Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is backstory.

Welcome to backstory, the show that explains the history behind today's headlines. I'm Nathan Connolly.

If you're new to the podcast, my colleagues Ed Ayers, Joanne Freeman, Brian Ballot, and myself are all historians and each week we explore the history of one topic that's been in the news.

Today on the show we're bringing you another long form interview showcasing an historian's new cutting-edge scholarship.

Tonight there is a standoff in the Great Plains. 200 Native American tribes are fighting conspiracy.

They're expected to carry crude oil from the Bach and Oil field to Illinois. The roughly 1200-mile Dakota Access Pipeline is...

Tonight near Cannonball North Dakota, this is the tense face-off between an army of police, Native American protesters blocking Highway 1806, trying to shut down construction of a controversial oil pipeline on private land.

In 2016, Native people and other activists set up camp at Standing Rock, a reservation in North and South Dakota to protest the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

These activists, known as water protectors, oppose the pipeline because they believed it violated sacred sites and threatened to contaminate the Missouri River, a major source of drinking water in the region.

Taking social media by storm, the hashtag No Dapple Movement grew into a protest of international proportions.

I was living in Albuquerque at the time and we had just come back from South Dakota visiting family in early August and we were at a memorial service for L'Oreal Synergini who was a 27-year-old Navajo mother who was gunned down and brought daylight by a white police officer Austin.

That's Nick Estes. In addition to being an American studies professor at the University of New Mexico, he's a member of the Lower Bruns Su Tribe.

He's also the co-founder of Red Nation, a coalition dedicated to preserving indigenous rights.

We were there doing work with her family and trying to get justice on behalf of her.

When we started getting reports that this camp was growing and burgeoning and we saw some of the early videos.

We decided as an organization on the Red Nation to send up a delegation in a head family who had set up camp there from the Kool-Ajasha, Yate or the Lower Bruns Su Tribe.

So I was hearing reports from them as well. So that's really how we as an organization and myself as an individual got initially involved.

Nick's new book, Our History Is the Future, details his experience at Standing Rock in 2016 while positioning that protest within the long history of indigenous resistance.

He says that Dakota Access Pipeline represents a continuation dating back centuries of white incursion on Native land and for Nick and many others.

It's also a matter of tribal sovereignty or the right to self-government for indigenous tribes in the United States.

In this extended conversation, we talk about Nick's involvement in the 2016 protest at Standing Rock, the history of indigenous resistance and the current state of their fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

...