project. So how much of a radical departure is the Biden administration from the Trump administration?
We're fighting two fronts, still, under Biden, that we were under Trump: the oil and gas industry and the epistemology of how this country understands itself—the constant erasure that Native people find themselves in.
Kamea Chayne: A lot of people who have gone through formal educational institutions have internalized American exceptionalism, to the point where learning about these histories that Native peoples have known is like a challenge to their personal identity. And so it may spark a lot of discomfort for people, but it's also necessary because it is a part of truth-seeking.
And to this point of how there's often manipulation of how reality is framed, you say that invasion is always made to look like self-defense.
Can you expand more on this with some examples and address this often-made point that unless you're providing a balanced story—like balancing the two sides of a conflict—then you're not credible because you're "biased"?
Nick Estes: That's really funny because—and maybe this is a little reductive, but—nobody would be like, "Well, we should actually try to find the logic in Hitler's extermination campaign." I mean, we should find the logic in that, but why do we have to balance that against the stories of his victims? That's not even scholarship, that's just propaganda.
Imagine suggesting that we should profile neo-Nazis and give them a platform so we have a "balanced" perspective. That's an absurd notion, and it's always used as a cudgel against people who are trying to write history, such as myself...
The state of South Dakota is actually silencing our side and doing the exact thing that it says it's trying to work against and providing "balanced" narratives. Or the buzzword five years ago was "political" or "ideological diversity"—they always say, "Oh, the left is trying to cancel such and such person", when in fact the right has been the epitome of cancel culture.
The other part is to understand that white supremacy, first and foremost, controls white people and their behaviors and thoughts. They are the primary targets of it.
It's to convince the white checkout clerk at Walmart that they have something in common with a billionaire like Trump or with a liberal elite like Joe Biden, when in fact, they don't have anything in common. They're from two completely different class backgrounds.
You can't actually talk about the racial politics or the colonial politics of this country without talking about class and how the main ideological war that's being waged by the right, and to a large degree the liberal elite of this country, is to maintain those class disparities and to not fundamentally change anything.
You can say, on the one hand, the right will use white supremacy as a unifying tool across class differences, against people of color and colonized people. But what's the alternative coming from the liberal elite? It's identifying ones like individual white privilege or individual white guilt. And it's like, "okay, so you understand that we live in a racist society, and you feel bad about it, and you do a diversity training on it." But there are still Native people whose lands are under constant threat by oil pipelines, who are being invaded by the oil and gas industry. You can't eat ideology at the end of the day. There has to be actual class politics because everyone needs housing, right? It's not just Native people. They may be overrepresented in terms of the need for housing or clean drinking water, but at the end of the day, the demands that they're making are universal class demands.
White supremacy is a fear-based ideology. And while it uses the specter of race, what it's actually talking about is preventing a certain kind of class politics from arising in this country.
Kamea Chayne: Certainly, a lot of the surface-level culture wars that a lot of the liberal left is attempting to drive really need to be substantiated with changes in material conditions, which can actually then address the structural injustices and racism.
And just in this past year of 2021, there are a lot of stories of the mass graves of First Nations children in the boarding schools of what is now known as Canada which have made a lot of headlines and shocked a lot of people who have not been exposed to this history, or at least in such a tangible way.
And whenever another story emerges, there are always some people saying, "Just wait until the U.S. government begins to conduct similar research into its own past." I wonder if you have any insights as to whether this work is and will be done and what impact uncovering more of this history might have.
Nick Estes: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission—whose work began in Canada in response to a class action lawsuit filed by hundreds of residential school survivors—did about an eight-year survey looking into the numbers from the residential schools. They did several years of testimony, where they went into communities, and boarding school survivors were given space. They provided culturally competent psychiatric and psychological help for people who were going through emotional distress while recounting the horrors of rape, abuse, death, beatings that were going on in these schools. The Canadian government spent millions of dollars advertising this, investing in it and doing this research. And in many ways, it was led by Indigenous people. The outcome of all this can be debated because it still kept in place the colonial relation, and there are still pipelines that are being built, some of them owned by the Canadian government itself.
In the context of the United States, it's important to remember that there were 139 identified residential schools in Canada, while there are over 350 boarding schools in the United States.
At the height of the off-reservation boarding school system in the United States, Canada sent its priests and its Indian agents down to a place called Carlisle Industrial School to reproduce the "successes" of that experiment in the Canadian context.
So there was a relationship between the residential school system as it was implemented in Canada, and the one in the United States.
Now, there is a lot of horror around the initial discovery of these mass graves. The first one was 215 children. And it's very macabre to count the number of graves, but that number is well over 5,000 right now. But we have to ask ourselves, why was it that 215 children made the headlines, but not 5,000?
It's because of the nature not only of Canadian media but U.S. media that we're only allowed a certain amount of attention when there's an atrocity that happens, even though the stuff takes long periods of discussion, debate, and careful, meticulous research. Me, for example—I don't consider myself a boarding school expert, but I became one by default because a lot of my family members went to a Catholic-run boarding school. I did a story through High Country News that took me over a year to research and write because the subject matter was very difficult.
What really shocked me was the immense amount of not only death and violence but the immense amount of what is not known and documented about these schools. The National Archives for the United States doesn't even have accurate records. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) did a FOIA request through the Bureau of Indian Affairs about boarding schools, and the records are so shoddy that the Bureau of Indian Affairs didn't even know. So the research on these schools is being done by independent journalists or NABS that began in the early 2010s, with a budget of five thousand dollars.
For Deb Haaland, who's the Secretary of Interior, the first Native woman to occupy that position, to say that we're going to do a federal investigation is amazing. It's a huge step in the right direction. But what really didn't make the news cycle is that she said she wanted the final report done by April of next year, which is less than nine months. This raises several other questions which I don't have the time to get into. But I will say that a good portion of these schools was run by churches and faith groups, the largest of which would be the Catholic Church, which is not subject to these open-record requests.
I know this because I've worked with several Catholic studies scholars, trying to understand the scope of Catholic Indian boarding school abuse against Native children. And these schools have covered it up. They've created laws in places like South Dakota, that have raised statutes of limitations that prevent civil actions against the church itself. It's not just about suing the church and getting monetary compensation—which they should. But it's about putting this on the public record.
It's important to remember that it was a class action lawsuit in Canada that resulted in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Yet we have written legislation that's actually written by the church to prevent these kinds of lawsuits from coming forward and to prevent them from entering into the public record.
So while on one hand, I'm hopeful about the efforts to do further investigations, I'm also very skeptical about what this is going to actually mean. When we do get the mic, so to speak, we have to really capitalize on it, but are people really paying attention? Are policymakers really paying attention? Do they really care? I don't really think so.
The U.S. operates like Groundhog Day, where Indigenous people are Bill Murray: we wake up knowing that the day has changed and that we remember the past, but everywhere around us, every person we meet, it's the same day over and over again.
It doesn't matter if it's a Democrat or a Republican because that's the kind of ideology that we face.
Kamea Chayne: It certainly seems like a lot of actions being taken end up being performative, not leading to deeper transformations.
And I'm sure this is a delicate subject, and I want to first clarify that I don't think religious institutions are one and the same as the religious beliefs themselves, or certainly the people who practice faith in those ways. But I'm interested in hearing you talk about this through a decolonial lens because from my understanding, the majority of Native American households identify as being Catholic, with Indigenous spirituality being the least prevalent.
How do you think Native communities reconcile the harms inflicted upon them from the church through these abusive colonial institutions that may still be present today in different forms, while knowing that the religion wouldn't have been here, or at least this widespread, without those forces?
Nick Estes: First of all, I'll just say I'm not a Christian. I lost my faith, as they say, I think when I was in high school. I was Episcopalian, as was my grandfather. He was really involved in the church. I remember talking to one of my uncles about this, and he said that the reason why they translated the Bible and some of the songs and hymns into Lakȟótiyapi, was to retain the language and to pray to our God under the cover of the church itself. And there was a kind of syncretism that happened.
Lakota spirituality didn't come out of that colonization process unscathed or unchanged—and that's how culture works.
But regardless of whether or not one holds a certain spiritual belief, that's completely different from the power structure of an institution that is operating on behalf of a colonial mission.
It's important to point out that the Catholic churches themselves were given civilization funds beginning in at least 1814 by the federal government to colonize and convert Native people. This continues on well into today. There are still remaining Catholic Indian boarding schools. There's no doubt in my mind that they get federal funding because the Catholic Church specifically has changed its mission so that it could get federal funding.
At one point in time, in 1935, they specifically didn't allow for faith-based education to get educational funding. But the Church's way of thinking was that they could still get money if they just said they were doing "care work”. So they got federal funding. And now, they're still eligible for funding. Even though there's supposed to be a separation of church and state, they're still getting federal funds for the civilization project. I'm not opposed to that per se, because they are doing an educational service, but you're not accountable for all the awful things you did to Native children in the name of those services.
Kamea Chayne: I also wonder whether Native nations generally have a different conception of sovereignty than the U.S. or settler-colonial governments do and whether the definition of "sovereignty" and "self-determination" has been watered down by the settler system.
So just furthering everything we've been talking about, what have been some examples of the history of how Native peoples have become forced to be reliant on the reservation system and cash economy, both controlled by the colonizing government, which might show that tribal nations having these limited spaces marked as reservations are far from what Native peoples may dream as sovereignty and its own subsistence economies?
Nick Estes: That's a really complicated question that requires volumes of books to be written about it. I'll just focus on one aspect of that, and that's The Marshall Trilogy, which is a series of Supreme Court decisions concerning the removal of The Five Civilized Tribes of the Cherokee Nation from the South for the benefit of white settlers who wanted their land. The Five Civilized Tribes were slave-holding tribes—they enslaved African people, and that's what earned them the "title" of "Civilized" because they had parity with white people, in terms of the enslavement of African people. But they also had printing presses, a newspaper, a three-branch government system, all those kinds of things. So for all intents and purposes, they had their own language and they were their own nation.
That was the legal challenge that John Marshall confronted as Chief Justice at the time, and he coined the term "domestic dependent nations", which is in itself a complete contradiction. That was further based on the Doctrine of Discovery, which is a 15th century papal bull that said non-Christian nations—which later changed to non-European nations—don't have the same rights of discovery as those coming from Europe. Therefore, they're not fully human and don't have full property rights. This meant Native people were never considered property holders, per se; they were considered mere occupants of land.
But later on, and this is the weird contradiction, we became property holders when it came time to sell our land because we had to.
Nonetheless, I would say that The Marshall Trilogy really imbues Federal Indian law with a theocratic tradition based on white supremacy, which dates back to the times of feudalism. So the United States Federal Indian law is holding on to a feudal system of rule over Native people in our lands.
The current idea of "sovereignty" is confined within that feudal system of rule, that the real "nation" is the United States and we're just satellite branches of it. We have as much power as municipalities in that legal framework. The U.S. can get rid of us at any time it wants to. That's not sovereignty; that's just colonialism.
But that doesn't mean that the United States holds a monopoly over the definition or articulation of what sovereignty is or what it can be for us. There are so many different versions of it in the United States, and I can't speak for all of them. But I would say that in practice, settler sovereignty is based on exclusivity, that there can only be one, whereas Native nations, at least historically, practiced one based on plurality. Sovereignty and governance were determined by diversity.
This is not to say that we should return to some fake or romantic past but to understand that we still have, alive in our political traditions, one of pluralism and plurality... that you actually see being practiced in other countries like Bolivia. It's a plurinational country, whereas liberal democracy is one that is homogenous. It doesn't allow for heterogeneity, especially under a settler system.
So it's not to say that we're without contemporary examples, like in Bolivia or Ecuador. Even with their faults, they're trying to work against that colonial, homogenous system of liberal democracy that we're all individuals and rights-bearing citizens—without understanding the collective nature of nationhood.
We should actually have collective rights, not just individual rights. We're not all Homo economicus, where we're all entrepreneurs and things like that. That's a capitalist and colonial mindset.
To really decolonize our understanding of sovereignty would be moving back to collective rights, moving back to ideas of nationhood that aren't based on exclusivity but are based on mutuality and reciprocity.
Kamea Chayne: The statistic that we share a lot on the show, which speaks to the importance of centering Indigenous leadership and supporting Native sovereignty and cultural revitalization, is that Indigenous peoples make up 6.2% of our global population but steward over 80% of Earth's biodiversity. This, of course, is pretty intuitive and should make sense in that Native communities have ancestral relationships with their ancestral landscapes and have traditional ecological and place-based knowledge of what it means to care for specific bioregions.
But at the same time, as we've shared today, so much of Native lifeways, knowledges, and forms of social and kinship organizing have been disrupted by settler colonialism.
So through your lens, maybe narrowing down to North America—though I'm sure we can find these patterns around the globe—how much of Native languages and knowledges tied to ancestral lands, which are critical for healing our planet, have been lost?
And besides just the knowledge piece, how much of the ways of social governance have also been transformed and are incompatible with the settler colonial system?
Nick Estes: The way I think about it is how Indigenous culture was created from the basis of a non-capitalist mode of production—the aspiration became to live in correct relations. And again, it's not to romanticize the past... We were on a path of development that we were knocked off of because of invasion, imperialism, capitalism. And the assimilation process, which was, simply, genocide and colonization, replaced our language, how we identify through kinship terms, our ceremonies, our belief systems as part of that superstructure, our laws, our values, everything like that.
And at the core of that was the material aspect of how we lived in the real world and the natural environment, with other human beings, with other living things and how we interacted with them—whether we were coercive, whether there was reciprocity among various parties, whether they're human or non-human.
The core of the non-capitalist mode of production, of how we ate, how we bathed ourselves, how we reproduced both physically and socially, was destroyed.
It was destroyed by killing off not just Native people, but our food sources, such as the Buffalo Nations, and putting us onto reservations, making us dependent on rations, redefining our political authority to one of domestic dependency to the United States.
But at the core of it is that capitalist mode of production and saying that this way of life, the profit motive, holds sway over all of these other aspects.
Nonetheless, people still retained their non-capitalist values. And so when we talk about, for example, the statistic that you brought up about protecting biodiversity, there are still forms of labor that protect these landscapes, whether they're mountains, rivers, grasslands. And if we think about the Line Three protests, or the protests at Standing Rock, people were protecting their way of life, and they set up pickets. But as we are recording this, unionized pipeline workers are crossing the pickets that Native people are setting up to protect not just their land and their ways of life but the future of this planet. That's I guess that's the way I think about it, is that this is a valuable form of labor that benefits everyone.
I also think about the oil and gas infrastructure projects that Native communities are challenging, which account for about a quarter of carbon emissions coming from Canada and the United States.
How is it that Native folks are at the frontlines of the most confrontational arm of the environmental movement, challenging oil and gas projects and defeating them, but when it comes to thinking about the future of this planet, thinking beyond capitalism, we're the last to be considered?
We're literally living in the future, and we're trying to get everyone else to join.
Kamea Chayne: As we look ahead, many people in the green movement will have heard of the Green New Deal, which we have critiqued on the show before as something that's still works within, and even reinforces, this extractive system and the global power dynamics—rather than attempting to transform its foundations and its underlying presumption of infinite economic and material growth.
I know The Red Nation has published and proposed this vision for The Red Deal. Can you introduce what this is to our listeners and share how it calls for going beyond electoral politics and the current U.S. governing institutions in the forms that they are in today?
Nick Estes: Back in 2011, there was a historic gathering in Cochabamba, Bolivia where they drafted and adopted what is known as the People's Accords. It was a new climate justice policy. The concept of the rights of nature actually came from these gatherings, and they were based on social movements, not just domestic policy coming from the imperialist nations of the North. They said if the United States—using the United States as an example—has so much surplus wealth that it can spend all this money, almost a trillion dollars as it is today, on the military, and it can have a police force that's larger than the standing army of China, then it has surplus wealth that it can give back to the rest of the world—in terms of its outsized role in pumping carbon into the atmosphere that disallows other countries to follow the same path of development.
That is a very compelling idea, and that's a decade old!
Now, what's happened in the North is the green movement has adopted a platform that's based on Thomas Friedman's ideas of structural adjustment in the United States—without fundamentally changing the imperialist nature of this country.
At the expense of who? Native people, for sure.
If we look at Biden's Renewable Energy Transition Plan, he wants to electrify the federal fleet, which I think is a noble endeavor. But at the same time, what are those components for the rechargeable batteries for these vehicles going to come from? They have to come from somewhere. The copper wiring that they use in renewable technologies, at this point in time, cannot be recycled copper—it has to be from iron ore. It has to be mined out of the Earth. Where is the United States going to get this copper ore?
One place that three administrations have targeted—the Obama, Trump, and now Biden administrations—is somewhere called Oak Flat, which is a sacred site to the San Carlos Apache Nation. This is part of the strategic minerals plan that these administrations have all articulated in competition with the "great powers of this world", to essentially wean the United States off of green renewable minerals or metals coming from, specifically, China or other countries that the United States may have political difference with. This is the same strategy that Obama implemented with his American Energy Independence Policy, which fast-tracked fracking in 2008 from 2006 when the United States became a net producer of oil.
The Green New Deal, as it stands right now, is simply rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship.
What The Red Deal has proposed and where it takes inspiration from is that Cochabamba accord, an understanding that we have to think beyond just maintaining levels of consumption, redefining what it means to live a good life—not according to consumption but to things such as housing, education.
There are surplus pockets of wealth that are being used to fund the police, the military, that can be divested from. But that's not going to happen from a top-down approach. It's going to take social movements to actually push those kinds of changes. And as we say, it's from below and to the left, which has always been the motor of history.
History has not ended; that's being fought over right now. There are alternative visions that exist beyond just maintaining the hegemony of the United States and its position as a "world power".
If we look at Earth Day, historically, Bolivia and its Indigenous movements have led the UN Earth Day events, looking at and critiquing the way that the First World Nations, the North Atlantic powers, consume their lion's share of resources at the expense of the rest of the world. Because of the U.S.-backed coup against Evo Morales and also against that Indigenous project that was happening in Bolivia in 2019, Bolivia came under the Añez government and withdrew itself from the Earth Day events at the UN.
So who filled in the Earth Day events this year? It was the United States. Primarily, it was Biden. And what was his portfolio for change? It was the Teslas, the Elon Musks. It was bringing in the billionaires like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. That's the vision, the alternative, that the Biden administration is putting on offer.
Strategic mineral resources and billionaires are at the forefront of the so-called green revolution that's happening right now. We can't cede that territory or that ground to them.
Social movements have to move in a way that appeals not just to the powers that be but actually challenges them.
Kamea Chayne: It definitely feels like the dominant or mainstream environmental movement is heading in the direction of "greening” capitalism and "greening" this extractive system and just replicating exploitation and extraction in new forms, outsourcing pollution and destruction to historically marginalized communities.
I definitely think that this movement would benefit a lot from taking a step back to understand the role that U.S. and global imperialism play in continuing to centralize power and the role that oppressive power plays in continuing to further our climate crisis and biocultural diversity loss. We can't really heal our planet without looking at all of this through the lens of power.
The final thing I wanted to touch on is that you share about how Indigenous peoples are “post-apocalyptic nations” within the context of the Anthropocene—which I'm aware is a word you don't love. But what do you mean by Indigenous peoples as post-apocalyptic nations, and how might this offer us a portal or a path into the future beyond nearly everything that most people know today?
Nick Estes: There is an IPCC report that just came out. A lot of news stories are covering it and talking about how the IPCC report says that "human activity" was the main driver of climate change. That's like a universal application of all humans as responsible, and it misses the point that there are actually industries... that there are 20 companies that are responsible for 30% of global emissions.
How is that a universal issue? How is that everyone's responsibility?
The fact that a lot of us have to consume oil or emit carbon just to go to work is not necessarily our fault if that's how we're trying to feed ourselves and survive. That's not democratic, because that's one economic system deciding for us.
The final analysis of this all, when you talk about being post-apocalyptic, I would say…
Not all apocalypses are unwelcome.
I'm reading this book by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and they were writing these letters back and forth in the midst of the George Floyd uprisings, talking about how the world that we want to live in, between Black and Indigenous movements, has always been under construction, in opposition to what poses itself as the only alternative. We're seeing the cracks in that system right now, we're seeing it being exposed, that it can't even sustain life for its greatest adherents, even for the adherence of the system itself.
Why do you think people are trying to go to space? They're trying to escape while the rest of us are set here to live.
So apocalypse isn't always a bad thing if we are seeing the end of that system, a system of death... Hopefully, a more just and life-based system will take its place.
To use the Zapatista framing, we are fighting for a world in which many worlds fit. That's the vision that really should win the day.
I remain hopeful that that's the future of this planet.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an uplifting social media account or publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Nick Estes: There's the book that I'm reading, called Rehearsals for Living. I think it'll land really well. There needs to be more conversations between the Black and Indigenous movement.
The other one I read is The Ministry for the Future. I have some reservations about certain things in the book, but I think overall, it's a good book in terms of imagining what a future could look like—even in the face of climate chaos and catastrophe.
Kamea Chayne: What personal mottos, mantras, or practices do you engage with to stay grounded?
Nick Estes: Elizabeth Cook-Lynn told me once, "You don't even own your own life. You're only here to ensure the coming of the next generation."
I don't think that's a fatalistic framing. I think it's a very noble framing, coming from her perspective as a Dakota grandmother.
Kamea Chayne: And what are some of your biggest sources of inspiration right now?
Nick Estes: This sounds cliche, but I am really inspired by the youth movements, the people who are filling the ranks at Line Three, at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, but also those who are in communities that I know that aren't necessarily on social media virtue-signaling every success and thing that they do.
I've been really humbled to see the outreach in the midst of the pandemic, the mutual aid networks that were set up and created to respond to the crises, but also seeing some of them formalized into longer-term movements has been really amazing.
Kamea Chayne: Nick, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been a really enriching conversation that I'm looking forward to re-listening to you again, so thank you so much. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Nick Estes: Capitalism is a long game. It took centuries to unfold and to come to this point. So when we think about decolonization, it's not just an event. It's going to take centuries and a long time to undo.
