Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature
Oct 7, 2026 · 29 min · 10 segments
In this episode, Indigenous scholar and organizer Nick Estes explores how Indigenous land-based and Earth-centered societies are advancing regenerative solutions and campaigns to transform capitalism…
What do you do when you're trapped in a system where you don't belong? Sometimes the only way out is through.
That's the predicament facing many indigenous communities, both in the US and around the world.
Capitalism is fundamentally in conflict with indigenous values, cultures, and life ways.
The climate emergency is the ultimate logic of a voraciously extractive paradigm that's also systematically unequal by design.
Just as economics is driving the destruction, it needs to power the restoration to transform the global economy from a vicious cycle to a virtuous cycle.
Today, native peoples are showing the world what it means to come together, not only as protesters, but as protectors, peaceful guardians of the sacred sources of life and of justice.
Indigenous peoples worldwide are linking networks to build power and engage millions more non-native allies to build a just and regenerative economy and world.
He co-founded the nonprofit coalition Red Nation, which is dedicated to the liberation of native people from capitalism and colonialism.
He joined the University of Minnesota in 2022 as Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies.
In 2021, he visited the No Line 3 water protector camps in Dakota and Anishinaabe territory.
There, he saw the catastrophic consequences of climate disruption and the fossil fuel economy on the tribe's sacred wild rice, called manomin.
Instead of a normal harvest of eighty pounds, the epic drought left just a cup and a half of this critical food for the community and their economy.
Anishinaabe people have an esoteric spiritual connection to manomin, which is codified within their 1855 treaty that actually protects the right of manomin to exist.
It's the only grain that is protected by treaty rights, by indigenous treaty rights, which isn't necessarily an aberration because Article 11 of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which was signed by my nation, the Oceti Sakowin, the Lakota Nation, and the Dakota Nations, also set aside territory for the continued perpetuation of the BdéOye Þíe, or the Buffalo Nation, or the Buffalo People.
And so even within these colonial treaties, these colonial laws, we inserted our rights of our relatives to exist and to continue to exist.
We know today Western societies have adopted the Rights of Nature movement.
And this is being attacked by the right as an anti-human and anti-life movement as well.
Today, the Rights of Nature movement has become the fastest-growing environmental movement in history.
What do you do when you're trapped in a system where you don't belong? Sometimes the only way out is through.
That's the predicament facing many indigenous communities, both in the US and around the world.
Capitalism is fundamentally in conflict with indigenous values, cultures, and life ways.
The climate emergency is the ultimate logic of a voraciously extractive paradigm that's also systematically unequal by design.
Just as economics is driving the destruction, it needs to power the restoration to transform the global economy from a vicious cycle to a virtuous cycle.
Today, native peoples are showing the world what it means to come together, not only as protesters, but as protectors, peaceful guardians of the sacred sources of life and of justice.
Indigenous peoples worldwide are linking networks to build power and engage millions more non-native allies to build a just and regenerative economy and world.
He co-founded the nonprofit coalition Red Nation, which is dedicated to the liberation of native people from capitalism and colonialism.
He joined the University of Minnesota in 2022 as Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies.
In 2021, he visited the No Line 3 water protector camps in Dakota and Anishinaabe territory.
There, he saw the catastrophic consequences of climate disruption and the fossil fuel economy on the tribe's sacred wild rice, called manomin.
Instead of a normal harvest of eighty pounds, the epic drought left just a cup and a half of this critical food for the community and their economy.
Anishinaabe people have an esoteric spiritual connection to manomin, which is codified within their 1855 treaty that actually protects the right of manomin to exist.
It's the only grain that is protected by treaty rights, by indigenous treaty rights, which isn't necessarily an aberration because Article 11 of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which was signed by my nation, the Oceti Sakowin, the Lakota Nation, and the Dakota Nations, also set aside territory for the continued perpetuation of the BdéOye Þíe, or the Buffalo Nation, or the Buffalo People.
And so even within these colonial treaties, these colonial laws, we inserted our rights of our relatives to exist and to continue to exist.
We know today Western societies have adopted the Rights of Nature movement.
And this is being attacked by the right as an anti-human and anti-life movement as well.
Today, the Rights of Nature movement has become the fastest-growing environmental movement in history.
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