Reckoning with Indigenous Solidarity

Solidarity with Indigenous land-based struggles, such as the #NoDAPL movement, reminds us that political affiliations cross racial lines, transcending aspects of tribal and national identity and community attachment. But does solidarity operate according to the politics of sameness, as in unwavering support for the political terrain demarcated by social justice struggles, or is there room among its many manifestations for opposition and challenge? The three books that comprise this review essay explore the tensions associated with enacting solidarity as they reflect on the social and cultural possibilities represented by Indigenous justice struggles. Their investments in examining the political stakes of solidarity—in the Oceti Sakowin's resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline Project, in Afrofuturist and Indigenous speculative fiction that traces the boundary between Black and Indigenous political formations, and in the tensions that exist among American Indian writing from the interwar and pre-civil rights era—help us to understand how Indigenous solidarity is connected to complex histories, settler-colonial relations, and systemic inequalities, as well as the political promise that social justice movements create.