This is the grounding premise and thesis of Nick Estes's new book. The standoff at Standing Rock in 2016 was historic for many reasons which has been documented already in dozens of films, and now a generation of books which look at the event from various angles. Estes's perspective emerges first from his identity as a Lakota citizen of the Lower Brule nation who was on the ground for much of the duration of the protest, but also as a historian of the Oceti Sakowin (aka Great Sioux Nation) people.This book is an account of the NoDapl protest from the author's personal experience, yes, but in actuality it is far more than that. It describes the event in the larger historical context of centuries of Oceti Sakowin resistance to US settler colonialism. The Sioux people are one of the most widely written about American Indian nations in American historical narratives. What distinguishes this book among that historiography, however, is, as its title suggests, the way it connects the past with a living present and future, not leaving Oceti Sakowin consigned to an inevitably disappeared existence as most American histories about Indigenous peoples are conventionally told.Standing Rock itself was a flashpoint that reminded the world that American Indians are still very much alive in the US political (and actual) landscape, Estes reminds us, but also tells us how Oceti Sakowin people have been leaders in Indigenous resistance long since the end of the 19th century Plains Indian wars. He draws a timeline through the 20th century highlighting how ongoing settler incursions through Sioux territories were (and are, as Standing Rock makes clear), a continuation of genocidal US policies. This is exemplified by the dam-building projects of the Pick-Sloan era which had catastrophic effects for the people of Oceti Sakowin which are recounted with excruciating detail. Always, these policies are designed to guarantee settler futurity and indigenous death.Indigenous resistance has in fact never ended despite the ways conventional narratives have obscured it. Among the connections Estes's timeline makes, for example, links the activism of the early 20th century Society of American Indians and the organization's leadership of Lakota people like Charles Eastman and Zitkala Sa with that of the Red Power movement's Lakota leaders like Russell Means, Madonna Thunder Hawk, Phyllis Young and others a half century later.One of the unique aspects of this timeline and Estes's framing of the history is how he understands indigenous resistance in terms of broader international indigenous resistance movements (which he devotes an entire chapter to). Even the activism of SAI is seen in this light, and he then weaves this history through to Indigenous people's insertion of themselves into the arena of international organizing at the United Nations with the leadership of the International Indian Treaty Council, whose genesis can be traced to the Standing Rock Reservation in 1974. So we see the 2016 standoff at Standing Rock not as a 21st century anomaly, but as just the most recent manifestation of this longer trajectory of resistance and activism. American Indian resistance is seen alongside other global anti-colonial, anti-capitalist movements, most notably the Palestinian struggle against Israeli settler colonialism.Finally, Estes sees this history as the basis for the future, rooted in the only logical conclusion: liberation--meaning of the human race and other nonhuman life from the hegemony of state-sponsored capitalism --through Indigenous knowledge and the restoral of relationality among humans and the nonhuman world. "How can settler society, which possesses no fundamental ethical relationship to the land or its original people, imagine a future premises on justice? There is no simple answer. But whatever the answer may be, Indigenous peoples must lead the way" (pg. 256).This is one of the most important books you'll read on American Indian history and modern activist movements.