From settler colonialism to Standing Rock*

The water protectors of the Standing Rock Sioux captured public attention with their opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline. Yet, their actions are only the most recent in a long history of indigenous resistance to resource extraction and treaty violations on native land. Often these struggles have involved indigenous music. In this chapter, I compare two folk songs, “Our Vinland” by the neo-Nazi band, Prussian Blue, and “Treaty” by the Haudenosaunee Iroquois vocalist, Joanne Shenandoah. I argue that these songs, respectively, express the current resurgence of settler-colonial nativism and the indigenous spirit of resistance to it witnessed at Standing Rock.