Last week, following President Donald Trump’s executive memo, the Army Corps of Engineers granted Dakota Access an easement to drill under the Missouri River just north of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota. For months, Standing Rock has led a coalition in vehement opposition to the proposed pipeline, which crosses lands promised to the Great Sioux Nation under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851. The pipe has already desecrated the graves of Standing Rock ancestors and now threatens the community’s water supply.

The first few weeks of Trump’s presidency have brought the injustices of racism, capitalism, and patriarchy long festering beneath the surface of American society out into the open, and placed them on center stage. Trump’s Standing Rock decision forces us to confront another foundational injustice, one rarely if ever discussed in contemporary politics: colonialism.

For many, it is contentious and even offensive to suggest that colonialism endures in the present. In the American popular imagination, colonialism ended either when the thirteen colonies declared independence from Britain in 1776, or when the frontier closed and open warfare against indigenous nations ceased following the massacre of more than three hundred Lakota at Wounded Knee in 1890. Colonialism, according to these narratives, is Ancient History.