About

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Hau! Cante waste nape cuziyapi.

My name is Nick Estes. I’m Kul Wicasa, a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe born and raised in Chamberlain, SD next to our relative, Mni Sose, the Missouri River. My nation is the Oceti Sakowin Oyate (the Great Sioux Nation or the Nation of the Seven Council Fires).

I hold a PhD in the American Studies Department from the University of New Mexico and a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in history from the University of South Dakota. Currently, I am an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico and a member of the Oak Lake Writers Society, a group of Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota writers.

In 2014, a group of us also co-founded The Red Nation in Albuquerque, NM, an organization dedicated to the liberation of Native people from capitalism and colonialism. I serve on our editor collective and write our bi-weekly newsletter.

Check out the writings and talks page for an overview of my writings, books, and talks.

Contact me here.

22 thoughts on “About”

  1. […] Nick Estes identifies the anti-Indian origins of the carceral state within the U.S. settler colonial project and argues that indigenous liberation offers critical frameworks for understanding how to abolish it. Estes is a co-founder of The Red Nation: an anti-profit coalition dedicated to the liberation of Native Nations, lands, and peoples. He holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of New Mexico and is a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. […]

  2. Hi Nick – I just heard you on “The Intercept” podcast with Jeremy Scahill this morning. Good stuff. I’m looking forward to getting your book once published. Do you ever do book signings or talks in Oregon? I just signed up to follow your blog. I’m excited for your progress. I also enjoy History, but it wasn’t until I read, “Wounded My Heart At Wounded Knee”, that a I came to understand the plight of the Native American in the U.S.

    Looking forward to learning more!

  3. Hi Nick – I just heard you on “The Intercept” podcast with Jeremy Scahill this morning. Good stuff. I’m looking forward to getting your book once published. Do you ever do book signings or talks in Oregon? I just signed up to follow your blog. I’m excited for your progress. I also enjoy history, but it wasn’t until I read, “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee”, that a I came to understand the plight of the Native American in the U.S.

    Looking forward to learning more!

  5. Excellent letter in Albuquerque Journal July 29, 2019! Thank-you! Please contact me if there is anything I can do to help spread your message regarding climate. I am a long time observer of nature, and have lived in the same home here in Albuquerque since 1983. I have seen first hand changes in my own back yard and sought answers. Usually those answers frighten me. Most recently, the caterpillars I love to see mature to black swallowtails were disappearing. I learned that tiny wasps, “lethal to 200 species of butterflies and moth” are being sold as organic pest control. Some are non-native species. Every time I turn around, I see one more thing we are messing up. It is so disheartening, and sadly, those who really care are reaching their breaking points where they are just numb to it all or cannot take it anymore. Please, email me if there is anything I can do to help.

  6. What you say has truth and justice in it, but that Guardian article on the new President of Bolivia reads like a caricature of Soviet propaganda from the 1930’s. Loosen up and write like an ordinary person; people will listen more.

  9. i think you are misguided. you are into this marxist revolution garbage which is not native, not the way to do it. marx was a pro-colonial racist (see his notes on jews, on lasalle) you are trying to get in with harvard and become a commissar of this white liberal system. you think it is still 1968 and will submit to these old white guys from the 60s that run academia but they are not our friends. indigenous people don’t want textbook marx and watered down protest tourism.

  10. Your life is now open source, with every detail being meticulously scrutinized, with us waiting to find the “bad line” so as to sequester and remove you from the program, in minecraft ofcourse

  12. Please stop speaking on Cuba like you’ve ever lived there or know anything but the commie propaganda you learned in school. You may sway these assholes with your twaddle but CUBA is and will always be a third-world commie SHIT HOLE, where only the ones in charge are rich. You don’t know shit about Cuba, stick to your indio-mental masturbations and leave my people out of your propaganda. Fucking loser.

  15. Dr. Estes,

    My name is Drew Lischke. I am currently pursuing a MA at the New School for Social Research in their Department of Historical Studies. I am working on an ambitious project about the philosophical undercurrents of capitalist expropriation and exploitation found in Enlightenment naturalist sciences and its effects on the history of United States Public Land Management (from the War Department in the late 18th century to today’s system of land leasing under the BLM and National Parks management). This history is deeply intertwined with Indigenous land dispossession– I have admired your corpus of work and thought you would be a good person to reach out to (I especially have loved your work with the Red Nation… so thank you for that!) Politically, the project hopes to uphold Indigenous epistemologies which may (speculation here as to avoid monotholizing and primordializing Indigenous existence) hold the key to non-exploitative relationships with Earth and Other (all human and non-human entities). I was hoping you may see this comment and email me at the email below. I am hoping to, at the very least, send you some questions via email that may help with this project’s germination. I hope this is not unprofessional of me to ask (especially via a blog… I was originally going to DM you on Twitter but your message function is limited to mutuals only, I think).

    Thanks,
    Drew

  16. The Big Lie Dr. Nick Estes, a member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, perpetuates in Everything Is Going To Be All White is when he states that the Sioux always lived/possessed the Black Hills. Reality, the Sioux were driven out of Minnesota and Wisconsin by the Chippewa, and in Dakotas they liquidated the Kiowa, the Omaha, the Ponca, the Oto and the Pawnee without mercy.

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