Vine Deloria, Jr.

Vine Deloria, Jr. (March 26, 1933 – November 13, 2005) was an American Indian author, theologian, historian, and activist.

Biography and writing

Deloria was the grandson of Tipi Sapa (Black Lodge) aka Rev. Philip Joseph Deloria, an Episcopal priest and a leader of the Yankton band of the Nakota Nation. Vine Jr. was born in 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.) His aunt was the anthropologist Ella Deloria. Deloria earned a law degree from the University of Colorado in 1970. From 1964 to 1967, Deloria was Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians. His son, Philip Deloria is also a respected historian.

In 1969, Deloria published his first of more than twenty books, entitled Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. This book became one of Deloria's most famous works. In it, Deloria addressed Indian stereotypes and challenged white audiences to take a new look at the history of American western expansionism. The American Anthropological Association sponsored a panel in response to Custer Died for Your Sins.

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).

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. 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.

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."

Legacy

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.

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

Secondary Literature

• DeMallie, Raymond J. (2006) "Vine Deloria Jr. (1933-2005)." American Anthropologist, Vol. 108, No. 4: 932-935.
• Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria, Jr., and the Critique of Anthropology, ed. by Thomas Biolsi, Larry J. Zimmerman, University of Arizona Press 1997, ISBN 0816516073
• Destroying Dogma: Vine Deloria, Jr. and His Influence on American Society, ed. by Steve Pavlik, Daniel R. Wildcat, Fulcrum Publishing 2006, ISBN 1555915191
• 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

See also

• List of writers from peoples indigenous to the Americas
• Native American Studies

Notes

• Native American Authors Project: Vine Deloria Jr. Retrieved May 17, 2005.

External links

• Biography: Vine Deloria Jr.
• Native American Authors Project
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• Vine Deloria, Jr.
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