ABSTRACT
“I want to tell you a story.” So begins the 2016 video, We Are in Crisis, a three-minute montage of drone footage of the landscape surrounding Mni Sose, the Missouri River, in southern North Dakota. Created by the artist collective Winter Count as a gift to Water Protectors resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline during the fall of 2016, this video imagines a distinctly Indigenous future that assesses the wreckage of the past while building communities that can continue to survive the apocalypse of settler colonialism. By superimposing a narrative voiceover and soundscape of water and drums over drone footage of landscapes indelibly marked by energy extraction past and ongoing, the artists of Winter Count trace the contours of an Indigenous future. They do so by reframing the body of the land, bodies of water, and the bodies of Water Protectors as agents of relational, historically-informed Indigenous resistance in the face of their erasure as victims of extraction and objects of police violence. We Are in Crisis braids past and present into a future where Indigenous communities continue to thrive in the midst of the failing infrastructures of settler colonialism.
