Vine Deloria, Jr.

Vine Deloria, Jr. (March 26, 1933 – November 13, 2005) was an a member of the Standing Rock Sioux TribeAmerican Indian author, theologian, historian, and activist. He continued writing, becoming one of the most prolific writers about American Indian rights and culture in history.published nearly 25 books, hundreds of articles

Civil Rights leader Deloria was to Native people a social reformer who was in every way the equal of a Cesar Chavez or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

steadfastly worked to demythologize how white Americans thought of American Indians, with was his scathing, sardonic humor

leading Native American scholar, whose research, writings, and teaching have encompassed history, law, religious studies, and political science.

September 9, 1974 he was hailed as "one of the 11 great religious thinkers of the twentieth century" by Time magazine. His first work, Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) was one of the most influential books written on Indian affairs and helped launch the field of Native American studies. Certainly he was one the most influential Native Americans of the 20th Century.

authoritatively on tribal sovereignty and self-determination. As a historian, he promoted Native science amid conflicting Western views. And as an advocate, he worked on countless initiatives, legislative and otherwise, to protect sacred sites, ancestral remains and artifacts and the federal-tribal relationship. n "God is Red" (1973), he took that position of deliverance-through-Indian-ways further, arguing that American Indian spiritual traditions, far from being dated, were in fact more in tune with the needs of the modern world than Christianity, which Mr. Deloria said fostered imperialism and disregard for the planet's ecology.

Biography and writing

Deloria was the grandson of Tipi Sapa (Black Lodge) aka Rev. Philip Joseph Deloria, an Episcopalian priest and a leader of the Yankton band of the Nakota Nation. Vine Jr. was born in one of the poorest parts of the nation at Martin, South Dakota, near the Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota Indian Reservation, and was first educated at reservation schools.

Deloria's father, Vine Sr., studied English and Christian theology, became an Episcopal archdeacon and missionary on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, to which he transferred the family's tribal citizenship. Deloria Jr. originally sought to be a minister, like his father, and in 1963 received a theology degree from the Lutheran School of Theology in Rock Island, Illinois. (He had first graduated from Iowa State University in 1958.) Deloria was a member of the U.S. Marine Corps, which he joined in 1954. His aunt was the anthropologist Ella Deloria. Deloria earned a law degree from the University of Colorado in 1970. His son, Philip Deloria is also a respected historian.

Activist

From 1964 to 1967, he worked as executive director for the National Conference of American Indians (NCAI), where he became a leading spokesman for Native-Americans in Washington, D.C.. He often testified before Congress at a time when civil rights centering on ethnic identity were at a peak.[1]

The NCAI was founded in 1944 in response to termination and assimilation policies that the United States forced upon the tribal governments in contradiction of their treaty rights and status as sovereigns. NCAI stressed the need for unity and cooperation among tribal governments for the protection of their treaty and sovereign rights.

NCAI's job, he said, was to point out the "illogical" consequences of the policy, while fighting members of Congress who promised to save bigger tribes from termination in exchange for eliminating small tribes in California and elsewhere. NCAI's answer was always a firm no, he recalled. His work on the issue set the stage for the focus on termination to change towards a focus on self-determination.[2]

Custer Died for Your Sins

In 1969, Deloria published the first of his more than twenty books, entitled Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. This book launched Deloria into the national limelight. In it he addressed Indian stereotypes and challenged white audiences to take a new look at the history of American western expansionism. He also strongly criticized the anthropological community for its impersonal dissection of living Native American cultures. The American Anthropological Association sponsored a panel in response to Custer Died for Your Sins.

The book led to him becoming the intellectual leader of the burgeoning, and often tumultuous, Native rights movement. In the book he stated:

"Ideological leverage is always superior to violence....The problems of Indians have always been ideological rather than social, political or economic....[I]t is vitally important that the Indian people pick the intellectual arena as the one in which to wage war. Past events have shown that the Indian people have always been fooled by the intentions of the white man. Always we have discussed irrelevant issues while he has taken our land. Never have we taken the time to examine the premises upon which he operates so that we could manipulate him as he has us."

— Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969) pp.251-252

The decade following "Custer's" publication saw the enactment of a series of landmark laws that gave tribes greater control over their affairs, led to the return of millions of acres of tribal land, established the national tribal college structure and reaffirmed the United States' treaty and trust obligations to Native people.[3]

The ideas and writings of Deloria played a major role in the passage of important reform legislation including the Indian Education Act (1972), Indian Self-Determination Act (1975), and the American Indian Religious Freedoms Act (1978).

Academic career

Deloria began his official role as educator in the fall of 1970 when he accepted his first faculty position with the College of Ethnic Studies at Western Washington University (WWU) in Bellingham. He taught there for a year and half.

It was during his tenure there that he became a legal advocate on behalf of tribal fishing rights. His work in this area helped paved the way for the passage of the Boldt Decision in 1974, the landmark case that affirmed Indian treaty fishing rights. Deloria’s involvement with tribal fishing rights also led to his writing, Indians of the Pacific Northwest: From the Coming of the Whiteman to the Present Day in 1977.

While teaching at WWU he also became one of the first board members of Native American Rights Fund in 1970. This organization is the oldest and largest non-profit law firm focused on defending and asserting Indian rights.

Later he took other teaching positions including with the American Indian Studies Center at UCLA for four quarters, followed by brief visiting appointments at the Pacific School of Religion, the New School of Religion, and Colorado College.

In 1978 he accepted a tenured appointment as professor of law and political science at the University of Arizona where he created two Master’s degree programs - one in American Indian policy, the other – the first of its kind in the United States – in American Indian studies.

In 1990 he left Arizona to accept another professorship at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in American Indian studies and history, with adjunct appointments in law, political science, and religious studies.

He retired from full-time teaching in 2000. For the next five winters, however, Deloria remained professionally active by returning to Tucson to teach a course in treaties at the University of Arizona’s College of Law. He gave his papers to the Denver Public Library.

As a university professor he provided a much needed intellectual understanding of the concept of tribal sovereignty. Two books which he co-authored with Clifford M. Lytle, American Indians, American Justice (1983) and The Nations Within (1984), and later a third book, Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations (1999 co-authored with David E. Wilkins), are used as standard works in Indian law and policy classes throughout the United States. Another of Deloria’s achievements in this area was the retrieval and compilation of documents – including many long lost and forgotten treaties – that were most critical to the understanding and study of American Indian law and policy. This work culminated with the monumental Documents of American Indian Diplomacy (1999 with Raymond DeMallie) and The Indian Reorganization Act: Congresses and Bills (2002). Most of todays' current understanding and interpretation of treaties, the concept of tribal sovereignty, and respected roles and responsibilities of the tribes and the federal sector in a “government to government” relationship, is owed to the work of Deloria.

Religion

Deloria was widely recognized as being the foremost leading authority on tribal religion and an outspoken champion of Native religious freedom. In 1973 he published God Is Red: A Native View of Religion – a book that cemented his reputation as one of the most important religious theorists of our time. In 1974 Time magazine named him as one of the 11 most important “shapers and movers” of the Christian faith – a “theological superstar of the future.” In 1999 he also published with James Treat, For This Land: Writings on Religion in America – a collection of many of his works on this topic. Other important essays on religion – and other topics – that appeared earlier in various other often obscure journals and magazines, were published together as a collection entitled 3 Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader (1999, edited by Barbara Deloria, Kristen Foehner, and Sam Scinta). Deloria realized that no person is truly free if he or she is denied the right to fully carry out the tenets of their religious beliefs. When it became clear that the American Indian Religious Freedom Act had failed to protect tribal sacred places and certain religious practices in the late 1980s, Deloria again stepped forward. His advocacy and writings played a major role in the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 and amendments to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1994. In recent years Deloria championed a different type of freedom – intellectual freedom. Deloria was a longtime and passionate advocate of Native traditional knowledge. Throughout his life he encouraged young Native people to see the validity and importance in the wisdom of their tribal past. He also believed that traditional knowledge offered an alternative means to address many of the issues that have long plagued the general society and argued persuasively that western philosophy and science are not the ultimate sources of truth in regard to understanding the mysteries of our universe. Beginning in 1992, Deloria sponsored a series of conferences – eight have thus far been held – designed to foster traditional knowledge and to build a network of people – spiritual leaders, elders and scholars – who could share this knowledge. His own writings in this area, including The Metaphysics of Modern Existence (1979), Red Earth, White Lies (1995), Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths (2002), and a final book released posthumously in the spring of 2006, The World We Used to Live In: Remembering the Powers of Medicine Men - do not tell people what to think, but instead encourages them to find their own way intellectually rather than to simply accept and follow established dogma.

Where to put 2

Also Deloria acted as a witness for the defense team in the Wounded Knee Trials in 1974. His testimony as an expert witness in the four trials that followed the American Indian Movement’s takeover of Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1973 helped win the inclusion of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty into these hearings – a major legal and strategic accomplishment in that it brought historical treaty rights into a contemporary legal proceeding.[4]

Or maybe you remember his 1992 suit, along with six other prominent Indians, against the Washington Redskins, just one of his many activist firebombs lobbed on behalf of Native Americans. n 1999, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board of the Patent and Trademark Office decided the case in their favor, but a federal judge overturned the decision in 2003. That decision is being appealed.

In 1999, Deloria argued in his book Red Earth, White Lies, that rather than entering the Americas via the Bering Strait, Native Americans, as some of their creation stories suggested, originated in the Americas (he also takes a Young Earth stance on the time span of human origins).

With the publication of "Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact" in 1997, Deloria turned his eyes towards prevailing scientific views of the peopling of the Americas. He forcefully, but humorously, derailed the theory that all of the ancestors of American Indians came across the Bering Strait.

p.22 [5]

The book was indicative of Deloria's ability to challenge Western notions in a way that gave prominence to Native thought. His efforts led to the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990 and the 1989 law that authorized the creation of the National Museum of the American Indian, which opened in Washington, D.C., in September 2004.

Deloria wrote and edited many subsequent books, focusing on many issues as they relate to Native Americans, such as education and religion. He was involved with many Native American organizations, and was a board member of the National Museum of the American Indian beginning in 1977. Deloria taught at the University of Arizona from 1978 to 1990, and then taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

After Deloria retired in May of 2000, he continued to write and lecture until he died on November 13, 2005.

Criticism

Deloria was criticized for his embrace of American Indian creationism. Deloria often cited Christian creationist authors in support of his views relating to science. Deloria also relied on Hindu creationists such as Michael Cremo.

Deloria was further criticized for his reliance on authors of pseudoscience such as Zecharia Sitchin and Immanuel Velikovsky. Deloria cited Sitchin to argue that white people were created by space aliens. Deloria also believed that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time, and that the stegosaurus still existed in the 19th century..

The Rocky Mountain News berated Deloria for "the utterly wacky nature of some of his views,” and “his contempt for much science." John Whittaker referred to Deloria's "Red Earth White Lies" as "a wretched piece of Native American creationist claptrap that has all the flaws of the Biblical creationists he disdains...Deloria's style is drearily familiar to anyone who has read the Biblical creationist literature...At the core is a wishful attempt to discredit all science because some facts clash with belief systems. A few points will suffice to show how similar Deloria is to outspoken creationist author Duane Gish or any of his ilk."

Awards and honors

In 1999, he received the Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year Award in the category of prose and personal/critical essays for his work Spirit and Reason. He was honorably mentioned on October 12, 2002 at the 2002 National Book Festival and also received the Wallace Stegner award from the Center of the American West in Boulder on October 23, 2002. He was the winner of the 2003 American Indian Festival of Words Author Award.

Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year (Prose - Personal and Critical Essays) award, 1999 (for Spirit and Reason)

the Wallace Stegner award from the Center of the American West in Boulder Colorado on Oct 23, 2002. This annual award is named after one of the most influential writers in the modern West. In 2002, Deloria received the Wallace Stegner Award, the highest honor presented by the CU-Boulder Center of the American West. The inscription on Deloria's award, given to people who have made a sustained contribution to the cultural identity of the West, read as follows:

"Always grounded in the stories told by the plains and ridges of your Sioux homeland, and guided by your vision of a vibrant tribal sovereignty, you have become a hero for the ages in Indian country and far beyond, you have changed the West and the world through your activism during the termination crisis, your spirited leadership ever since, your vast and influential writings, and your encompassing mind and matchless courage."

winner of the 2003 American Indian Festival of Words Author Award.

2nd annual American Indian Visionary Award from the Indian Country Today (ICT) newspaper, for his life of achievement. has been selected to receive the American Indian Visionary Award by the newspaper Indian Country Today.

Deloria, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, was chosen for displaying the highest qualities and attributes of leadership in defending the foundations of American Indian freedom. He is being honored for his work as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians to more than 20 scholarly books about Indian political, cultural, legal and historical issues.

Legacy

Mr. Deloria is survived by his wife wife of 47 years, Barbara, of Golden; three children, Philip, Daniel and Jeanne; a brother; a sister; and seven grandchildren.

Philip Deloria, assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado, picks up his father’s cause in Playing Indian, a book that begins with the Boston Tea Party and ends with his childhood memories of visiting a commune in the Pacific Northwest in 1971 where the residents costumed themselves in fringed leather jackets and moccasins, lived in tipis, and talked vaguely of native environmental values.

Northwest Indian College will be the site of a Vine Deloria Jr. Indigenous Studies Symposium in July 2008. The keynote speaker will be Hank Adams, Assiniboine/Sioux, president of the Survival of American Indians Association and a longtime Native rights activist.

Quotations

• "The twentieth century has produced a world of conflicting visions, intense emotions, and unpredictable events, and the opportunities for grasping the substance of life have faded as the pace of activity has increased." -from the intro to Neihardt's "Black Elk Speaks."
• "The massive amount of useless knowledge produced by anthropologists attempting to capture real Indians in a network of theories has contributed substantially to the invisibility of Indian people today." -paragraph 22 of chapter 4, titled "Anthropologists and Other Friends" from "Custer Died for Your Sins."
• "Scientists, and I use the word as loosely as possible, are committed to the view that Indians migrated to this country over an imaginary Bering Straits bridge, which comes and goes at the convenience of the scholar requiring it to complete his or her theory. Initially, at least, Indians are homogenous. But there are also eight major language families within the Western Hemisphere, indicating to some scholars that if Indians followed the trend that can be identified in other continents, then the migration went from east to west; tourists along the Bering straits were going TO Asia, not migrating FROM it."
• "It is becoming increasingly apparent that we shall not have the benefits of this world for much longer. The imminent and expected destruction of the life cycle of world ecology can only be prevented by a radical shift in outlook from our present naive conception of this world as a testing ground to a more mature view of the universe as a comprehensive matrix of life forms. Making this shift in viewpoint is essentially religious, not economic or political.."

Bibliography

• Cadwalader, Sandra L., and Vine Deloria. 1984. The Aggressions of Civilization: Federal Indian Policy Since the 1880s. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ISBN 0877223491
• Deloria, Vine. 1985. American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 0806118970
• Deloria, Vine, and Clifford M. Lytle. 1984. American Indians, American Justice. Austin: Univ. of Texas Pr. ISBN 0292738331
• Deloria, Vine. 1974. Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties; An Indian Declaration of Independence. New York: Dell Pub. Co. ISBN 0440514037
• Deloria, Vine. 1976. A Better Day for Indians. New York: Field Foundation. OCLC 6144291
• Deloria, Vine. 1979. A Brief History of the Federal Responsibility to the American Indian. Washington: Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare [Education Division], Office of Education. OCLC 6071498
• Deloria, Vine. 1988. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 0806121297
• Deloria, Vine, and James Treat. 1999. For This Land: Writings on Religion in America. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415921147
• Deloria, Vine. 1993. Frank Waters: Man and Mystic. Athens: Swallow Press. ISBN 0804009783
• Moore, MariJo. 2003. Genocide of the Mind: New Native American Writing. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books. ISBN 1560255110
• Deloria, Vine. 1994. God is Red: A Native View of Religion. Golden, Colo: Fulcrum Pub. ISBN 1555911765
• Deloria, Vine. 1974. The Indian Affair. New York: Friendship Press. ISBN 037700023X
• Deloria, Vine. 1977. Indians of the Pacific Northwest: From the Coming of the White Man to the Present Day. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 0385097905
• Deloria, Vine. 1979. The Metaphysics of Modern Existence. San Francisco: Harper & Row. ISBN 0064502503
• Deloria, Vine, and Clifford M. Lytle. 1984. The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty. New York: Pantheon Books. ISBN 0394725662
• Deloria, Vine. 1971. Of Utmost Good Faith. Bantam Books. OCLC 7527677
• Deloria, Vine. 1995. Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact. New York: Scribner. ISBN 0684807009
• Wise, Jennings C., and Vine Deloria. 1971. The Red Man in the New World Drama; A Politico-legal Study with a Pageantry of American Indian History. New York: Macmillan. OCLC 146199414
• Deloria, Vine, and Herbert T. Hoover. 1979. Reminiscences of Vine V. Deloria, Yankton Sioux Tribe of South Dakota. OCLC 23145934
• Deloria, Vine. 1978. The Right to Know: A Paper. Washington: Office of Library and Information Services , U.S. Dept. of the Interior. OCLC 6617807
• Neihardt, John Gneisenau, and Vine Deloria. 1984. A Sender of words: essays in memory of John G. Neihardt. Salt Lake City: Howe Bros. ISBN 0935704221
• Deloria, Vine. 1999. Singing for a Spirit: A Portrait of the Dakota Sioux. Santa Fe, N.M.: Clear Light Publishers. ISBN 1574160257
• Deloria, Vine, Barbara Deloria, Kristen Foehner, and Samuel Scinta. 1999. Spirit & Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr., Reader. Golden, Colo: Fulcrum Pub. ISBN 1555914306
• Deloria, Vine, and David E. Wilkins. 1999. Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations. Austin: University of Texas Press. ISBN 0292716079
• Deloria, Vine. 2007. We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 9780803259850
• Deloria, Vine. 2002. Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths: A Critical Inquiry. Golden, Colo: Fulcrum. ISBN 1555911595
• Bataille, Gretchen M., and Charles L. P. Silet. 1980. (Intro by Deloria) The Pretend Indians: Images of Native Americans in the Movies. Ames: Iowa State University Press. ISBN 0813809258

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Biolsi, Thomas, and Larry J. Zimmerman. 1997. Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria, Jr., and the Critique of Anthropology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. ISBN 0816516065
• Deloria, Vine, Steve Pavlik, and Daniel R. Wildcat. 2006. Destroying Dogma: Vine Deloria, Jr. and His Influence on American Society. Golden, Colo: Fulcrum Pub. ISBN 1555915191
• DeMallie, Raymond J. (2006) "Vine Deloria Jr. (1933-2005)." American Anthropologist, Vol. 108, No. 4: 932-935.
• Smith, Huston, Phil Cousineau, and Gary Rhine. 2006. A Seat At The Table: Huston Smith in Conversation with Native Americans on Religious Freedom. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0520244397

External links

• Johnson, Kirk. 2005. Vine Deloria Jr., Champion of Indian Rights, Dies at 72 Nytimes.com.
• Berry, Carol. 2008. Vine Deloria Jr.'s legacy continues to inspire Indiancountry.com.
• Vine Deloria Jr.: Bookfest 02 Webcast Rs7.loc.gov.
• Vine Deloria Jr., Giant in Indian Country, dies at 72 Indianz.com.
• If You Think About It, You Will See That It Is True Noetic.org.
• Browning, Allen. 2005. Vine Deloria, Jr. Learningtogive.org.
• Adams, Daniel Douglas. Red Earth, White Lies Wwco.com.
• In Honor of Vine Deloria, Jr. Coloradoaim.org.
• Wiltz, Teresa. 2005. The Indian Who Overturned The Stereotypes Washingtonpost.com.
• Rave, Jodi. 2005. Native American thinker Vine Deloria ends his human adventure Qctimes.com.
• Vine Deloria, Jr. - Evolution, Spirit, and Indigenous Mind Personallifemedia.com.
• For This Land: Writings on Religion in America Books.google.com.
• In Honor of Vine Deloria, Jr. Nwic.edu.
• Moore, MariJo. 2003. A conversation with Vine Deloria, Jr. about evolution, creationism, and other modern myths Findarticles.com.
• Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths: A Critical Inquiry Lauralee.com.
• Vine Deloria, Jr. Answers.com.

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