This post is Part 1 of a series on social revolutions of the past 30 years — examples where public consciousness has massively shifted in favor of liberation. My aim is to create space to pause and acknowledge how things have changed in ways that once felt impossible, that things can always be otherwise. It is inspired in part by Rebecca Solnit’s 2016 edition of Hope in the Dark and David Graeber’s 2007 essay “The Shock of Victory.”

The average education about Native American history when I was growing up in rural Nevada was pretty much “Indians helped the Pilgrims at Thanksgiving” or “savages viciously attacked poor defenseless settlers.”

Nowadays, while you may still hear such distortions and genocide-justifying lies from right wing pundits, broader public awareness of indigenous peoples’ continued existence and ongoing defense of their lands, stewardship practices and philosophy have blossomed in fire.

Thin Green Line protestors in Tacoma, WA, source: Media Project Online

Books like Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry by indigenous scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer have been a sustained presence on the NYT Best Seller list, and the former was one of the most checked out books from the public library in 2024.

Even television shows like the FX dramedy Reservation Dogs (2021-2023), created by indigenous filmmakers Taika Waititi (Māori and European descent) and Sterlin Harjo (Seminole and Muskogee descent) has opened up a wider space in the media landscape for depictions of indigenous characters as something beyond crass stereotypes or the lie of the “Vanishing Indian.”

Reservation Dogs poster, source: FX

Films like Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) have brought to the mainstream moviegoing public a powerful story of what colonization really looked like, depicting indigenous Americans not as “backward savages,” but in fact the prosperous land-owning class of the Osage Nation of modern-day Oklahoma — that is, until their family members are systematically murdered to give the white settlers access to exploit that land’s rich oil reserves through marriage to an Osage woman.

This character, Mollie Burkhart, is stunningly played by Lily Gladstone (Piegan Blackfeet, Nez Perce), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Gladstone she has since used her platform to Executive Produce four films to date, centering on contemporary Native American stories of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (Fancy Dance), adolescence (Jazzy), confronting generational trauma of the residential school system (Sugarcane), and steps toward restoration of indigenous land and animal stewardship (Bring them Home).

The discussions of settler colonialism have gone from basically unspeakable heresy against the very soul of America to, it seems to me, pretty widely accepted in liberal to leftist circles at least (I mean John Oliver made the direct comparison of the US to Israel on a late-night comedy show). Reading Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’ An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States in 2024, I was struck by just how far the public sphere has shifted in narratives about indigenous people in just the 12 years since the book’s publication.

#NoDAPL

I trace a significant part of this recent shift to the 2016-2017 Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access oil Pipeline, which made international news as indigenous water protectors and allies in solidarity occupied the historic lands of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe for 11 months through the harsh North Dakota winter. The protests and occupations were multi-pronged, including support from 87 indigenous nations, thousands of activists, legal scholars, and organizers.

NoDAPL protest march in 2016, source: IndianNZ

The NoDAPL protests brought the issues of indigenous tribal sovereignty, broken treaties, and especially the indigenous conception of water and lands as sacred to the forefront of public discourse about climate change and the United States’ history of genocide.

The backlash

With each of the social revolutions I will cover in this series, I must acknowledge not just the positive steps toward shifting public consciousness, but also the reactionary backlash which inevitably follows.

This has been twofold: the State repression against activists attempting to defend water and life, and culture war against intellectuals, educators, and artists. In the former, law enforcement has deployed all manner of violent tactics (borrowed from the anti-Civil Rights police violence of the 1950s-1960s), from water cannons to chemical weapons and rubber bullets, to siccing dogs on protestors. The legal repression escalated to such a degree that those occupying the Standing Rock Sioux reservation were given prison sentences ranging from a few months, up to eight years (for single count of property damage).

Not to be deterred, #StopCopCity protestors began occupying the Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta in 2021 in the wake of Black Lives Matter Uprisings in 2020 (which I will cover in a future entry of this series), connecting struggle against anti-Black systemic racism and police with indigenous sovereignty. Again, protestors and those engaging in direct action were met with violence, most famously the murder of non-violent resister Tortuguita (whose death is still under investigation), which made international news spurred a week-long demonstration of solidarity.

Tortuguita in Welaunee Forest in 2021, source: Twitter

The second prong of backlash against rising indigenous sovereignty can be seen in the response to revisionist histories like 1619 project (commemorating the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery upon its publication in 2019). The same year, President Trump signed into law the 1776 Commission, intended to enforce “patriotic education” to combat to “twisted web of lies” he claimed was being taught regarding systemic racism in U.S. schools.

This, paired with the overall withdrawal of funding from US education and the ongoing dismantling of US Department of Education by Executive Order is the result of long decades of psychological warfare waged by the likes of Steven Bannon and other right-wing political actors, cataloged brilliantly (and disturbingly) in Annalee Newitz 2024 book Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.

Paths forward

That said, I am encouraged by Grace Lee Boggs’ words in The Next American Revolution (2012), where she analyzes how radical, beloved community has risen in Detroit in the face of monumental dis-investment and violence by the State and Capital, creating autonomous networks of care and creativity — including in education. Alternatives to “patriotic” public schooling are cropping up, like the Boggs School, founded in 2013 on the philosophy and activism of the late Grace Lee and her husband Jimmy Boggs, over their decades of organizing in the Midwest city.

These types of schools center around education as a practice of freedom, in the tradition of Paolo Freire’s work in literacy in rural Brazil, Freedom Schools of the 1960s which opened up education to Black Americans to learn about their history and spark critical consciousness to take action in their society.

Education has long been a site of struggle for Indigenous peoples everywhere, with a major tactic of colonization being the suppressed of indigenous knowledge, language, and traditions — perhaps most famously in the Residential School System, part of the “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” philosophy of forced assimilation and destruction of indigenous culture.

Promising efforts in excavating and restoring indigenous knowledge systems are blossoming all over the world, like the School of Māori and Pacific Development at the University of Waikato in Aotearoa (New Zealand), established in 1996 and becoming the Te Pua Wānanga ki te Ao, Faculty of Māori and Indigenous Studies in 2016. The emergence of these sorts of research institutions are heartening, as are the environmental remediation projects combining indigenous land stewardship and Western scientific methods.

Commencement Ceremony at the University of Waikato, source: Waikato.ac.nz

Indigenous peoples have been resisting erasure, colonization, and dispossession for hundreds of years. Now is the time of a growing movement to stand in solidarity and learn from one another if we want to make it into the next century.

Suggested Reads

• Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance by Nick Estes
• The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save our Earth by The Red Nation
• Coexistence & A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt