The South Dakota Humanities Council has announced its 2022 One Book South Dakota: "Our History Is The Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance," by Nick Estes.
The South Dakota Humanities Council selects one book annually to encourage citizens to read and discuss through the year. Estes will give the keynote address at the South Dakota Festival of Books next fall.
Estes, who resides in Minneapolis, is a member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and was born in Chamberlain, South Dakota.
During the Zoom call announcing the Humanities Council's selection, Director for the Center of the Book Jennifer Widman read from the book's introduction: "Indigenous resistance draws from a long history projecting itself back and forward in time. While traditional historians merely interpret the past, radical indigenous historians and indigenous knowledge keepers aim to change the colonial present."
The book puts the 2016 protest encampment at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota into historical context. Estes has been doing research for more than a decade on the politics of water and the Missouri River.
The previous year’s One Book was “The Children’s Blizzard” by Melanie Benjamin, focusing on the historic winter storm that struck Dakota Territory in 1888.
