Considering the AFL-CIO’s recent endorsement of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), one may be forgiven for thinking that we are living through yet another revival of the debate between indigenous rights and left labor activists.

The terms of the argument go back at least to the early 1980s, when American Indian Movement (AIM) cofounder and activist Russell Means delivered a speech to the International Survival Gathering in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It might seem strange that such a prominent figure in the struggle for Native American sovereignty would address a major speech on Marxism, but Means had a larger point: nothing in the European intellectual tradition — even its radical wing — interested him.

Marxism, in Means’s account, would offer Native Americans nothing better than capitalism: both declare indigenous people and the land a cost of economic development. Marxism simply reorganizes a settler-colonial society’s power relations based on efficiency. Native peoples live in “sacrifice areas,” and any modern, industrialized society will need to extract fuel, surplus, and raw materials from their land.