Imagining possible futures is key to indigenous organizing.

The struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline is rooted in this history. Indeed, the pipeline violates the same treaty that underwrote the AIM occupation of Wounded Knee. And just as AIM demanded respect for the treaties and indigenous sovereignty, the Standing Rock Sioux are demanding that the Fort Laramie Treaty be honored and the land and water be protected. The people who have endured centuries of dispossession and attempted elimination — the poorest of the poor, the most likely to be killed by law enforcement, the most easily forgotten — are still here and still fighting. They have built alternatives within and beyond capitalism for hundreds of years. They are the carriers of traditions of indigenous resistance and resurgence simultaneously rooted in Lakota land and history, and global in scope. In recent decades, this struggle has been threatened by neoliberal cooptation. Repelled by a colonizing state, many indigenous groups found themselves in an uneasy alliance with neoliberals who denounced “big government” and jumped at the opportunity to slash the welfare state and restructure tribes as junior corporate partners in the global economy. “Tribal sovereignty” became increasingly conflated with owning and profiting from an Indian casino. Yet despite the absence of a free-market critique in some indigenous circles, Standing Rock and other actions have emerged as exemplary counterweights to this pernicious drift. And elsewhere, indigenous land protectors are also navigating the currents of globalization to great effect. The Unist’ot’en camp in northern British Columbia has, thus far, blocked construction of numerous potential and proposed pipelines through their territory, building a space where indigenous lifeways can persist on lands defined by industry as an “energy corridor.” In Minnesota, the energy company Enbridge recently shelved plans for the Sandpiper pipeline, partially in response to tribal opposition. And the Obama administration nixed the Keystone XL Pipeline, after facing enormous pressure from tribes and their allies. In each of these instances, indigenous peoples are more than cameo extras. They are central protagonists in the fight against the forces of capitalist expansion, who would destroy the land and water, and trample indigenous sovereignty, all for the purposes of resource extraction. At Standing Rock, disparate tribes have set aside differences and come together as one. People from indigenous nations across the continent have travelled thousands of miles to stand with them. Indigenous people are rallying in support from New York City to San Francisco. Together, they are envisioning a future without a Dakota Access Pipeline, and enacting a future where indigenous nations exercise their rights to define a more just, equal, and sustainable path forward, as stewards of land, water, humanity, and each other. At Standing Rock, the audacious vision for an indigenous future, handed down from Wounded Knee and global in force, is alive and well. This is how you Ghost Dance in 2016.