The long history of the Black Hills controversy between the Sioux Nation and the U.S. Government involved Yellow Thunder Camp. While the issue has been amply analyzed in many books, it has never been related by someone like this author. It is a first-hand account: the writer lived at YTC, attended court proceedings and established solid friendships with Lakota individuals. In addition to years of research into the Lakota culture, she worked with elders throughout the reservation and was accepted as associate member of the Pine Ridge Grey Eagle Society. She joined them in visits of Black Hills sacred sites.

This book examines the origin of many Plains Indian families, which began with the union of French trappers and traders with young Indian women in the early days of contact between Europeans and American Indians of the Dakota territory and the Sioux Indian territory of Nebraska. The famous Indian activist Russell Means, who made a name for himself through the activities of the American Indian Movement, the 1973 occupation of the Village of Wounded Knee, an unsuccessful political life, and a more successful Hollywood movie career, is at the core of the book. Though he proclaimed he was an Oglala Lakota patriot, Russell Means was in reality a European descendant of mostly French-Indian intermarriages on both paternal and maternal sides of his family. Indeed, he was more French than Indian, as documented in the carefully researched genealogy presented by French Moroccan anthropologist Hélène E. Hagan. The genealogy presented in this book dispels the fictitious claims advanced by Russell C. Means about his father’s and mother’s family surnames in the autobiographical account he wrote with the help of independent author Marvin J. Wolf, Where White Men Fear to Tread (St. Martin’s Press, 1996). The book also addresses the unfortunate use of fictitious material attributed to Chief Seattle for the publication of a small book purportedly on ancestral Indian spirituality, If You’ve Forgotten the Names of the Clouds, You Lost Your Way, published under his name shortly before he succumbed to a fatal cancer in 2012. In addition, the author evokes her fieldwork among the Oglala Lakota people of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the 1980s, the research she conducted with traditional elders as a volunteer with the archives of the Oglala Lakota College in her reservation-wide photo project covering years 1890 to World War II of the history of Pine Ridge families and her involvement with the Yellow Thunder Camp in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The last part of the book describes her later collaboration with the American Indian activist for the Public Access Television series of The Russell Means Show, which she conceived and produced in Los Angeles from 1999 to 2003.

The Introduction of the book indicates the necessity to start with the archaeology of the early settlements of the West Bank of the Nile , a territory to be considered as the mother or matrix of all Egyptian civilization. It establishes the pioneer nature of this Etymological Essay in the English language, as most of the studies in keeping with its findings are to be found in the scholarly literature of Europe and North Africa. 1. Archaic Terminology: The chapter traces the origins of early settlements of the northwestern region of Egypt, the desert oases, the Fayum, the region of the Lakes, and the western portion of the delta of the Nile, by Saharan and Libyan archaic people, with specific emphasis on archaic topography which can be directly related to Modern Amazigh spoken today in North Africa (Tamazirt.) 2,The Pillar People: The review of a number of terms from the mythology and ceremonial procedures of dynastic Egypt shows the influence of those early settlers named The People of the Pillars (Intui) on the beliefs and practices perpetuated through centuries in Egypt, and the presence of an all pervasive worship of these early origins: (cult of ancestors.) 3.The Holy rulers of First Princes of Egypt: An intensive comparative review of ancient Egyptian and Modern Amazigh terms reveals that the first noble rulers of the area were of Amazigh origin. A series of families of terms link quite clearly a number of beliefs and practices to the North African cultural complex. 4.Tehuti, time and the Wisdom of the stars is a chapter delving a little more deeply into the cosmogony and cosmology of the early Egyptians, and the roots of that knowledge in archaic practices, which have parallel indicators in North Africa. 5. The Innermost Shrine from The Book of the Dead: The geography of the Land of the Beyond, Tu-at (Du-Ament), and a variety of important indices throughout the Book of the Dead indicate quite clearly that the final return of the defunct to the Blessed Land of the Ancestors was also a step by step description of their claim of descent from these original beings. The rule of “Ma-aa-at,” the organizing principle of an entire civilization for centuries, or ‘NTR,” originated in the area of the Sacred lakes and the ancient settlements of the Fayum and oasis complex. Linguistic comparison with Modern Amazigh continues to indicate the kinship of those people with North African Imazighen (also known as Berbers.) 6. A Conclusion, Notes, and an Appendix, which is the reproduction of an article published in The Amazigh Voice, a publication of the Amazigh Cultural Association in America, indicate the pioneer aspect of such a work and the direction in which further linguistic studies could bring increasing light into areas of Egyptian scholarship heretofore deemed as obscure and/or of barbarous origin. .

Awards: One Book South Dakota Common Read, South Dakota Humanities Council, 2022. PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, PEN America, 2020. One Book One Tribe Book Award, First Nations Development Institute, 2020. Finalist, Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize, 2019. Shortlist, Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, 2019. Our History Is the Future is at once a work of history, a personal story, and a manifesto. Now available in paperback on the fifth anniversary of its original publication, Our History Is the Future features a new afterword by Nick Estes about the rising indigenous campaigns to protect our environment from extractive industries and to shape new ways of relating to one another and the world. In this award-winning book, Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance leading to the present campaigns against fossil fuel pipelines, such as the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, from the days of the Missouri River trading forts through the Indian Wars, the Pick-Sloan dams, the American Indian Movement, and the campaign for Indigenous rights at the United Nations. In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century, attracting tens of thousands of Indigenous and non-Native allies from around the world. Its slogan “Mni Wiconi”—Water Is Life—was about more than just a pipeline. Water Protectors knew this battle for Native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even with the encampment gone, their anti-colonial struggle would continue. While a historian by trade, Estes draws on observations from the encampments and from growing up as a citizen of the Oceti Sakowin (the Nation of the Seven Council Fires) and his own family’s rich history of struggle.