Nick Estes is part of a long line of indigenous historians, intellectuals, and resisters who use “theory as a weapon and history as a guide” to inform the struggles of the present. His grandparents fought the devastating construction of the Pick-Sloan dams in the 1950s and ’60s (which flooded over two hundred thousand acres on the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River reservations), and two of his grandfathers wrote histories of their Lower Brule Tribe of the Lakota nation, Make Way for the Brules (1963) and Kul-Wicasa–Oyate (1971).

Building on their work, in Our History is the Future, Estes outlines four pivotal moments in the assault on indigenous people and their resistance against it: the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fur trade, the consolidation of the reservation system and annihilation of the buffalo in the nineteenth century, the mass destruction of the Pick-Sloan dams, and the North American oil booms of the twenty-first century. In beautiful stories describing the relationships between people, nations, animals, and the Earth, Estes makes a series of theoretical contributions that point to the kinds of knowledge and social movements that can dismantle capitalism’s constant and destructive drive toward accumulation at all costs. Estes offers materialist solutions to the understanding and overturning capitalism and settler colonialism.

Indigenous prophecy, Estes argues, is revolutionary theory. Our History is the Future describes, for example, the Ghost Dance begun by the Paiute prophet Wovoka in the 1880s and incorporated by the Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota tribes of the Oceti Sakowin confederation. At that time, most native groups had been pushed onto reservations, and around 90 percent of their populations had died. The US Army had nearly exterminated the buffalo. Native children languished in boarding schools, subject to intense corporal punishment and starvation, stolen from their families, robbed of their languages, had their hair cut, and were alienated from their cultures. To native peoples, the settler-colonial project had become apocalyptic.