lization, impoverishment and perpetual treaty violations as suicide rates among Native youth skyrocket. Additional strategies include blood quantum laws (Indian blood laws) designed to decrease recognition of Indigenous land claims over generations, as well as laws that enable white settlers to make claims of indigeneity (claim membership in an Indigenous group).
Native poet and novelist Sherman Alexie claimed, “In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written, all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts.” The racial construction of Native people continues to be embedded within the ideology of eugenics, whereby the destiny of their Indigenous identity will be diluted and disappear over generations and white settlers can more legitimately claim native status. Arvin, Tuck and Morrill emphasize that “settler colonialism must be understood as a multi-fronted project of making the First Peoples of a place extinct; it is a relentless structure, not contained in a period of time.”
Only through continued resistance have Native people survived the ongoing genocidal project of the Doctrine of Discovery and US settler colonialism. Recognizing this reality reveals what is at stake for the Water Protectors who will continue to resist big oil at Standing Rock, for it is a struggle for Indigenous survival and for the preservation of Earth itself.