Palestinians and American Indians have been subjected to repeated ethnic cleansing and starvation campaigns, the disruption of their ability to reproduce their societies, and too many genocidal “self-defenses” and annihilating “protective measures” to account for in this short essay. They share the destruction of their archives and heritage sites, and the project to sequester and narrate their lives, histories and futures through what Mark Rifkin calls “settler time.”
In most history books, the US–Dakota War began on August 18, 1862—during the American Civil War—when a group of Dakota fighters led by Little Crow attacked the Lower Sioux Agency, where the federal Indian Agent’s administrative offices were located, as were the food storage depots of traders. The day before, a Dakota hunting party had killed five white settlers. At the Lower Sioux Agency the Dakota killed thirteen people, including seven men who primarily made their money through trading with them. Traders there had denied extending credit to the Dakota for food, a denial that compounded a famine triggered by the withholding of goods and cash annuity payments by the US government. One trader who had told the Indian Agent “So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry let them eat grass or their own dung” was killed that day, the mouth of his corpse reportedly found stuffed with grass (Minnesota Historical Society). On September 9, 1862, the first governor of Minnesota, Alexander Ramsey, stated: “Our course then is plain. The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the State.” By September 26—which history tells us was officially the war’s end—at least 600 settlers—combatants and noncombatants—had died and hundreds more, including those of mixed ancestry, were held as captives. In the aftermath, the US Congress nullified all treaties with the Dakota, treaties the United States had already been breaking with impunity. For the Dakota, living in their homelands became a crime. Thirty-eight Dakota men were publicly hanged, and two more were executed in 1864. About 1,600 others—most of them women and children—were interned in a concentration camp at Fort Snelling. Hundreds died from disease and exposure before being ethnically cleansed to reservations in South Dakota and Nebraska in 1863, the very removal they had been resisting for decades. (Sweet)
For Mark Rifkin, sovereignty over chronology—the ability to decide when things begin and end—is a critical technology of settler colonial power. Seen through settler time, acts of indigenous anti-colonial violence are always surprise, criminal, terroristic attacks or “outbreaks,” in ways that are similar to how the Haitian Revolution was framed as a “revolt (Trouillot).” They have no historical context outside of what settler societies imbue them with. In Rifkin’s words, “Such counterinsurgent storying, in which Indigenous resistance appears as the exceptional atrocities of barbarous Indians, functions as the dominant account of the Dakota War of 1862, effacing the persistent violence that engendered the uprising as well as the experiences of time and sense of historicity that endowed it with meaning for Dakota people”(62). Within settler time, the war begins when the Dakota attack settlements, killing and kidnapping settlers, and the most obvious questions are foreclosed: Why did the Dakota attack, kill, and take captives? Why, at the time of the attack, were many Dakota starving? When did the Dakota War begin, and when did it end? Did it ever end?
Two years into a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, a genocide framed as “self-defense,” the stakes of time and temporality—of when we begin history, and of how “historical events” are identified and bookended—should be clear. These stakes were obvious to a former vice president of the American Historical Association, whose latest book includes a history of the people my family belongs to, the Ojibwe of the Great Lakes region. She explained her opposition to an association-wide vote condemning the destruction of universities, archives, museums and heritage sites, and historians in Gaza because it “is not settled history, so we’re not clear what happened or who to blame or when it began even. It isn’t something that a professional organization should be commenting on yet” (Inside Higher Ed; emphasis mine). Waiting for history to be settled before one can know when it begins and ends, makes common, settler sense. After all, the creation and destruction of archives is not ancillary to the assertion of sovereignty; it is constitutive (Mikdashi, 2022; Sleiman; Qato).
The narrative war over Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza is a war over time and the historical memory of the future. On the one hand, Israel’s supporters insist that the “war” began as a justified measure in response to the October 7th attack. In this telling, the Hamas-led attack on the Israeli military and the killing and taking captive of combatants and noncombatants is a rupture in time. Because it is outside of history, there can be no context for the attack, and yet the attack paradoxically justifies everything that Israel has done since (and perhaps, before) in Palestine. Like the Dakota before them, this narration of settler time renders any form of Palestinian anti-colonial resistance —including both violent, armed resistance and nonviolent initiatives like BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions)—as animated by irrational hatred (Mikdashi, 2024). Moreover, violence—including genocidal violence—against them does not inaugurate time. Sherene Seikaly reminds us that “History did not begin on October 7, 2023” (Seikaly, 2023), and that insisting it does is an exercise in the dehumanization of Palestinians themselves and an erasure of their, and our, history. In short, it is an act of colonial epistemology. Recounting the history of Palestine through a series of “crisis” or “wars” normalizes decades of siege, colonialization, and ethnic cleansing. Only from within this epistemology can anyone state that the US–Dakota “war” began and ended in 1862 or 1890, 1973, or 2016, or that the history of Palestine and of Palestinians began in 1917, 1948, 1967, or 2023 (Estes; Seikaly, 2025). In a similar vein, the assertion that the “war” began on October 7, 2023 is a claim over the temporality of power.
The war over time is also a struggle over whose time we are living in, whose histories structure historical narratives, and what forms and subjects of futurity are secured by the thrust of these narratives. (Abourahme; Barakat; Joudah). This struggle is an acknowledgment of the fact that “history is a bastion” (Million) precisely because it is shaped by colonial epistemologies and methods on the one hand, and settler time on the other. For example, Gaza City is simultaneously one of the oldest, continuously inhabited cities in the world with more than 5,000 years of history, and a city that most people in the United States know about through the prism of the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” The temporal multiplicity of Gaza City meant that while spectating its destruction stretched around the world, people were watching and living, in effect, different, overlapping cities and timelines. While we were spectating, Palestinians were living this temporal multiplicity. As S, a community worker with children and youth in Gaza, wrote in a text message on October 18, 2023, “We went to sleep in 2023 and woke up in 1948” (Voices from Gaza, quoted in Seikaly 2025). Understanding archival and temporal cacophony (Arondekar, 2023; Byrd 2011; Mikdashi, 2022) also attunes us to altogether different, transnational histories of the Americas, one where the recent unearthing of a 5,200-year-old canoe in Wisconsin—one of many under lake Mendota in what archeologists believe was once a transportation hub — is also a history of the world.
During lectures or conferences about Palestine in the United States, I have often asked audiences and interlocuters about the Dakota War. More often than not, when there are answers, they follow the contours of a familiar timeline—the war began in 1862 and lasted for five weeks, ending with the expulsion of the Dakota from Minnesota. These spaces—conferences, lectures, roundtables—are often opened with a form of land acknowledgment, within which another articulation of settler time is performed; it is a time that can acknowledge and mourn genocide as long as it is believed to be far enough in the past, as long as archive is another word for mausoleum, as long as history is safely settled.
Maya Mikdashi is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and the author of Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism and the State in Lebanon. She is an enrolled member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians.
Works Cited
Abourahme, Nasser. The Time Beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2025.
Arondekar, Anjali. Abundance: Sexuality’s History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023.
Barakat, Rana. Ongoing Return: Mapping Memory and Storytelling in Palestine. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press Books, 2026.
Byrd, Jodi A. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Estes, Nick. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2024.
Inside Higher Ed. “Historians’ Council Vetoes Gaza Scholasticide Condemnation.” January 17, 2025. Accessed April 21, 2026. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/shared-governance/2025/01/17/historians-council-vetoes-gaza-scholasticide.
Joudah, Nour. Mapping Decolonized Futures: Indigenous Visions for Palestine and Hawai’i. PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2022. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1q13d9zh.
Mikdashi, Maya. “The Sea that Separates Us: Lebanon, Palestine, and Return.” Hot Spots, Fieldsights, November 5, 2024. https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/the-sea-that-separates-us.
Mikdashi, Maya. Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022.
Million, Dian. “Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History.” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (2009): 53–76. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40587781.
Minnesota Historical Society. “The US-Dakota War of 1862: Andrew Myrick.” Accessed April 21, 2026. https://www.mnhs.org/usdakotawar/stories/history/andrew-myrick.
Qato, Mezna. “Forms of Retrieval: Social Scale, Citation, and the Archive on the Palestinian Left.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 51, no. 2 (2019): 312–15. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743819000096.Rifkin, Mark. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
Seikaly, Sherene. “Gaza 101 | Gaza in Context: A Collaborative Teach-In Series.” Jadaliyya. Streamed on October 24, 2023. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/45431.
Seikaly, Sherene. “Palestine Is a Paradigm.” Public Humanities 1 (2025): e179.
Sleiman, Hana. “The Paper Trail of a Liberation Movement.” Arab Studies Journal 24, no. 1 (2016): 42–67.
Smithsonian (magazine). https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-in-wisconsin-unearth-an-ancient-parking-lot-with-16-dugout-canoes-including-one-thats-5200-years-old-180987741/.
Sweet, Jameson R. Mixed-Blood Histories: Race, Law, and Dakota Indians in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2025.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing The Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon press, 2015.
“Voices from Gaza: S., Community Worker with Children and Youth.” Insaniyyat (Society of Palestinian Anthropologists). WhatsApp messages, October 2023. https://www.insaniyyat.org/s-community-worker.
