Vine Deloria, Jr., is the most significant voice in this generation regarding the presentation and analysis of contemporary Indian affairs, their history, present shape, and meaning. He has a command both of the English language and of information about the “legislation” pertaining to Indian affairs from Pope Alexander VI’s Inter Caetera bull of 1493 (in which the good pope did “give, grant, and assign forever to you and your heirs and successors, kings of Castile and Leon, all singular the aforesaid countries and islands…hitherto discovered…and to be discovered…. together with all their dominions, cities, camps, places, and villages, and all rights, jurisdictions, and appurtenances of the same” [God Is Red, 274–75]), to the 1978 demise and renewal of the Indian Claims Commission and the controversies over varying interpretations of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1976. No other voice, Indian or white, has as full a command of the overall data of Indian history and affairs, and no other voice has the moral force, the honesty, to admit mistakes and to redress them, or the edge to bite through the layers of soft tissue, through the stereotypes, myths, and outright lies, to the bone, to the bone marrow, of Indian affairs.
What is it, precisely, that Deloria tells us? In Custer Died for Your Sins he examines the prevailing myths about Indians which locate them in the past and render them invisible. He calls this work “an Indian Manifesto”; it is a call to consciousness and action by Indian people every bit as much as it is a challenge to the so-called dominant society. He shows us that the Indian wars continue, for example, with the U.S. violation of the Pickering Treaty as recently as the 1960s, building the infamous Kinzua Dam that flooded the Seneca Reservation, while at the same time squandering “one hundred billion dollars” in Vietnam to supposedly “keep its commitments.” He proves that the whole popular understanding of treaties is backwards. No Indian tribes were ever given land by the United States; the tribes gave the U.S. land in order to have their title to the remaining land confirmed. On the issue of tax exemption, he tells us that most tribes believe that “they paid taxes for all time when they gave up some two billion acres of land to the United States” (Custer, 4). This is the information, the message, coming out of his analysis of contemporary Indian affairs.
Vine Deloria, Jr., was born in Martin, South Dakota, on the border of the Pine Ridge Indian reservation, and is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. He comes from a distinguished Sioux family: his great-grandfather, Saswe, was a medicine man of the Yanktons; his grandfather was a Yankton chief who converted to Christianity in the 1860s and spent the rest of his life as a missionary on the Standing Rock Reservation. His father spent thirty-seven years as an Episcopal missionary in South Dakota among the Sioux, ending his career as Archdeacon of the Missionary District of South Dakota. His aunt, Ella Deloria, was an anthropologist trained by Franz Boas, with distinguished books (Speaking of Indians and Dakota Texts) to her credit. Deloria himself served in the U.S. Marine Corps, and after graduation from college attended the Augustana Lutheran Seminary in Rock Island, Illinois, for four years, earning his B.D. degree in 1963. After seminary he worked for the United Scholarship Service in Denver, Colorado, to develop a program to get scholarships for Indian students in eastern preparatory schools. In 1964, he became Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) in Washington, D.C. In September 1967, he entered law school at the University of Colorado, hoping that Indian legal programs could do for the tribes what the Legal Defense Fund had done for the black community. He has been a member of the Board of Inquiry on Hunger and Malnutrition in the U.S.A. (where in 1967 he discovered black children in the Mississippi delta eating red clay on alternate days in order to fill their bellies (We Talk, You Listen, 194) and a member of the National Office for the Rights of the Indigent. He appeared as an expert witness at the four Wounded Knee trials; founded the Institute for the Development of Indian Law in Washington, D.C.; served as a consultant on the movie Soldier Blue; and was professor of political science at the University of Arizona in Tucson until 1990, directing the graduate program in American Indian Policy Studies. He also serves on the board of the Indian Rights Association. At present, he teaches in the department of law, history, political science, and religious studies at the Center for Studies in Ethnicity and Race in America at the University of Colorado at Boulder. More than all his, however, through his writing Vine Deloria, Jr., has been the spokesperson for Indian people as they are today, their history, their condition, their concerns, their views of white society, their best prospects for the future.
Anyone first approaching Deloria’s written work is impressed by the sheer amount of it (fourteen books, nine of them as sole author; six “special reports” for government agencies or private foundations; more than a dozen editorials or articles as contributing editor; fourteen introductions to books; and more than eighty-five articles in a wide spectrum of magazines and journals). In addition to the amazing volume of this written work, there is the scope of it. He has been trained as a theologian, lawyer, and political scientist, and has written on all aspects of contemporary American Indian affairs, from the meaning and history of the treaties to the religious dimension of Indian life.
His early work Custer Died for Your Sins (an extremely popular book from the late 1960s) revealed a surface attraction sustained by the depth of the work. That surface attraction is evident in the title itself, in the elements of Custer—Death—Sin, and in the aiming of these elements aggressively at the reader. Early on, we learn that the title originally was a bumper sticker, common in Indian country, that struck back with humor and bite at the sort of religious consciousness in America that still expressed itself by erecting “Christ Died for Your Sins” signs at key points on the landscape, while at the same time erecting mission churches and schools on the choicest pieces of reservation land stolen through the Allotment Act. (It is worth pointing out that as of January 1989, Navajos converting to certain evangelical Christian churches were still required to publicly destroy, by burning, any of the jish, or medicine bundles, still in their safekeeping.) This bumper sticker title clearly states, as does the whole of Deloria’s corpus, that sin is a major aspect of the American experience, but the sinners are those who have stolen and desecrated the land, and General George himself is the symbol of the greed, arrogance, aggression, and deceit that guides/fuels this desecration. Deloria is wise enough to realize that orgies of guilt and confession over past sins too often have been substituted for a significant change in attitude toward and/or treatment of American Indians, allowing us to avoid the central question of history: “Why must man repeat his mistakes?” As he points out, accepting responsibility for current and future continuations of the patterns of oppression and abuse is much harder than wallowing in guilt.
One aspect of Deloria’s work that is especially clarifying is his ability to make suggestions for change after criticizing the status quo. For instance, in The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty, co-authored in 1984 with fellow attorney and political scientist Clifford Lytle, Deloria sets forth his most detailed recommendations. This volume is mostly a carefully described narrative of the Indian New Deal policies of John Collier, which culminated in the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. Deloria and Lytle describe the whole process of reform, debate, and compromise out of which this bill ultimately emerged, the problems of its implementation, and the “barren” decades of 1945–65 when the drive to terminate Indian reservations and federal responsibilities to the tribes was at its height. This narrative serves as the backbone for addressing contem-porary Indian affairs. In a final chapter, “The Future of Indian Nations,” Deloria and Lytle recommend (1) a call for structural reform of tribal governments that is basic, but that still allows connection between the past and present; (2) lasting, deep cultural renewal that will address the question of Indian identity in the modern world; (3) economic stability for Indian communities that recognizes the Indianness of the reservation while being efficient in present-day economic terms; and (4) stabilization and mutual respect in relations between tribes and federal and state governments. That chapter, then, is composed of sections which detail the prospects for and obstacles to each of these recommendations. It is this steady commitment to the details of the actual conditions of and prospects for the renewal processes of Indian communities as they now exist that makes Deloria’s work so valuable.
The depth of Deloria’s commitment to the cause of Indian rights, to the issue of sovereignty for Indian nations, to the calling for truth and justice in this nation’s dealings with Indian peoples is unquestionable. But Deloria’s work seeks dimensions far beyond the surface realities of contemporary Indian affairs or the history of white-Indian encounters in North America. Deloria shows us the nature of the huge rift between the spiritual “owners” of the land, the Indians, and the political owners of the land, the whites—a rift which creates obvious turbulence throughout the political, moral, and psychic life of the nation. Deloria believes that until a reconciliation between the two is achieved, our society will be unstable and very dangerous. It is this vision of a reconciled society that gives his treatment of Indian affairs and history such depth and bite.
Deloria never allows us to forget that the heart and soul of all aboriginal society is the connection to the land. As he puts it, “the fundamental choice of this century is between history and nature,” or between the ideas of progress and evolution and the sacredness of one’s actual place in the universe. As Deloria sees it, a belief in history, in progress, allows us to act immorally toward anything or anyone that stands in its way. Morality, right action, ethical maturity, is a matter of rootedness, of deep knowledge of and connection to place, of the capacity for establishing such connection even when one’s place must change, or one must change one’s place. In lecturing on this preeminence of the land itself in aboriginal experience, Deloria once quoted Carl Jung to precisely locate the root of his own work:
Certain Australian primatives [sic] assert that one cannot conquer foreign soil, because in it there dwell strange ancestor-spirits who reincarnate themselves in the new born. The foreign land assimilates its conquerors. (Jung 1928:49)
He went on to ponder the effects of the earth on human personality, how specific places might be formative to particular kinds of personalities. Such pondering appears to be the deep source for all his work on Indian affairs, and of his awareness of the dangers of rootlessness/ruthlessness in those societies cut off from both conscious and unconscious links to the soil. In stating this preeminence of the land itself in aboriginal experience, Deloria quotes Curley, a Crow chief, in 1912, refusing to give any more of his land to the federal government:
The soil you see is not ordinary soil—it is the dust of the blood, the flesh and the bones of our ancestors. We fought and bled and died to keep other Indians from taking it, and we fought and bled and died helping the whites. You will have to dig down through the surface before you can find nature’s earth, as the upper portion is Crow. The land as it is, is my blood and my dead; it is consecrated; and I do not want to give up any portion of it. (God Is Red, 166–67)
Roger Dunsmore
University of Montana
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources
Deloria, Vine, Jr. Custer Died for Your Sins. New York: Macmillan, 1969.
——. “This Country Was Better Off When the Indians Were Running It.” New York Times Magazine, March 8, 1970. Rpt. in Alvin Josephy, ed. Red Power. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971.
——. We Talk, You Listen. New York: Macmillan, 1970.
——. God Is Red. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1973.
——. “The Question of the 1868 Sioux Treaty…A Crucial Element in the Wounded Knee Trials.” Akwasasne Notes (Spring 1973).
——. “The Indian Movement out of a Wounded Past.” Ramparts Magazine (March 1975).
